Chapter by Chapter

The premise for Silver by author Chris Wooding was mysterious and had me interested in finding out where the novel was headed. I was expecting some sort of generic dystopic novel and was surprised to find that Silver is not your everyday outbreak story. It freaked me out. Terrified me at times and was pretty freaking addictive for a book about a zombie/cyborg virus outbreak.

Silver is set at a boarding school in the United Kingdom where five different students are all about to face their greatest fears. After being bitten by a metallic bug a student falls under the effects of an unknown illness, only hours after that does he fall into a rabid state. It doesn’t take long for multiple students to succumb to the infection, becoming robot-like zombies, tearing the flesh of their fellow classmates with their teeth. Spreading their disease.

For teens Paul, Caitlyn, Erika, Adam and Mark this is the start of their own personal hell. Trapped at Mortingham Boarding Academy the students must now find a way to safety without becoming a part of the growing horde that wants nothing more than to kill them or make them join their numbers. Trapping themselves in a building with seemingly no way out the group finds that the world outside may be terrifying but that they should be more afraid not of what’s outside but of what must come next.

I loved the way that Silver started (with two of the characters getting in a fist fight). And within the first hundred pages I was already hooked I had expected it to be a pretty tame horror novel but boy was I wrong. It’s a thrilling, graphically detailed story that kept me on the edge of my seat. It reminded me of The Walking Dead and definitely kept me interested. This is a zombie novel with a twist, not making us see the mindless undead but instead mechanized humans who have been forced to merge with technology. Silver is innovative with an insanely consistent pace.

Apart from that, Silver is also very well written. The way that the novel plays out, I found, made it easier to envision it inside your head while reading. The descriptions are perfect, the way the characters react to the situation was pretty the situation was pretty realistic and pretty intense. They obviously wanted to survive and their actions showed that accurately. I do think that there were certain characters I favored more than others (Caitlyn and Paul for the most part) who I felt were just more three dimensional than the others.

My only real problem with the novel would have to be the ending. In comparison to the rest of Silver which was pretty realistic, innovative and pretty freaking crazy and intense—I expected something more dramatic and climatic than what was given to me as a reader. I felt a bit let down and suspect that there will be a sequel based on that ending. Am I interested in a sequel? Oh yeah. Will I read it? Oh yeah because I need to know why this virus exists and what’s going to happen to the remaining characters.

I would recommend Silver to readers who are fans of the horror/thriller genre, readers who are fans of AMC’s The Walking Dead and want a sci-fi spin on it, and finally to any readers who just want a heart pounding novel that will leave you turning pages. Definitely one of the scariest novels that I’ve read this year.