Zombie stories have been a staple of horror fiction for quite some time, the undead creatures have shambled into the wider consciousness so it isn’t easy to put a new spin on the zombie tale. Debut novelist Leigh Radford may have found something unique, though.
How far would you go to save your marriage? For British scientist Kesta Shelley, there is no limit.
Having always preferred the company of microbes, Kesta has spent her life looking down the barrel of a microscope rather than cultivating personal relationships. But that changed when Kesta met Tim—her cheerleader, her best friend, her absolute everything. So, when he was one of the last people in London to be infected with a perplexing virus that left the city ravaged, Kesta went into triage mode.
Though the government has rounded up and disposed of all the infected, Kesta is able to keep her husband (un)alive—and hidden—with resources from the hospital where she works. She spends her days reviewing biopsy slides and her evenings caring for him, but he’s clearly declining. The sedatives aren’t working like they used to, and his violent outbursts are becoming more frequent. As Kesta races against the clock, her colleagues start noticing changes in her behavior and appearance. She is withering away, self-medicating with alcohol, and has stopped attending her mandated ZARG (Zombie Apocalypse Recovery Group) meetings. Her care for Tim has spiraled into absolute obsession.
There are whispers of a top-secret lab working on a cure, and Kesta clings to the possibility of being recruited like a lifeline. But can she save her husband before he is discovered? Or worse…will they trigger another outbreak?
Like a lot of horror, One Yellow Eye is a story that unfolds as one person’s difficulty in dealing with grief, the loss of a loved one. You could make the argument that the protagonist Kesta is in denial about the death of her husband. She is a scientist and she thinks she can “cure” him of his zombie affliction. All the people who caught the contagious virus and became zombies were rounded up and dealt with. Except maybe Kesta’s husband, Tim. Somewhat reminiscent of young Karen in the basement of Night of the Living Dead, Kesta keeps Tim chained up and secluded in her home. This gives Kesta extra drive to become a member of “Project Dawn,” to learn how the virus started and a cure or prevent it from happening again.
Radford has some interesting things going for this story, the science element si intriguing and helps to bring additional layers of tension. Kesta is under stress from her job, stress from her friends because she’s hiding her undead husband, and stressed because she is burying her grief through denial and focusing on a cure. It is because Kesta has such first hand knowledge of how the undead function (he husband Tim), that she is able to use that knowledge to get ahead of her peers and the scientific bureaucracy just a little bit.
Having set the story after the zombies have flourished and been rounded up, it sets up with some strong resonance with the aftermath of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Sure, the virus has largely been contained, but it the plague could all to easily reemerge.
It is very heartbreaking to follow Kesta’s story, her grief is palpable. Another layer Radford adds to separate her zombies is that they retain part of their humanity and their memories; their identity. This makes the grief even more difficult for Kesta to process because these zombies seem not even mostly dead. In other words, this particular zombie gives the surviving members of the undead’s family false hope.
Which is why some of the steps Kesta takes to try and save her husband are understandable. But from an ethical and scientific perspective, going through with those steps beyond just thinking them is the real problem. She essentially embodies the idea of maintaining a big lie grows more difficult the longer the lie is told. Her grief drives her scientific, reasoning mind to places that reason is not present. As she continued to hold to the deception, my empathy for Kesta started to slip away. Unfortunately, the tension and pacing unraveled a little bit as well. Radford brought the novel to a pretty good conclusion, though.
One Yellow Eye is an interesting take on the zombie novel. Science isn’t always at the forefront of zombie fiction (the high-water mark in that regard for me is Mira Grant’s Newsflesh saga), and Radford’s novel stands out because of that element, that element is what will draw readers to the novel. Kesta’s empathetic grief will keep readers along for the ride; grief isn’t always associated with zombie stories, either.
Hardcover | Gallery Books | July 2025
https://www.leighradfordauthor.com/
https://reactormag.com/excerpts-one-yellow-eye-by-leigh-radford/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Gallery Books
© 2025 Rob H. Bedford
