Why You'll Love This
Blackmore keeps stacking threats — undead, serial killers, infected rats from the sewers — until Halifax itself becomes the monster.
- Great if you want: layered zombie horror with genuine human menace alongside the undead
- The experience: relentlessly grim and pressurized — tension rarely lets up
- The writing: Blackmore writes dread through accumulation, not jump scares — bleak and precise
- Skip if: you haven't read the earlier books — context matters here
About This Book
Halifax was already a dying city before the dead started walking. Now it's a frozen hellscape where Scott's next threat could come from above, below, or the shadows between—because the zombies are just the beginning. A serial killer is still out there, doing what serial killers do, apparently unbothered by the apocalypse. Infected vermin are swarming up from the sewers. And the cold itself seems determined to finish whatever the dead leave behind. Blackmore stacks dangers the way a good horror writer should: relentlessly, and with a dark sense of humor about the whole absurd nightmare.
What makes Hellifax work as a reading experience is Blackmore's refusal to let the zombie genre coast on formula. His prose is blunt and physical—you feel the cold, the exhaustion, the particular dread of a city that has become genuinely, creatively hostile. The pacing moves in waves, building pressure before releasing it in bursts of grim, propulsive action. By the third book in the Mountain Man series, Blackmore knows exactly how far he can push his characters and his readers, and he pushes accordingly.
