By the end of Autumn: Dawn, Moody had given us a bleak yet compelling picture of a city in which 99.9% of its population had fallen down dead and then promptly become (un)alive again, fragmented groups of survivors coalescing together to create a fragile bastion against the undead. Autumn: Dawn was Moody’s triumphant return to both London and the Autumn series, and when I reviewed it upon its release last year, I was struck both by Moody’s clear and confident vision of the Autumn universe and its on-going central narrative, and the fact that he is one of the best British zombie horror writers currently alive. Moody has long dwelled on London as a location for an uprising of the undead, with his long-running Autumn series taking place in around the capital as it followed individuals and small groups of survivors as they tried to outlast the undead, crazed bands of fellow survivors intent on trying to assert dominion over the hellish landscape, and the remaining elements of the military as it emerged from its bunkers. Fortunately for the genre and trope, however, when it comes to the works of David Moody, the fall of London is deftly transformed from cliched catastrophe to sublime triumph. London being overrun by zombies, or the living dead, is hardly an uncommon occurrence in the horror genre – indeed it seems to have become a beloved (and distinctly stale) trope to be used by zombie apocalypse fiction authors to demonstrate just how doomed the country/world is London, one of the oldest and largest capital cities in the world, depopulated and massacred by corpses seeking to eat brains, flesh or pass on their virus, dependent on the scenario.

Autumn by David Moody