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Max Brallier's The Last Kids on Earth and the Zombie Parade is a monster-apocalypse comedy for 9 year olds in which the zombies start mysteriously vanishing.
Jack Sullivan is thirteen and the Monster Apocalypse hit his town this past summer. He lives in a tree house with his best friend Quint, and with June and Dirk they make a pretty good monster-fighting crew. There's also Rover, Jack's enormous monster dog.
It opens with the four of them running flat out through a shopping mall. Why? They're on two very important quests. One is a vegetable garden (Dirk wants tomatoes for pizza). The other is a bestiary, which Quint explains is a fancy word for a monster notebook.
Unfortunately the mall is home to the Wormungulous, a worm monster the size of a train.
Things get properly scary for a moment. Jack's friends end up buried under the rubble of a department store. But help comes from somewhere very unexpected. A huge monster who smells of cheap aftershave digs them out.
His name's Thrull. He's hurt his leg saving them, so they help him hobble home. It's Joe's Pizza, the old middle-school hangout, now full of tentacled, furry monsters arm-wrestling and eating whole pizzas in one bite! Jack and Quint were never cool enough to be invited there before the apocalypse, which is a lovely joke.
So where have all the zombies gone? And what's that strange shrieking noise in the night? Jack has a very bad feeling about it.
Reading it feels like listening to your funniest friend telling you about the worst day ever. Jack's voice is super cheeky, full of snack breaks and video-game jokes. There are sound effects everywhere, KA-BAM and SLAP SLAP SLAP.
Underneath the jokes there's something quite sweet too. Jack is an orphan who spent years wanting a family, and now he's got one he's terrified of losing them. His late-night chat with Quint on the tree-house deck is a genuinely lovely scene.
It's gross in places (there's a flattened eyeball stuck inside a monster book). If your reader is fine with zombies and slime, they'll probably race through it.
It carries on from the first book, so if you're starting fresh it's worth going back to the first Last Kids on Earth book. That's where Jack is holed up in his tree house, working out how to survive, and where the crew first comes together.
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