“I didn’t shoot the bitch until she started eating Alan’s face.”

Hello. Has anyone ever written a better opening sentence for a horror novel than Keene has for DEAD SEA? Not in my opinion, they haven’t.

Back in July, I searched the internet for a few new horror novels to read and stumbled across Leisure’s Horror book club (www.Dorchesterpub.com). The book club offers two paperbacks each month and one of July’s offerings was DEAD SEA.

Leisure offers the first chapter of the book for website visitors to carouse, so I selected DEAD SEA and started reading. Five minutes later, I was entering my credit card info.

DEAD SEA is the story of Lamar, a desperate, out of work, and down on his luck young man living in Baltimore. He isn’t your usual zombie horror protagonist—Lamar is a homosexual African American, morally tortured by a robbery of necessity he committed against the auto dealership where he had worked.

His worries over overdue bills and wondering if the police were going to arrest him at anytime came to an abrupt end when the infected rats began spilling out of the sewers and infecting people with Hamelin’s Revenge—a disease that turns the victims into flesh craving zombies.

Lamar flees a burning Baltimore with two young children he rescued along the way and a handful of other survivors aboard a decommissioned Coast Guard ship turned museum.

That is when the fun really starts.

Hamelin’s Revenge finds its way aboard the ship and zombie madness ensues. Lamar, and a few others manage to escape the ship in a lifeboat. Bad turns to worse when they discover the zombie disease doesn’t stop on land. Other creatures harry the small group of survivors as they make their way to a hopefully abandoned oilrig.

DEAD SEA provides an injection of originality the zombie/horror genre desperately needed. Keene is a master of weaving interesting characters to populate his terrifying worlds. Like his previous novels, DEAD SEA is a can’t miss read.