I am, admittedly, a fan of TWD. Having this novel set in another country, with all new characters, I doubted I would enjoy it as much as I have other installments. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself fully engaged by these characters and the human drama unfolding amidst the zombie apocalypse. Very fast, entertaining read.

What a great find! I had no idea these were being written! I love the tv show Walking Dead, I never got into the comics, but am enjoying the stories written in the zombie universe of the story! So, while I wait for the next season to start, I am enjoying it from a different perspective! Great story!

I've been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the novels set in The Walking Dead universe. Although this wasn't my favorite of the bunch, it definitely offered some exciting, fresh twists on the existing canon. Anyone who enjoys fast-paced zombie fiction will find much to like here. I didn't get a chance to read this one until after the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak started, which made the novel even more effective.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing an ARC. This review contains my honest, unbiased opinion.

The below 3.5 star review was posted to Every Day Should Be Tuesday on October 29, 2019 and Amazon and Goodreads on November 7, 2019:

I have long been a fan of the comics and watcher of the show, but I haven’t yet dived into any of The Walking Dead novels. But with an impending trip to China and a good experience with Chu’s Lives of Tao books, Typhoon was the perfect book to start with. Chu takes the action across the Pacific, telling a story set after the zombie apocalypse hit China. If you think walkers are bad, wait until there are 700 million of them.

Typhoon follows three characters six months after the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. Zhu is a villager who left for the city of Changsha and a good factory job. Elena is an American doing a gap year teaching English before law school who fell in love with Zhu and got trapped in China after things went to shit. Hengyen is a military man who runs their large settlement’s “wind teams” of scavengers. The settlement is in the Hunan province, in the interior of China. The heavily populated coast is for the dead.

The settlement and our three protagonists have achieved some measure of stability, but two discoveries will change everything. On a scavenging mission Zhu discovers that many of the residents of his former village still live, and on another mission Hengyen discovers a “typhoon” of “jiāngshī” sure to easily roll over the settlement. But he has his orders: defend the settlement at all costs and round up everyone living “illegally” outside of the settlement.

In true The Walking Dead fashion, things go wrong and get very dark. But, also like the comics, they end on a bittersweet note. Duty is a major theme.

The Chinese setting was a point of attraction, and Chu gives the stories its own quirks due to the setting. The zombie apocalypse caused remaining leadership to regress into stricter communism—the “Living Revolution” (hey, it still makes more sense than the Commonwealth caste system). A Taoist sect styled the Heaven Monks round up the dead for mysterious purposes. Like seemingly every settlement in The Walking Dead world, they have their own term for zombies—jiāngshī—which literally means “hopping vampire” and is the closest analog to zombie in Chinese folklore.

Chu also gives us plenty of innovative zombie kills—another The Walking Dead trademark—and settlement defense. I particularly appreciated the latter.

On the other hand, Chu’s characters seem unaware of basic rules of zombie canon. I lost track of how many times a character hit a walker somewhere, anywhere other than the head. The plot also at one point hinges on a character heaving the Idiot Ball with great strength.

Disclosure: I received a review copy of Typhoon via NetGalley.

Elena is an American teaching English in China during her gap year. She meets Zhu who left his country farm for a factory job in the city. They begin to fall in love.
She is trapped in China after the plague, there are an estimated one billion dead walkers, known as jiangshi.
Across the country groups of survivors band together and form settlements, trying to stay safe among the cannibalistic zombies.
Zhu and Elena are part of the Beacon of Light encampment. They are in a group called a Wind Team, that goes out and scavenges food and needed supplies. During one of their forages, Zhu discovers a colony of survivors from his home farming village, hiding near a deserted rice paddy.
He is pulled in different directions, loving Elena, wanting to be with his villagers, and his obligations to the Beacon.
In the meantime, a typhoon of walkers is headed right for the Beacon of Light . Will they be able to live through the onslaught?
This was my first book by Wesley Chu and it was amazing!
I am a big fan of The Walking Dead television series and this story exceeded my expectations.
Packed with action , excitement and adventure. Filled with interesting characters that I cared about, or loved to hate!
Thank you to Gallery Books for the e-ARC via NetGalley.

For those who think the Walking Dead show has become a bit stale, Typhoon is set in the same world with the same rules, but in China. Well-written and engaging, Typhoon sets up many of the same issues that the show does. How do you survive in this world? What will you allow yourself to become?

Chinese zombie apocalypse
We all know The Walking Dead here in America, we've seen the total destruction and hoards. Well now imagine China with nearly 1.4 billion zombie ready bodies all crammed in a small location. Imagine the size of the hoards, it would be like a typhoon hitting the living.. It is frightening on a whole new scale. The characters are a mix of people from China and from America, civilians, military and other. People stuck in the country after the zombies spread, and the government mislead them. There is a touch of political drama, that fits nicely into the story unfolding and makes it very believable. The characters are relatable, easy to cheer on or wish a slow death. The action was intense at times, making it hard to put the book down and get some sleep. I loved it. I'd really love to see a new series from this book, let's get out of America and see how some of the rest of the world is handling things.
Bravo Wesley Chu.

I received a copy of this from the publisher for an honest review

In fiction, the apocalypse is typically a local affair, the global impact notwithstanding. In the early days, survivors might catch panicked broadcasts from places farther than a day’s walk, but once the lights go out, the world shrinks not only to matters of survival, but to a few square miles. It makes sense, then, that almost all the comics and novels in The Walking Dead universe have taken place in in a tight geography in and around the states of Virginia and Georgia. (The only exception, until now, was an obscure digital one-shot by Saga‘s Brian K. Vaughan set in Barcelona, though it does relate back to people we know in the comics.)

This also helps explain why the mere premise of The Walking Dead: Typhoon is so captivating: it’s a narrative of the zombie apocalypse set on the other side of the world, far removed from the locations and people we’ve become familiar with; author Wesley Chu (The Lives of Tao, The Red Scrolls of Magic) tells both the tight, personal stories of three closely connected characters, and the larger story of the Hunan province of China in the first year of the rise of the dead.

The recently ended comics run of The Walking Dead follows a single protagonist, Rick Grimes, in his life after the dead rose. As a small-town sheriff in the South, he embodies certain American values. His successes and failures often tie back to his expectations of those around him, and they of him; the personal is cultural. Very few of Rick’s strategies are going to translate to the Hunan province: though the basic mechanics of the undead remain the same, everything from the physical landscape to the larger governmental response is profoundly different.

Chu’s take on the franchise primarily follows three people: Elena, an American who was teaching English in China before the zombie plague broke out; her boyfriend Zhu, a young man who left his sleepy rural town for the lure of better wages in China’s factory boomtowns; and Hengyen, a grizzled military man with an unshakable faith in his people’s ability to persevere. Elena, Zhu, and gentle giant of a man called Bo make up a “windrunner” team: one of many small groups scavenging for supplies in a larger and larger radius around Beacon. Hengyen is the leader of the wind teams, working under the direction of Secretary Guo, the acting provincial governor.

Along with several thousand others, this trio lives within a walled haven from the dead called Beacon of Light. Though the rhetoric has reverted to more Revolution era terminology—they are now fighting the “Living Revolution” against the dead—Beacon is run by the vestiges of China’s great bureaucracy. Unlike the world Rick inhabits, where it seems as though government and military systems collapsed early on, there’s a certain continuity of government in the Hunan province six months after the dead rose. There are other people scratching out a living outside of Beacon—people referred to as “vultures” for failing to contribute to the Living Revolution: several sects of the Heaven Monks, who cleanse the dead with fire, some farming families; and the usual rumors of cannibals and bandits.

Another group we learn of is made up of the remnants of Zhu’s hometown, located several days’ walk from Beacon. Early in the novel, Zhu leads a scavenging team there and, after getting separated from Elena and Bo, discovers it’s home to a community of villagers protected from the dead by the natural geography of a mountain gorge. This presents him with a dilemma: to inform the government of Beacon of the existence of people and supplies that Beacon so desperately needs, or to help the villagers escape to the national park of the Precipitous Pillars once the rainy season begins and their sanctuary is deluged. Zhu keeps his discovery a secret from his best friend and girlfriend, an omission that comes to bite him later, almost literally.

The differences in terminology between this novel and the American-set main series make for an interesting examination of the cultural differences. Notably, the characters of the TV series and comics never use the word zombie; though Rick refers to them primarily as walkers, other groups prefer different names. The people of Beacon refer to them as jiangshi, a character from folklore who preys upon chi, or a person’s life energy. Rick’s people refer to large groups as herds; the people of Beacon think of them as storms. Indeed, the typhoon of the title refers to a group of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of zombies pouring out of the city of Changde—roughly twice the size of the Atlanta metro—on a collision course with Beacon. As the world’s most populous country, China would naturally be the most populated with the walking dead, its megacities emptying out into the countryside in a morbid reversal of the current migration from rural economy to factory cities.

The coming storm throws the city of Beacon, and therefore our characters, into crisis. Once they learn of the threat of the typhoon, military leader Hengyen and civilian authority Guo come into conflict about whether to retreat or hold the line. Zhu must decide where his loyalties lie: with love or with country, home or hometown. Elena must decide how far she’s willing to go for the slimmest chance of returning to Texas. The motivations and connections of dozens of other people intersect, intrude, and otherwise influence our principles; this is a complicated, living community. Survival is every bit as messy as dying at the teeth and nails of the jiangshi.

Though primarily known for his science fiction, Chu pivots to horror seemingly effortlessly. Like comedy, horror is largely about timing, and Chu’s fast-paced set pieces hit beat after beat of escalating terror. The Walking Dead: Typhoon captures a vivid sense of place, both culturally and physically. It tells the story of a province—of a country—while never losing sight of the people who anchor the narrative.

I hope there will be other forays into the larger world of The Walking Dead, and I hope they are all this well considered.

The Walking Dead: Typhoon is available now.

Great addition to the Walking Dead universe. Fantastically creepy and engaging characters. I received this book from NetGalley for an honest review.

I just finished this book and feel a great need to get these words down… What a freaking ride! A definite cut above so many of the zombie books I’ve read… The first half builds a selection of first-rate characters and the final act is a tremendous blender of blades, zombies, and hell on Earth.

Post zombie-plague China is a place of one billion undead… Little protective settlements have found their place on the landscape with several attached to the official government, but there are outliers or vulture groups that are tucked away in hidden valleys and have made defenses of their own. In the countryside, these settlements are manageable with the numbers of jiangshi (zombies), but from the east in the direction of the giant metropolises comes a horde hundreds of thousands strong.

The Beacon of Light is such a government encampment… its leaders preach an unconditional allegiance to the Living Revolution and their Mao-inspired morning chants. Built on the ground of an old army base and managed by strong-armed Secretary Guo, the Beacon hopes to survive with a system of resource-searching wind teams and its strong defenses. But many know that these defenses will be no match for the coming horde. How will a group of just 3,000 protect themselves?

The story is told through two main points of view. Zhu is in charge of one of the dozens of wind teams that go out to find supplies among the jiangshi. He is a very resourceful young man whose strong loyalty to his friends is helping him deal with the loss of his family. His crew consists of his girlfriend, Elena, and the jovial muscle, Bo. Elena is an America who was on a gap year in China and was stuck when the outbreak occurred. Bo is a big guy from a rural farming village who knows well how to swing a sledgehammer at a zombie’s noggin. They spend their days foraging for resources they can trade for goods inside the Beacon.

The other point of view is that of Windmaster Hengyen. He is both the leader of an elite wind team and the commander of all the collective teams. He develops the plans to send the crews out to the most strategic locations for foraging. He also spends a lot of time trying in vain to talk some sense into the Secretary whose lofty ideals don’t exactly match with the practical solutions of the zombie apocalypse. Chu makes a great decision in choosing these two narrators as they have vastly different motivations and allegiances within the Beacon.

The best thing about this book is that it isn’t just a ‘run and gun.’ With themes ranging from totalitarian rule to desperate familial love, Chu adds much depth to Typhoon’s action-packed pages.

And I have to add: I’ve only watched the first season or so of The Walking Dead, and I don’t think it’s necessary to even be that familiar with the franchise to enjoy this book. If you know that the plague turns people into undead crazies who bite and transmit said plague, then you will be fine!

Chu’s pacing never lets up and his worldbuilding creates an awesome tension throughout… sharpen your machete, grab your arrows, and read this book!

4.5 out of 5 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley, Skybound Books, and the author for an advanced copy for review.