A Review for Dark Inside by Jeyn Roberts

Posted by Guest Reviewer Melanie
Published Date: September 2nd, 2011
Finished Date: December 12th, 2011
Publishers: Macmilliam
Source: Finished Copy for Review
Format: Paperback
Pages: 368 
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The Blurb from Goodreads: Since mankind began, civilizations have always fallen: the Romans, the Greeks, the Aztecs…. Now it’s our turn. Huge earthquakes rock the world. Cities are destroyed. But something even worse is happening. An ancient evil has been unleashed, hooking on to weakness, turning the unwary into hunters, killers, crazies.
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Mason: His mother is dying after a terrible car accident. As he endures a last vigil at her hospital bed, his school is bombed and razed to the ground. Everyone he knows is killed.
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Aries: A school bus, an aftershock and a crash. Pulled out of the wreckage by a mysterious stranger, she’s about to discover a world changed forever.
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Clementine: An emergency meeting at the town hall that descends into murderous chaos. Outside the rest of their community encircle with weapons. How can those you trust turn into savage strangers?
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Michael: A brutal road rage incident. When the police arrive on the scene they gun down the guilty and turn on the by-standing crowd. Where do you go for justice when even the lawmakers have turned bad?

The Review: 2.5 out of 5: We join Mason, Aries, Clementine and Michael on their own individual journeys after an apocalyptic type event that leaves the rest of the population either dead or as I suppose you would call them zombies aka Baggers. They each have their own story told by their point of view and we also get a point of view from someone called Nothing, who that is isn’t ever clarified but I think I knew from the introduction of the characters who it was. It’s quite a grim story of what happens to the world due to what we as humans do to it and expect from it, that it’s inevitable that something like this will happen and we deserve it. The deconstruction of society is blatantly clear as the zombie type survivors wreak havoc among the devastated cities, torturing and murdering survivors who are not like them, sweeping the buildings, burning them out, mass killings, suicide bombers. . . you name it and they will do it, morality out of the window. These beings are down to the most basic, primal instincts and they crave it. So you can imagine what this group of people are going through and the lengths they will go to get to wherever they feel they need to be, to survive from not just the threat of zombies but hunger and the elements or just to stay hidden and survive in a world gone to hell.

Now, for all I understood the messages in this book and it did make me question a lot of things, especially, do we deserve it? Could it really happen? What would I do? How would I survive? Maybe I should kit out an emergency backpack and find a hidey place and scope out emergency exits, buy walkie talkies, torches, batteries, stockpile food etc. (Yeah, I have a seriously over active imagination.) I really struggled with it. I liked it and I didn’t, I can’t really explain because I liked the characters and wanted to know about them but the book dragged when they were alone and moved at a snail’s pace and even though we got some action it didn’t feel paced throughout. Maybe it was because there was five points of views and you had to wait to find out about something that happened 3-5 chapters back, it made it feel a bit erratic and I might have liked it better if it had been a set of 4 stories with the nothing chapters separating them. But saying that, I understood why it was done the way it was and why people like it, but it just wasn’t to my liking. This is the first zombie type novel I’ve read and maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for it or expected something different because I know a LOT of people love this but unfortunately it just wasn’t for me.