Urban Gridlock

Chronicles of the Undead, Book 1

By: Jaime Hernandez

Narrated by: Eric A. Shelman

They were average people caught in a deadly time.

Lifelong best friends Max and Jesse are six stories high working a construction job, when the gates of Hell explode in downtown Cleveland. They bear witness to the furious beginning of the Zombie Apocalypse. Trapped in the middle of the city, the pair must fight their way back to the only thing that matters…their families. As the two struggle to make their way out of the city, their families must do whatever is necessary to survive. Max’s family is in a race against time to fortify their suburban castle against the coming storm, while Jesse’s family is forced to leave the comfort of their home to find a secure shelter.

With danger and horrors surrounding them, they must all find their way back to each other. In the fight to stay alive, who will live and who will die?

Follow the terrifying tale of these two families from one of the best-selling, award-winning authors of the Zombie Road Fan Fiction Collection.

©2021 Jaime Hernandez (P)2023 Jaime Hernandez

Easy to follow impossible to put down.

I loved this audiobook! The author developed her characters very well, they were likable and relatable. The story line was gripping and every thing I would expect out of a zombie book all in one book!
The narrator did very well also, his voice was easy to listen to and did not grate on my nerves whenever he did a different voice for a different character, it was very believable!

Classic Zombie Fun!

This is why I love zombie horror! Old school style with all the action you could want. The story is family driven and the characters are easy to like. I’ll be diving in to book two right away! That was a terror packed ride and I can’t recommend it enough! Don’t hesitate to get this book! It’s fantastic and Eric Shelman is a marvelous narrator! So good!

The BEST!!

Read the book, and it brought me back to the genre. Listened to the book, and it was incredible. Jamie, keep up the incredible writing and the story. The characters are top-notch as well as the writing.

Good zombie book series

I liked this zombie story and would recommend it to others who like the genre. it left me in anticipation each step of the journey. very detailed and descriptive of everything from zombie descriptions to the location.

I love the description of what was going on as the city was falling apart around them. the details, the emotions, the shock of it all.

though the story left me frustrated with a number of things though many would not care for a few of them. don't know if its supernatural or virus yet but people can turn in little as 3 seconds from a neck bite. the world fell to slow shambling corpses in less 24 hours left me in disbelief. many secene are easy to expect... the main thing that frustrated me was almost every zombie description 'they had bites up and down their arms' by the 30th time hearing it repeated... I did like the addition of fingers missing, limbs torn off, a barely attached head swinging around.

a good read/audio book but I probably won't listen to it more than once unlike other zombie books I've gone through.

Depends on what you're looking for

I'm going to address the performance before the story because that's quick. In the first 20% of the book, it seemed to me that the narrator didn't have the characters locked in. The pacing/pitch of each character just wasn't always hit solidly, and it bothered me. Two of the female characters sounded the same as well. I truly debated if I wanted to continue listening to the rest of the novel based on this. If you feel the same, just keep going. Shelman locks it all in about 20% of the way through and it is a very solid performance from then on. During the last half, I cannot remember a time when the performance drew attention to itself, which is the highest praise I can give a narrator.

As for the story, it really depends on what you are looking for. This is a great gorefest slice-of-life piece going from the first moments of zombies through about three days. There isn't time for characters to have an arc... it is just too quick. Hernandez introduces several characters and uses the story to really lock in their personalities and relationships, and we get to know the Chronicles of the Dead version of the zombie plague. We get to see what minor bites versus major gore does to the human and the effect that has on how they turn. We get to see a large range of zombies, and a lot of them hit in different ways--how they died, a wide range of ages, what they mean to the main characters, what they look like now, etc.

My only complaint about the story is I don't feel it fully resolves the plot... and I won't touch on that specifically because I'm not doing spoilers here. Just know that this story has more similarities in plot development to Safe Haven or Adrian's Undead Diary (which are both series that I love, even though their first books don't fully resolve) than it does to the books in Cascadia or City series (more books I love). Unlike Safe Haven or Adrian's Undead Diary, Urban Gridlock has a large cast with tight-knit families that rival Flemings novels.

So, in summary: big cast, tight-knit family units, short time span, lots of gore, and a nice take on the severity of zombie bites and how that affects the change.