My Life as a White Trash Zombie

Shit, sometimes I have these horrible phases when I can't finish a single book and I hate all of them, but now this is my second surprising find in a row (well, not really, but lets forget about the dud in between). HOW? Not complaining, just... ya know. Cool. I will be honest, I picked it up based on the cover, because it looked awesome. Generally I don't like books with human faces on them, if there is another variant that's not hella ugly I prefer that, but in this case I just really liked the artwork. (Shoot me now or I'll talk about art until I run out of characters, I guess loving books AND visual arts does that.)

Angel sucks at life. She is... white trash, as it says on the tin, but pretty much that's her life. She never finished school, does drugs and drinks, her dad is no good and her boyfriend doesn't give a fuck about anything in life. Neither did she, until recently. She was found unconscious and naked by a road, otherwise pretty much fine. Overdose? Sure. Then she starts getting mysterious letter about how she is expected to go to the coroner's office to start a job or else she will be sent to prison and die there very fast, so she does it. During her new job she notices some.... interesting new ravings, though. Meanwhile decapitated corpses start showing up.

I've noticed something. Everyone tries to be incredibly socially sensitive nowadays, things get banned, people get harassed online and in real life for using the not acceptable word (that changes every two weeks), media gets picked apart viciously for someone wearing the wrong thing. But lower class white people, the “white trash” somehow always get treated with zero sympathy and zero humanity. That's why this was interesting from the get go; Angel's flaws are obvious from the get go. She is not perfect by any means. But she is also a person who is not there because she and her people are basically just one of the few types who you can joke about and hate on without being considered some kind of a bigot. She had her perfectly justifiable feelings and hurts. She's also funny and an enjoyable character, which is not a bad thing for a book that is in first person.

The zombie concept was good too. They are not shambling, brainless (hurr hurr) creatures who pursue you slowly and moan. Basically they can be fine and function normally... if they get the appropriate fuel with the appropriate frequency. Now that was the bare minimum to make them acceptable and readable as characters, I suppose. To make them something other than an enemy or a context for the human heroes to handle we just have to make them somewhat intelligent.
Having them congregate around places that have a lot of dead bodies is funny and logical, though. I also really like the irony of people who handle dead bodies interacting with zombies, it's just really funny. Even in dark scenes, when they discuss the deaths it's interesting, because one part of the conversation is technically also a dead person. (Never had this much fun with that since the living dead attacked the pathologist Waldo Butters in Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. I would love that bugger meeting Angel, they would bounce off of each other perfectly.)

The mystery in the book wasn't spectacular. I guess we didn't know enough of the characters to make it a truly interesting and hard to solve case? I don't know. I honestly mostly just enjoyed Angel doing her thing. Not like the crime aspect wasn't fun and enjoyable, but as I said, we don't know who does what and why. Well.
I'm pretty sure based on the blurbs that some bigger story will develop eventually, so there is that. Hopefully Angel won't be turned into a Mary Sue who is the centre of a lovefest by everyone around her with a gigantic horde of adoring men a'la October Daye (eugh), so if we can avoid that I think this can become a surprisingly solid urban fantasy type of a deal.

I don't know shit about the author. I don't read those kind of romantic or erotic paranormal romances and her other series seems to be like that, so not my thing, but I will definitely read more of this series. The bright pink cover could be a bit off-putting or maybe the title, I don't know, but it's genuinely pretty damn fun.

Good night and don't forget your lunch!