After finishing off the first book in this series, Mad World: Epidemic, I was excited to see the story continued, especially since I don’t usually read books from a series right after another. Even though the story took place several years later, Mad World: Sanctuary turned out to be disappointing, enough that I am not sure if I want to continue the series after all.
At the beginning, we are tossed back into the story, with a few reminders here and there about the previous book that I felt were more awkward than necessary. The story picks up five years later with the same characters and a few changes in their lives. They are now traveling with a five year old boy who is half zombie (or something) and they have all paired up as couples except for the youngest girl. Also, they have to constantly hide from the government in order to keep Luke (the zombie-child.) While I expected some more action packed events full of zombies, now that the outbreak was five years + in, the amount of zombies was about the same as in the first book. While one scene does stand out because there are numerous zombies involved, the horror scenes were more of the same and not really exciting or creepy.
The story doesn’t develop much either, since the characters spend the book just re-locating from one place to another. Instead we get similar fight scenes, a lot of driving around in a van (and only having energy drinks or soda, which was also something that bugged me about the first one but I failed to mention in my review) and constantly being followed, although they don’t come across anyone until the last third of the book. They manage to meet some new people but the predicaments sounded way too familiar (almost like some of the volumes of The Walking Dead, actually) so I wasn’t really entertained.
The only thing that redeemed this book for me, in fact, was the ending because there is a twist I didn’t see coming, which turns into a cliffhanger of an ending. So if I want to know what’s in store for these characters, I would have to read the next book and I am just not interested. Overall, I found this to be a weak filler of a book to continue the series without adding anything significant to the story until the very end.