The Dead

The Dead is a novel for teenage readers by the English writer Charles Higson, published in 2010. It is the second book in the series that began with The Enemy.

The series is set in a London where a sickness has turned almost everyone past childhood into creatures driven to attack the young, so the survivors are children organised into small groups in the ruins of the city. This book follows a group travelling towards a supposed safe place, and the journey is where the danger is: the streets, the tunnels, the shops that have to be searched for food, and the other groups of children whose plans do not fit theirs. Higson writes the action from multiple viewpoints and describes the practical business of keeping a child alive in a city with no adults, from finding medicine to deciding who is worth following.

The series is built on the standard apparatus of the zombie story, but Higson keeps the setting recognisably London and names the institutions the characters knew before the outbreak.