The Reading Bud

Book Details:

Author: Nzondi 
Release Date: February 17, 2026
Series:
Genre: Horror, Zombie Horror, African-American Horror
Format: E-book 
Pages: 312 pages
Publisher: Stark Publishing
Blurb:
Love survived death—now it has to survive the apocalypse.
On the second anniversary of her boyfriend’s death, Cozy Coleman, a rising star in a world where necromancy is mainstream, boards DeathCon, a horror-themed convention cruise where she and her two best friends—the Scream Teens—are hired as headline necro-tainment.
When a brutal she-wolf attack kills Cozy, she awakens reanimated, caught between life and something far darker.

Review

DeathCon by Nzondi is a loud, bloody, witty, and highly energetic zombie horror novel that begins on a horror-themed cruise and quickly explodes into a full-scale undead crisis involving necromancy, military secrets, bio-terrorism, ancient spiritual dimensions, and one very sharp-tongued heroine. The story follows Cozimel “Cozy” Coleman, an eighteen-year-old Black necromancer living in Honolulu, who works with her friends Jess and Squiggy as part of the Scream Teens, raising the dead for grieving families, legal matters, and ceremonial farewells.

The novel’s first major strength is Cozy herself. She is funny, impulsive, mouthy, vulnerable, grieving, brave, and gloriously imperfect. Her voice gives the book its distinctive rhythm: pop-culture references, horror-geek humour, teenage bravado, emotional pain, and sudden bursts of tenderness all collide in the same breath. Beneath the jokes and swagger, Cozy is carrying real grief over Randy, complicated abandonment wounds around her parents, and a deep fear of death that makes her profession as a necromancer especially fascinating.

The setting of DeathCon aboard the Sea Queen is one of the book’s most entertaining choices. A zombie-themed cosplay cruise is already a brilliant horror playground, but author Nzondi uses it well: fake fog, costumed partygoers, staged scares, corpse-raising rituals, music, themed bars, and actual undead violence blur together until neither Cozy nor the reader can easily separate performance from catastrophe. The early scenes are especially strong because the book understands the fun of horror fandom before turning that fun into panic.

As the story expands beyond the ship, DeathCon becomes more than a zombie survival novel. The Vago virus, the idea of “Zombies of Mass Destruction,” the secret laboratory, Colonel Blake, Randy’s return, NAD, and Cozy’s strange connection to death and Trinus Annu give the book a larger speculative and mythological framework. The novel is at its most intriguing when it blends African spiritual language, necromancy, military science, and apocalyptic bio-horror into one chaotic but original mythology.

That said, the book is not subtle. The prose is fast, slang-heavy, reference-packed, and sometimes overwhelming. The pacing rarely pauses, and some readers may find the tonal shifts, from comedy to gore, from teen banter to grief, from zombie attack to metaphysical vision, a lot to absorb. Cozy’s narration is intentionally hyperactive, which gives the book personality but can also make some emotional beats feel crowded.

Still, the sheer force of the story is hard to resist. DeathCon is gruesome, funny, cinematic, and unexpectedly emotional. It works because Cozy is not just fighting zombies; she is confronting abandonment, love, death, identity, and the terrifying possibility that her gift may be tied to something much bigger than she understands.

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