Undead on Arrival by Nick Smith

From Night of the Living Dead to 28 Days Later, the living are rather fond of the corporeal undead. Usually portrayed as mindless, decaying corpses with a penchant for human brains, Undead On Arrival tells an altogether more 'ordinary' zombie story. Here we have the sorry tale of Glen Glass, a man dissatisfied with his mediocre life, whose only pleasure stems from his passion for spy movies and in particular his hero, John Dance. Caught up in a bizarre sequence of events, Glen is given the chance to live life (of a sort) as he had never before thought possible when he returns to earth as one of the undead. As part of the growing zombie community Glen is subjected to scientific experiments and questionable attacks while the government struggles to understand and control its members. Overcoming the obvious physical drawbacks of his condition, he fights to discover the nature of his death and pursue the woman he loves. The third offering by Nick Smith (his previous books were Milk Treading and The Kitty Killer Cult), Undead on Arrival is a witty and original book. But though it has all the ingredients of an extremely good read, it somehow fails to mix them quite as well as it could have. [Rebecca Isherwood]