Bad Taste in Boys by Carrie Harris

Kate is more than ready to move beyond her high school experience and go off to college to pursue medicine. She's got everything prepared in order to look the best she can to the college recruiters. This means that she's also staying on top of her extracurriculars, like volunteering lab time with the science teacher and unfortunately helping out with the losing football team. Kate stumbles on evidence that the football coach is giving the team steroids, but it has horrifying side effects. Side effects that look very similar to what you think a zombie would be like. Now people are dying and Kate is worried that those closest to her could be infected: her brother, her best friend, and her secret crush Aaron.

This isn't going to be a long review, because the book itself isn't long. It's super fast-paced and only 208 pages. I think it took me a grand total of two hours to read this. There's not a lot of in depth descriptions of thoughts or evaluation of emotions. Obviously more plot-driven.

I think that it's a longstanding fact that I don't like horror. Zombie especially freak me out. I mean seriously, that shit could happen. So this book was kind of perfect for me. Most of the horror was  from the ambient tension of where the boys were being infected from and having to be covert about where Kate was looking for information rather than from the zombies themselves. Not that the zombies weren't scary, Carrie Harris did a great job describing the effects of the drugs. I especially liked the scene where one boy pukes up black and then seems to die. Well done, creepy without making me put the book down.

This is a series, and the sequel is called Bad Hair Day and involves werewolves. I'll be reading it, mostly because I think this is fun mind-candy. Fast read, without a lot of emotional commitment. Nice.