Thanks for the review!

I have always gravitated to SFF and horror, so the zombie and post-apocalyptic fiction were a natural extension for me. I'll sadly have a number of books that made the rounds and were never returned.

The Morningstar Strain is definitely worth a read. It's not without its flaws, but I think it holds up. The series has a diverse set of characters, a strong plot, and a pretty realistic take on how humanity would react to this kind of global event. There are some internal inconsistencies between books and some suspension of disbelief required with "facts" presented about history (relative dates of the creation of certain government agencies are just flat out wrong). The most glaring inconsistency is a minor character who is introduced towards the end of the first books as being able to speak multiple languages, including flawless English, but in the second book is only able to speak Japanese and has to learn basic English.

However, despite its flaws, the story is fun, it's not overly graphic, and most characters have realistic reactions to the world collapsing around them.

I think this was probably my first foray into zombie fiction myself. I had always been fascinated by horror but at the time I was still pretty squeamish about it and easily frightened. The survival guide presenting itself as fictional non-fiction removed a lot of the fear factor.

I wish I still had my copy. It came out while I was in school and my friends and I were in the habit of swapping books with each other. The survival guide made the rounds, and naturally it eventually got loaned out to a friend of a friend - and then I saw neither again.

I've never actually read any of The Morningstar Strain. If you're re-reading it, it must be good - I'll have to check it out

This was a pretty formative book in my entrance into reading and enjoying zombie/apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic fiction. I remember buying a physical copy from Atlantic Books in the local mall, and still have my original copy, along with World War Z. I'm still always on the hunt for good zom-poc fiction and am re-reading The Morningstar Strain series by ZA Recht (and others, following his death).

Full review for those interested

Censorship isn’t the answer to something like this. Censorship is never the answer. For that matter, “Night of the Living Dead” was passed for general audiences by the Chicago Police Censor Board. Since it had no nudity in it, it was all right for kids, I guess. This is another example, and there have been a lot of them, of the incompetence and stupidity of the censorship system that Chicago stubbornly maintains under political patronage.

Censorship is not the answer. But I would be ashamed to make a civil libertarian argument defending the “right” of those little girls and boys to see a film which left a lot of them stunned with terror. In a case like this, I’d want to know what the parents were thinking of when they dumped the kids in front of the theater to see a film titled “Night of the Living Dead.”

I do enjoy when people talk about censorship and point out the hypocrisy of graphic violence being allowed as long as there isn't any overt sexuality. Censorship continues to not solve this problem today - Like when Deadpool came out with an R rating and campaigns telling parents that it wasn't just another superhero movie, and parents were still taking their kids to see it.

When people talk about "What's an event you'd go back in time to see" this screening might be the one for me. I genuinely feel bad for the kids, and I do think that many of us have probably seen a movie that was too scary before our time, but that happening to so many people at once is a pretty unique phenomenon.

— and you could actually see what they were eating.

This is also pretty noteworthy. When shown to a modern audience, the film is generally seen as pretty tame. But the effects are really quite good. I think a big part of it is being filmed in black and white - the absence of colour makes the props look less fake. Even the blood is interesting: they used chocolate sauce because it left such dark stains that it gives additional realism. Compare to Dawn of the Dead a decade later - a much gorier movie and while the effects are still really good they don't have that same uncanny realism

it's a fairly well known story that Night of the Living Dead opened at an afternoon matinee shortly before MPAA ratings became official. The result was that lots of parents dropped their kids off for what they assumed to be a campy movie in the vein of Dracula or the Wolfman, and instead traumatized their children with scenes of immolation and disembowelment.

Here’s a snippet from Roger Ebert’s infamous review, which he later described not as a review of the movie itself, but a review of the audience’s reaction to the movie:

The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying.

I don’t think the younger kids really knew what hit them. They were used to going to movies, sure, and they’d seen some horror movies before, sure, but this was something else. This was ghouls eating people up — and you could actually see what they were eating.