The Living Dead

TL;DR: Bloated mess, tell don't show story telling, ham-fisted social commentary
This was bad, really bad. I normally would have DNFed it but I felt like it would somehow diminish my loyalty to the zombie genre so I stuck with it.
The story has very good bones, it could have been great but it feels like no editing was done and way to many things that should have been trimmed were left in. There's constant interruptions with what the characters are thinking which are often completely useless to the story and to character building.
Equally constant in its unrelenting presence is the clumsy social commentary that is so poorly executed it makes all sides look like bad caricatures and the result is an aggressively centrist (for a lack of a better word) mess even though it seems like it wants to lean “left” that's all about tell don't show for most of it. A lot of the characters' back stories seemed like contrived bad excuses to hammer in more social commentary.
There were cool scenes in this mess, the Annie Teller plot line was rather fun and the dive in the zombie psyche was an interesting twist (even though it was overdone) but honestly in a novel so bloated it was statistically impossible that there wouldn't be at least 1 thing that worked.