A review by howlinglibraries
Where the Dead Go to Die by Aaron Dries, Mark Allan Gunnells

5.0

 I'll try my best to do this book justice with a review, but it isn't every day that you find a new favorite zombie book of all time.

Every day has its destiny. The cracking icicle that's almost ready to fall. A branch weighed by too much snow, soon to break. Clouds that try and try to hold in their water, only to fail, and in doing so fulfill their meaning in the world. An architecture of inevitability, that this was fated to be. The destiny of this day: Bloodshed. It would begin with a single drop.

Where the Dead Go to Die is a fresh take on the zombie apocalypse that I've never seen before. In a future where the zombie infection takes months, sometimes even years to change a person into the inevitable, government agencies set up hospice centers to allow the would-be walking dead a safe place to be taken care of while they live out their final days in some semblance of dignity and calm.

The book follows a young mother named Emily who's starting her new job as a nurse at one of these hospice centers, and throughout it, we get the chance to grow attached not only to her and her daughter Lucette, but also a wide panel of side characters who are human, flawed, and impossible not to empathize with. Dries and Gunnells are masters at developing these characters until they feel like they could walk right off the pages, which means it hurts that much more whenever any terrible fate befalls one of them.

Where the Dead Go to Die is perhaps the first piece of zombie media of any form to break my heart so thoroughly; if you need proof, I'm fighting tears just typing this review, thinking about some of the characters and how much better they deserved. I adore horror stories that can cut to the heart of me and this one didn't let me down. I feel like I'm going to mourn this story for a long time, and for me, that's a mark of a genuinely memorable read.

I can't wait to read more by both of these authors and I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It takes place around the holidays, but you could easily read it at any time of year. Whether you typically enjoy zombie tales or not, I highly suggest picking this up if you like emotional horror stories with a lot of heart. 5 stars, easy. Thanks for the heartache, Dries and Gunnells. 💔

✨ Representation: one Black side character, one queer side character