The Daylight Cycle Continues

With a dwindling food supply, a lawless gang, and the encroaching dead threatening their existence, Dakota Travis and his best friend realize they may no longer be safe in their abandoned apartment building. They flee into the wasteland that was once South Dakota to find safety. There, they encounter the last remnants of the United States military and take shelter within a converted asylum. But their safety is anything but guaranteed. Now, surrounded by the undead, tensions run high between these two friends and the soldiers. Food is in short supply, and shelter may only be temporary. The commanding officer is quickly succumbing to insanity, while his right-hand men rule indiscriminately with iron fists. And once Corporal Jamie Marks begins to make advances, Dakota realizes the undead may be the least of his worries, especially amongst men who already hate him.

SUNRISE by Kody Boye is the second book in The Daylight Cycle series. At the end of the first book, Rose crosses paths with a new group of survivors in Idaho. Sunrise is essentially the backstory of how the new group formed, the challenges and discoveries of their multi-state journey and how Rose eventually joins them. The second book also includes the introduction of what may be a second transformative virus, as well as a new player in the field of zombies and men.

Dakota is a young gay man realizing some people are still close-minded and hate-filled, even with the undead hunting all of them. The author does a great job showing how prejudice and bigotry can be more of threat to survival than any virus or supply shortage. The dynamics between the characters is extremely well-developed. Once again, Boye shows his skill at portraying the intensity and pain of the trauma each survivor carries within them, from both the outbreak and their personal histories.

These characters are not the perfectly adept characters one might usually find in an apocalypse series. These are some very damaged individuals trying desperately to function as a cohesive group, hoping to eventually call themselves a family. Their attitudes and inner reflections are some of the most realistic and poignant portrayal of apocalypse survivors I've ever read.

Having lived in South Dakota for a number of years, I cringed a little at some of the details provided by the author, but the novel is too good for me to drag the author over a few liberties taken with the SD references.

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I don't normally care what other reviewers have to say about a story, but I've read some homophobic comments from others which are misleading and one that is absolute BS. Let's get the BS out of the way: stories with a man and woman falling in love don't come with warnings (except maybe for sexual content), so I don't see why an author has to warn readers about two gay characters falling in love. THERE ARE NO SEX SCENES. The only intimacy between characters are when any of them reveal their feelings for one of the other survivors, whether it's a civilian crushing on a soldier, a gang-banger wondering if he's worthy of a second chance, a father mourning the loss of a child or a friend worried sick about another friend.

As for the accusations of this being "gay propaganda" -- NEWSFLASH: gay people exist in the world and they are just as likely to become survivors in a zombie apocalypse as anyone else. I can't help but wonder if some of the readers bashing this storyline bothered to read the first book in the series. The Daylight Cycle is not so much about zombies as people from different walks of life attempting to put aside their differences in order to increase their chances of surviving as a species.

Honestly, if you need your characters to be the same cookie-cutter "safe" types to avoid offending your ideas about what is appropriate, you probably shouldn't be reading horror fiction.

As always,
AstraDaemon