There are tons of Zombie Apocalypse novels, and I still enjoy them. I understand authors throwing a spin on the genre, to make things more interesting, and I'm generally fine with that. Zombies are terrifying, they usually outnumber humans, you can't reason with them, and they just don't give up, which is why I believe they make for interesting antagonists.
In this series the evolved zombies are intelligent as well, so even more scary, and it's more hopeless and frustrating right?
So I can live with that. It's a neat little twist to the shambling, groaning, brain eating undead that so many people love, however, in this series they also have magic. For some reason, to me at least, this is just totally annoying. You would think that zombies hurling Fireballs and magic missiles, using mind control, paralysis, and "laser beams shooting from fingers" would make things more interesting, but for me its actually less fun. Only two more books in the series, not really having fun with it anymore though. Bummer.