The third book in The Enemy series by Charlie Higson, named The Fear, is an exciting tale that picks up with DogNut and the gang at the Tower of London. However, it’s only for a chapter. DogNut is dead-set on getting back to Brooke and embarks on an exploration mission of London in order to find her. He takes with him Felix, Finn, Courtney, Marco and a little girl called Olivia. They soon meet up with new kids though, first with the kids living in Westminster, who are trying to get some sort of civilization sorted by enforcing rules and voting and so on. Then with the squatter kids, who creates havoc wherever they go. Of course, they get into a few shambles here and there and end up meeting the hunters, a group of mercenaries that helps out the small settlements for payment. By the time they reach David and his gang of kids, holed up in Buckingham Palace, they realise how differently certain things work from settlement to settlement, but how everyone is also the same. Everyone has a leader, essentially they try to grow food, they try to survive, they try… but they are still just kids.
We also follow the story of Shadowman, a strange character that keeps himself to himself, but he follows St George and his army of grown-up, diseased crusaders.
Another intriguing, yet disgusting, character is the Collector. A grown-up that’s pretty smart, but he collects everything, including kids.
That’s not all; we also learn more about the group of kids that holed up in the Museum of Natural History. We meet up with Justin and Wiki and Jibber-jabber. The group of nerds from The Dead. They want a cure and they have a pretty nice set-up with a lot of kids living with them. Unfortunately with all their resources going into keeping the laboratory working, security isn’t as great.
Eventually the story leads into The Enemy’s plotline as Brooke meet up with Blue and Maxie in Buckingham Palace.
The Fear is an exciting tale, filled with twists and turns and gore. It also shows the remarkable way that kids are able to cope through something as horrendous as a world without adults. Now, I don’t know a lot about child psychology, but I do know that if something like this was to happen that the kids would survive one way or another, and I think that Higson has tapped into that splendid need for survival and brought it to live in this series.
This book, like the previous ones, is a bit gory and yucky, but it’s a great zombie series that is definitely worth a read.
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It was hard for me to finish this one. ( )

I loathe the relentless fat-shaming, and the gratuitous sexism, and the shallow characterization, but as adventure stories I just can't stop reading them.

Library copy ( )

In London, after a worldwide sickness infects adults, turning them into zombie-like creatures, DogNut and his crew embark on a deadly mission to find missing friends, as hungry, bloodthirsty grownups lie in wait.

Going down like popcorn these are. Easy to read and a good fun zombie book. ( )