text: City of the Dead can't really be called a zombie story.  It's really a cheesy action novel that just happens to have beings called zombies in it.  The zombie aren't really undead like in the Romero movies, but are corpses possessed by demons.  
  
  I really didn't find any part of the novel scary and it doesn't seem like the author was trying to make it scary.  He seemed to take the route so many Hollywood scary flicks take and just tried to gross out his readers through descriptions of the decayed bodies of the demons.  
  
  The action is clunky and not very exciting.  His hero's are constantly stopping to argue about things like how Jim's ex-wife raised their son while being hotly pursued by hundreds of demons.  There are too many parts that require suspension of disbelief: a military Humvee could never catch an Explorer SUV, the hero's escape a fire by climbing across a ladder to the neighbor's house with the demons somehow not noticing, they're being chased by dozen's of demon vehicles on the road but second's later after crashing they have somehow lost them.  And I have to ask why Keene included the descriptions of Necrophilia in the novel.  
  
  In the end City of the Dead reads more like a cheesy Schwarzenegger/Stallone/Norris movie than a horror novel
  