After having loved David Moody’s Autumn and its sequel Autumn: The City, I was eager to get started on the third title in the series, Autumn: Purification.
The book itself offers the following synopsis:
“One day in September a virulent plague spread throughout the world, killing billions. Even now, the full horror of the plague is just beginning for the dead are not just dead…
One small group of survivors is imprisoned in an underground base, trapped between the door to the outside world and the sealed entrance to the airtight cocoon where hundreds of soldiers sit and wait for rescue.
On the surface the crowd of bodies is growing in size every day, drawn by the heat and the noise of the people hiding beneath their rotting feet. The sheer mass of decaying flesh above begins to cause problems for the military when vents become blocked, but a mission to clear the cadavers starts a vicious battle between the living and the dead. And there are far more of the dead…”
Autumn: Purification opens with a brief recap leading to the events narrated herein and thereafter, picks up almost immediately from where Autumn: The City left off. This had me ever so slightly worried since it would have been incredibly easy for Moody to take the path of least resistance and created a clone of the plot from Romero’s Day of the Dead from this point. Thankfully, this is far from the case with Purification.
Moody continues to develop not only his characters and the undead in this third instalment of the Autumn series but the universe which they occupy also. The tone of the book, as with its predecessors, is suitably bleak and the focus is very much on the plight of the characters, the daily trials they suffer, how they cope with their own emotions and despair; and how much they have changed despite less than six weeks having passed since the cataclysmic event which wiped out the majority of the planet’s population and the dead started to rise. At the same time, Moody pays attention to the degradation of the physical states of the walking dead, but Purification, as with the previous instalments in the Autumn series, sees the shambling corpses continue to evolve in a fashion that I can only imagine that other authors wish they had thought of first…
Although there is plenty of action, death and decaying flesh in this book and it is undoubtedly at home in the horror genre, it will leave those looking for an adrenaline-fuelled mindless zombie tale unsatisifed. I would submit to you that this is no bad thing. Autumn: Purification continues to flesh out Moody’s Autumn universe admirably and although this book only runs to 260 or so pages and could be read as a stand alone title, I would suggest to any potential reader to do as I have done and read the series from the start since it has greatly enhanced my enjoyment of each of the books by taking them in sequence.
There’s no need to take my word for it either, award-winning author Jonathan Maberry said of Autumn that: “This is smart fiction, written with style and insight. Not for the gore-hounds who can’t think past a pile of entrails, but the rest of the readers in the world.”
Taking into account my love of post-apocalyptica and how many books concering the sub-genre that I read, I can honestly say that Autumn has, to date, seriously impressed me and consistently hits the mark where so many other books fail and simply rely on gore and decay. In short, my advice to genre fans is simple. Get involved with the Autumn series as soon as possible. You won’t regret it.
