Rhiannon Frater

After Siege by Rhiannon Frater is the 4th book in an on-going series entitled “As the World Dies” about a zombie apocalypse and the group of Texans who have fortified a small town and are making an attempt to carry on with life. While I really enjoyed the first two books of the series, it has progressively gotten weaker and although there is at least one more book in the series, I am finished with it.

In this particular volume a new character is introduced. Emma has come to the fort after being on her own for some time. Her son became a zombie and until she had found him and put him to rest, she couldn’t move on with her own life. Now, as a member of the fort she is ready to join this new community and help to keep it safe. After rescuing three people who had left the fort, they realize that there are more zombies on the outskirts of town than they realized. They also learn of a right wing military force who could possibly be a threat.

Personally I think it’s unfortunate that the author didn’t let this series stand after the first two books. She seemed to write herself into a corner by killing off the best character and in order to move the story along she brought her back as a ghost, along with others who would appear and pass messages along. I guess if you are writing about zombies, then ghosts shouldn’t be too much of a stretch, but it has proved to be too much for me.… (more)

This easily belongs to the top 0.1% of urban fantasy and yet I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I would've expected.
The opening is very engaging and immediately captured me.
It's gruesome though. Really dark and gruesome.
The book uses every opportunity to insert world-building into normal situations in a natural fashion. but it's sometimes not very subtle about it but it never leads to painfully stilted dialogue.

While reading this book I constantly felt like the author was very aware of all the clichées and stereotypes as well as general genre tropes and either subtly and skillfully subverted or deliberately avoided them.

But this very aspect of the book makes things, I am usually comfortable talking about in a review, spoilery because we all know the tropes by now.
So this spoiler is here because I can not talk about the meta game the author plays without spoiling the very thing that makes this so enjoyable and unique. But all outright story spoilers will be contained in an additional layer of nested spoilers.

After the very engaging gripping opening, the pacing suffers a bit when the theme completely shifts to romance drama as the MC enters a kind of love triangle but not as the center but as the OW.
It takes until the climax for the pacing to pick up again.

A lot of these trope subversions threw me for a loop. On one hand, I appreciated how the author played with the meta context but on the other hand, it just made me uncomfortable for the MC to be in such a position. The love interest cheats with the MC on his fiancée.

Morality in this book is truly gray to the point where it made me surprisingly uncomfortable sometimes.
This also leads to probably the single biggest flaw in the book. Despite this moral ambiguity the author always shoehorns reason into the story to dislike characters that are about to be killed. Sometimes literally in the sentence before.
"Oh, by the way, that guy raped someone 3 years ago." *gets shot in the head*
Only unlikable people are allowed to be killed by the good guys. The punishment doesn't need to fit the crime though. You just have to dislike them first. This comes across as very forced and it also sometimes spoils the tension because you know there can only be one reason for the awkward addition.

That being said, in general, every time I recognized a classic stupid trope setup and was already preparing a disappointment rant in my head it turned out to be premature.

Ultimately, the ending was way sweeter and happier than I expected.


The second big weakness are the action scenes. Don't get me wrong, they are still much better than a lot of urban fantasy, and the most important part, the tension, was conveyed decently, but they failed in enabling me to imagine them properly. I rarely had a clear picture of who is where in relation to each other or the actual body movements and how they interacted.

While I feel like this book easily deserves 4 stars just because of its skillful play on tropes and just by the virtue of the sheer number of pitfalls the book deliberately avoided, my personal enjoyment was much closer to 3 stars and I don't really know why.
I think while there are very few bad clichées to be angry about the overall story was still just kind of meh. On a macro level, it's just another vampire romance despite the much better execution.
I would love to have read this after my 10th vampire romance and not after the 100th.… (more)