The zombies are just the beginning. The real horror lives inside.
Let’s get one thing straight from the jump: this isn’t about the zombies. Not really. Sure, they’re shambling around, groaning, doing the whole “eat the living” routine. The real gut-punch of Remy Porter’s Dead Beat comes after the fences go up. After the immediate panic fades, the survivors in the small English town of Haven catch their breath. That’s when the other shoe drops. The living start looking at each other with a different kind of hunger.
You think the putrefied bodies are bad? Wait until you get a load of the villagers’ rotten hearts.
Johnny Silverman, our copper protagonist, knows a thing or two about rottenness. He’s sleepwalking through his beat long before the outbreak, burying some dark secret of his own. When the world ends on his shift, his first instinct is still to serve and protect. He holes up in the station with Summer, a support officer, and Lester, the town drunk who’s suddenly, terrifyingly sober. It’s a decent setup. Classic. But Porter, drawing on his own background as a former police officer in the north of England, quickly ditches the rulebook. Because across town, a farmer named Jack Nation and his truly depraved son Griffin are building something else entirely.
Not just a barricade. A fiefdom.
And here’s where the book either loses you or hooks you in deep. While Johnny’s trying to uphold a ghost of the old world, Jack’s building a new, brutal one. He gets people organised, gets that fence built, and clears the town. He provides safety. In return, he demands absolute loyalty and enforces his own grim laws. The community, scared out of its wits, mostly goes along with it. Johnny’s attempts to assert his authority fall flat, pathetic even. It makes you squirm. This isn’t a heroic last stand; it’s the slow, suffocating death of decency.
The monsters outside the fence begin to pale in comparison to those on the inside.
Porter does something clever, or maybe just brutally honest, with the genre’s usual learning curve. There’s no prolonged period of confusion about headshots or bites. These characters have seen the movies. They know the rules. The horror isn’t in figuring out what a zombie is; it’s in realising that all the zombie lore in the world doesn’t prepare you for what the guy next to you will do to feel powerful again. The plot swerves into seriously dark territory, implying non-consensual sex, and the suggestion that Griffin is doing unspeakable things to captured zombies. It’s grim. It’s meant to be.
And Johnny? He’s no Rick Grimes. He’s barely holding it together. The narrative switches between third person and first person from his perspective, and in those closer moments, you see the cracks. He’s weak, compromised, haunted. You keep waiting for him to find his spine, to become the hero. Porter denies you that catharsis for a painfully long time.
When it works, it really works. The British setting is a refreshing change from the usual American-centric apocalypses. The slang and the rural atmosphere feel authentic. The characters, even the vile ones, have dimension. Jack the farmer isn’t a cartoon villain; in his own twisted mind, he’s the saviour, the strong hand Haven needs. Lester the drunk finds a grim purpose. The conflict feels real, bleak, and depressingly plausible.
So, who’s it for? If you want a straightforward, action-packed zombie shoot-’em-up with a clear-cut hero, you might leave disappointed. Maybe even a bit angry. This book is for the reader who prefers their horror psychological. Who’s fascinated by the breakdown of society not through gore, but through quiet betrayals and moral compromise. It’s a character-driven story where the walking dead are almost set dressing for a deeper, more troubling question: when everything falls apart, are we inherently good, or do we just wait for an excuse to let our worst selves out to play?
Porter’s mission, it seems, was to explore that dark side. To show people doing horrible things to each other when they should be banding together. On that count, mission accomplished. It’s a bloody good read, but it’ll leave a bitter taste. A bit like biting into something you thought was fruit only to find it’s full of worms.
Dead Beat by Remy Porter
Haven, Population: 2000.
A place where Johnny sleepwalks the beat, counting down the hours to the end of another police shift. Burying the secret deeper.
But this is the day the world ends. The infection has spread unchecked, and now the dead have domain. Johnny is thrown into a fight to survive. The shattered community around him willing to do anything to stay alive.
But as putrefacted bodies close in, it’s the villager’s rotten hearts he begins to fear the most … And beyond them the puppetmasters who started it all.
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