The novel covers a period of time from the first zombie attacks to around fifteen years after the outbreak. It follows five central characters:
- Charlene Rutkowski, a Diener working in San Diego alongside assistant medical examiner Luis Acocella. When the outbreak begins, she finds herself in the path of the so-called “Patient Zero”.
- Greer Morgan, a teenage girl living at the Sunnybrook trailer park alongside her dad and younger brother. After the outbreak, she becomes romantically involved with a musician named Muse, and they travel the country together.
- Chuck “The Face” Corso, a news anchor known for his intense plastic surgery work. When the outbreak begins, he finds himself at the centre of the news cycle surrounding it.
- Karl Nishimura, a sailor aboard the USS Olympia. After the ship becomes overtaken by an insane chaplain during the outbreak, he becomes desperate to return to his husband and five children on the mainland.
- Etta Hoffmann, a disabled statistician who begins corralling and archiving stories from across the world after the outbreak.
The book contains the following tropes:
- Anyone Can Die: Luis Acocella, Nathan Baseman, Annie Teller, Jennifer Angelys Pagán, Karl Nishimura, Muse King, Richard Lindof, Greer Morgan, and many, many others die before the book’s end.
- Axes at School: Greer's younger brother Conan, after seeing the beginnings of the outbreak in the trailer park, brings his rifle to their high school and begins shooting former classmates and people who bullied him.
- Cannot Tell a Lie: Etta Hoffmann has a bad case of this throughout the novel, as does The Face in the second half.
- Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: Charlie becomes something of this to Hoffmann during the last act, rescuing her from the AMLD building, and becoming her Only Friend in Fort York.
- Comic-Book Time: Similar to Diary of the Dead, the book seems to be taking place in line with the rest of the films (See Happy Ending Override below.), yet sees the zombie outbreak taking place in the modern day.
- Continuity Nod: Hoffmann gets a call from a population specialist in year five who says that the ratio of zombies to humans is four hundred thousand to one, the same statistic given by Dr. Logan in Day of the Dead (1985), which according to the original script, took place five year after the apocalypse began.
- In the third year of the Apocalypse, Etta gets calls from Pennsylvania about Zombies attacking a high rise for the rich.
- The Darkness Gazes Back: After the zombified Chief is shot in the middle of Slowtown, the group sees hundreds of zombie eyes peering out from the darkness of buildings that they had once thought all but empty. They quickly decide to vacate the area.
- Deadline News: The WWN crew and Chuck Corso broadcast news and information about the outbreak for the first two weeks after the outbreak begins. It ends when a group of assholes invade the studio and lets the hordes in, leading to most of their deaths and the producer being Driven to Suicide on camera.
- Decoy Protagonist: Both Luis Acocella and Nathan Baseman seem to be set up as the main protagonists of their particular storylines, but they both die at the end of them, leaving Charlie and The Face to take over.
- The Determinator: Annie Teller’s zombie of all things becomes this. Even a decade after the outbreak, with it’s legs replaced by metal and the rest of her body covered in spikes, she keeps going west, driven by the vague memory of the La Brea Tar Pits where the living Annie Teller was meant to meet with her lover, Tawna Maydew. In the final chapter, she makes it.
- Driven to Suicide: Nathan Baseman does this after zombies invade the newsroom. Before Charlie rescues her, Hoffmann is almost a driven to this after eleven years of being alone in the AMLD building.
- Facial Horror: At the end of the first act, Chuck comes face to face with a zombified Annie Teller, who scratches his face up so badly with glass shards that he becomes essentially unrecognizable. In the last part of the novel, he is referred to exclusively as “The Face”, and refuses to admit anything about his past life.
- Gang Up on the Human: Upon studying the behavior of zombified animals and noticing that they only attack humans and not other living animals, Etta Hoffmann concludes that the zombie plague is not cannibalistic, but actively anti-human.
- Happy Ending Override: A throwaway line implies this for the survivors of Day of the Dead (1985).You were a group of friends named Sarah and John and Bill, dead on a deserted tropical island, even in victory wondering how you might have saved others.
- Hope Spot: After Charlie becomes the first person to survive a zombie bite, it seems for a brief moment they will be able to calm the crowds and get everything back in order. Unfortunately, it is already too late to stop Lindof’s mob.
- Raising the Steaks: During what Hoffmann dubs “Year Fucking Six” of the outbreak, various animals including chimps, rats, dogs, chickens, and even dolphins begin reanimating as well.
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Refitted for Sequel: Zombie Rats, who become a minor threat in the final part of the book, were first conceived of for a deleted scene in Land of the Dead. - Riddle for the Ages: What exactly caused the zombie uprising, and why it stops in the end are never given an explanation.
- Self-Harm: After Father Bill accidentally views a confiscated porn magazine, he starts cutting himself with a pair of shears to control his newfound lust.
- Shared Universe: with the rest of George Romero's the Dead Series
- Shout-Out:
- There are many refferences to a lot of George Romero's work both within the Living Dead Series, as well as his other works.
- During 4th year of the Zombie Apocalypse, Etta hears numerous reports that range from a young man using the apocalypse to live out their vampiric delusions to Police officers burning civilians under the belief that the zombie plague is a Biological Agent.
- When Nishimura tries telling Greer the story of the Golem, she mishears it as "Gollum" and responds with “Tolkien, right? Skinny guy, wanted a ring.”.
