Ben Friedhof

I've been reading zombie novels, watching zombie movies, and playing zombie games for as long as I can remember. At some point I realized: in the German-speaking world, there were almost no atmospheric, seriously written zombie novels.

Not pulp. Not parody. Not the hundredth retelling of an American outbreak in an American suburb with American guns. I wanted to read a zombie story set in a world I recognized — German cities, German infrastructure, German bureaucracy trying to contain something it wasn't built for. A story where the characters feel like people you know, where the tension comes not from jump scares but from slowly watching everything you took for granted disappear.

So I wrote one.

"What would happen if it started here?"

LYRV-27 started with that question. Not in New York. Not in London. In Cologne — a city of a million people, a university town, a place where people ride bikes and argue about recycling and watch the evening news. What happens when that world breaks?

The answer became three books (so far), over 4,000 readers in Germany, more than 1,400 reviews on Amazon.de, and a #1 ranking in Amazon.de's zombie category. I self-publish everything independently — no publisher, no agent, just me and the story.

Now, the series is available in English for the first time. If you're tired of the same American zombie template and want to experience the apocalypse from the streets of a European city — in first person, in real time — LYRV-27 is for you.

— Ben Friedhof