This book is translated by Jessica Powell and published by Mandel Vilar Press in 2016. It won’t be eligible for the next awards cycle, but I thought it was worth reviewing, as it’s a little different for a zombie novel. It runs about 184 pages.

The setting is the area between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Isadore Bellamy’s scrapbook provides us with personal experiences and includes the upsetting circumstances that surround the executive vice president of the R&D division of the local branch of Eli Lilly where she works as a researcher. The material she has collected includes police interviews of herself and her co-workers Patricia Cesares and Mathilde Álverez, plus the diary of the doctor, who is convinced he is a zombie and constantly in search of some method to reinstate his soul. The narrative reveals the different realities people live, and cuts off suddenly as…

On the one hand, this is a philosophical work, as it’s about the nature of existence and the search for the self. On the other hand, it presents an amusing picture of the doctor who is either totally wacko or a zombie—because of his lack of emotions, he totally fails to understand the women he works with. The book also provides a compendium of zombie lore, and has an appendix of wicked weeds for preparation of the powder used in witchcraft rituals to create a zombie. Unfortunately, it doesn’t provide Isadore’s recipe.

This is a bit messy, and won’t suit fans of the usual zombie apocalypse.

Four stars.