of Z fiction and brains

So just as I thought there was nothing but YA romance novellas on Amazon, I stumbled upon a little gem of a Z fiction. and yes, Z is a new-fangled lit lingo for zombie fic. It took me a couple mouthfuls of green tea to figure that one out as I was browsing through the pages.

and normally, I'm not the morbid/supernatural/paranoid sort that reads Z lit and prepares a apocalyptic zombie survival kit in my basement with army rations to make any general proud. 
but Apocalyse Z: the Beginning to the End by Manel Loureiro sucked me in and I'm only 70% through, according to my Kindle.

Z lit has never pulled in into its grip on chaos and gore, just because I always thought that when you've read one, you've pretty much read all of them. 
hoards of zombies shuffling about a dead town looking for brains, a couple of survivors running around like headless chickens trying to find rations and always always always the hope for humanity's survival.
but one thing quite cool about this book is the narrator is telling his story through blogposts and later on, when the servers shut down, his journal. it's quite compelling in the sense that the narrator not only gets to describe the daily occurrences, but also gets to add in his two cents' worth in hindsight. and it reads so much like what a blogger/journaler will write: the sometimes 2-sentences post about being so sick and horrified about the day's incidents that he could not even bear to put pen to paper, and I literally feel that tinge of nausea in my tummy for him, and want but do not want to at the same time to turn the page to see what made him that speechless.
and when he described the reanimation of a dead comrade's corpse right in front of him, I actually curled right into myself and tried to read the lines through scrunched-up eyes. the narrator described the morbid fascination of the entire sequence, the feeling of seeing something so gruesome and unholy but unable to look somewhere else. and I felt like I was seeing things right through his eyes.

and the book is set in Spain and was translated from a Spanish piece of work. the writing does read a little chunky but staccato, some of its meaning could have been lost in translation. but that sense of stiltedness somehow makes this work of fiction even more realistic, brings the whole survival in an apocalyptic wasteland to a whole new different light. people running for their lives don't spend much time mincing their words in their journal entries after all. but the descriptions of the desolate setting and decaying humanity were never lost, it still flows beautifully despite the translations.

and the entire time I was reading the book, I was thinking to myself, no way in heck would I be able to survive a zombie invasion, if there ever was one. I can't hunt animals, I can't bust locks, I can't aim and shoot guns, I can't even fix a broken car. the only remotely useful survival skill I have is the medical knowledge. I know how to set bones and clean wounds and give antibiotics, but that's about it. 

I'm so going to be zombie fodder when a Z invasion comes along.