Horror Comic Review - Stephen Blue - Zombie World - Dead End

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1988 – Dark Horse Comics - Spoiler alerts A very clever take on the standard modern zombie premise that turns unexpectedly into a supernatural detective story. A young lady called Lisa leaves a high society fancy dress party in her car late at night. She is still dressed in her angel costume complete with wings. When her car breaks down, she finds herself surrounded by zombies and seeks refuge in a nearby isolated house. An old lady there is in some mental distress and assumes Lisa is her missing daughter sent back from heaven. A young man, the older woman’s son, seems much more rational and helps Lisa barricade doors and windows to keep the zombies out but more emerge from the cellar. The man insists they must have broken in there from outside but Lisa works out he is lying. Her reasoning – the zombies she first encountered seemed freshly dead but those from the cellar seem more decomposed and flaked in stone rather than soil. She also realizes all the zombies are homing in on the house and ignoring other properties. She realizes her host is a serial killer. His early victims were buried under the cellar in concrete, so they have rotted more and had a tougher time unburying themselves. As that space has filled, the killer has buried others further out in the fields so the fresher bodies have come for revenge from out there. Lisa steps back and lets the zombies move in on their real intended target, their killer. His Mum has died in the onslaught though, and Lisa’s boyfriend, dressed as Satan, rescues her as the house itself catches fire. Very imaginative and Lisa’s transformation to shrewd detective is cleverly handled. Arthur Chappell