Come to Dust

MacLeod’s contemporary horror novel is competently written, but it never explores the greater ramifications of its premise. Mitch is barely scraping by as a barista after some time in prison when his sister abandons her daughter, Sophie, to his custody. The first time Mitch takes a night off to go out on a date, four-year-old Sophie is killed by an abusive babysitter, and he is plunged into despair—until Sophie wakes up again. Children all over the world suddenly start returning from the dead, but they’re little more than animate corpses, grey, rotting, and passive. Mitch is forced to defend Sophie from a millenarian cult who believe the reanimation has been caused by the devil. MacLeod (Stranded) capably handles the pathos of Sophie’s death and not-quite-life, but the novel devolves into a jumble of genre-standard action scenes, and the prose is shapeless and relies heavily on exposition. (June)