needs more demons?

If the title didn’t already clue you in, the final sentence of the back cover blurb perfectly telegraphs You Are So Undead to Me’s tone: “Her life — and more importantly, the homecoming dance — depends on it.”

In the first volume of Jay’s post-Buffy zombie franchise, reluctant zombie “Settler” Megan Berry is at least as concerned with boys and cheerleader tryouts as she is with figuring out who’s sending murderous zombies after her. It’s more lighthearted than most recent publishing successes with superficial similarities. This isn’t a bad thing at all — in fact, Jay has crafted a novel that might not only appeal to some fans of Meyer’s Twilight books, but also to some readers who find Bella’s level of angst a little wearing, if not unintentionally silly.

Berry is obtuse about some of what’s going on around her in a way that may make some readers’ eyes roll (although it’s partly a specie of obtuseness that certainly honors longstanding tradition) and alert readers will see through the red herrings easily. But like Berry’s selective blindnesses, a flimsy mystery seems less a fault of this novel than an attribute of the genre that You Are So Undead to Me embodies. It’s very much a color-inside-the-lines exercise, but it delivers exactly what it promises.

needs more demons? has just about the requisite amount.