Product Description

David Moody brings the AUTUMN trilogy to a stunning conclusion.

The survivors from AUTUMN: THE CITY are imprisoned in an underground base, trapped between the door to the outside world and the sealed entrance to the airtight cocoon where hundreds of soldiers sit and wait.

The crowd of bodies on the surface continues to grow in size, drawn there by the heat, light and noise occasionally produced by the people buried underground beneath their rotting feet. The sheer mass of shuffling figures and decaying flesh above them begins to cause problems for the military with vents and exhaust shafts becoming blocked and useless. Soldiers are sent above ground to begin clearing the bodies away.

Encouraged by a relatively successful first strike which is met with little resistance from the corpses, the officers order their troops to the surface again, this time to destroy them all.

Trapped in the middle of a long and bloody battle between the military and the dead, the survivors' safety is compromised and they are forced to flee the base.

Exposed and vulnerable once again, the group run for their lives without aim or direction.

All hope is gone, but in the rotting shadows of the past they find the key to what remains of their future...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #226670 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 280 pages

About the Author
David Moody is the author of the acclaimed AUTUMN living dead novels. A writer sick of square-jawed, all-American heroes and contrived happy endings, his books are unique and individual. Tried and tested horror and science-fiction themes are twisted and given a fresh perspective by this British author. Moody's characters are ordinary people - you, me, the man or woman next door or across the street - forced to survive the most extraordinary of conditions. It is this uneasy mixture of the familiar and bizarre that makes his stories such unsettling and disturbing reads.

Customer Reviews

A very classy end to a very fine trilogy
Autumn, Purification, basically marks the end of a trilogy of zombie-focused books.

The story evolves around the same group of survivors that was featured in the previous, `Autumn, the City' book. The action starts exactly where it stopped there. The survivors are sheltered in an underground, army-occupied bunker. They take the decision to venture out of it after the shelter gets overwhelmed by a mass of zombies and all hope to stay safely in is lost. What follows is their quest for survival in a devastated, highly perilous world.

Without lifting the curtain off of the story plot, please remember that David Moody is a talented English writer who has decided to take his time to tell a very realistic tale of survival without any kind of biased opinion. Zombies are never called zombies, they are depicted as beings that used to be normal and that now suffer from their decaying condition. They don't hurt for pleasure, or without reason. The military is shown as a group of very different characters. They are not described as a stereotypical, 2-bit group of dumb-minded, orders-obeying robots. Some of the survivors are selfish and meet their end without judgment, while it becomes clear that their attitude is actually dictated by their incapability to feed their hope any longer. Some others are brave and courageous, but also subject to doubt. Boredom is shown as an implacable enemy. The fragility of hope in people's heart is demonstrated over and over. Only a handful of people get to see some kind of light in the gloom of their everyday life.

Moody seems to be willing to get away from any kind of judgment on the zombies' conditions, hence it becomes difficult to really feel disdain towards them. Rather, their evolving attitude becomes logical and, from them, less of a threat, more `acceptable'.

Overall, action is continuous and logical. The whole book is a real pleasure to read. It concludes with class and smoothness a fine trilogy of books that really deserves any reader's attention.

Humanity's final stand.
David Moody, Autumn: Purification (Infected Books, 2004)

The third entry in Moody's popular Autumn quartet, Purification picks up where The City left off, with the survivors being driven out of the military base by hordes of the (still not flesh-eating!) dead and scrambling to find some place more permanent to make their last stand.

Simply by dint of the fact that Moody's not bouncing back and forth between two unrelated storylines, Purification starts off stronger than The City, and the momentum keeps up throughout the book. The undead continue to evolve, which keeps both the survivors and the reader guessing, and the human relationships between the main characters evolve, as they should. (The minor characters are, for the most part, still cardboard cutouts, however.) The ending does put one in mind of another novel whose ghost has shadowed the entire series, but I figured that was going to be the case.

Quite enjoyable. ***

Zombie action, but no gore.
I have read and reviewed the first 2 "Autumn" books and I am probably sounding like a broken record. There is not enough of the over-the-top Zombie gore that I enjoy so much. There is however more action in this book than the first two in the series.
The books are well written and interesting. The problem I have, besides the absence of extreme Zombie gore, is that the books focus mainly on the characters. The Zombies almost seem secondary to the story.
I enjoyed all three books, but this was my favorite so far. The suspense is tight throughout almost the entire book. You get a possible explanation of what may have caused most of the world's population to die. The Zombies are more violent than ever, and the feeling of despair is at an all time high. Then the mood changes, there may be hope!
These books wouldn't be my first choice in the Zombie genre, but they are entertaining. The story does lure you into wanting to know how it all ends. I have read the first three in the series and plan to read all five books.