2025
With cover art by Alex Eckman-Lawn, whose darkly playful, wondrously unsettling collage work also graces my own book of macabre art, I was predisposed to love One Yellow Eye before I even read the first page. Eckman-Lawn’s work has this quality of being simultaneously horrifying and oddly comforting, like a postcard from the void that shows up just when you need it most, with your own skull peeking out to say hello. Turns out the cover is a perfect match for what’s inside: a heartbreaking, obsessive love story dressed up in zombie apocalypse trappings.
British scientist Kesta Shelley has always been more comfortable peering through microscopes than navigating human relationships, until she met Tim – her cheerleader, her best friend, her absolute everything. When a devastating virus sweeps through London in its final days, Tim becomes one of the last infected. While the government rounds up and destroys all the zombies, Kesta manages to keep her husband hidden and sedated in their spare bedroom, handcuffed to the radiator, pumped full of drugs while she desperately searches for a cure. Kesta is reckless, selfish, making spectacularly dangerous decisions that put everyone around her at risk. She treats her colleagues and best friend like shit, using them as means to an end. And somehow Radford made it all believable, and empathetic and human to me.
I loved Kesta’s devotion to Tim, to science, to her singular, self-sacrificial quest. Yes, she’s infuriating and arguably torturing Tim by keeping him alive in this state. Yes, the science might be questionable (or maybe meticulously researched, I genuinely don’t know), and the security around this supposed top-secret government lab is laughably lax. But watching her mark anniversaries and birthdays with Tim’s yellow eyes staring listlessly back at her, telling him stories from their past while he’s chained up and barely conscious, it’s devastating. I could have read a book twice as long. The daily routines with Tim, the dense technical details about virus origins and research, Kesta’s completely neglected self-care, her interactions with lab mates, the way she keeps blowing off Jess, all of it fascinated me. The repetition that some readers found tedious worked for me because that’s what obsession looks like. It adds realism to Kesta’s desperation, making the science feel grounded even when her choices spiral into absolute madness.
I wish we’d gotten more of Tim when he was actually Tim, more concrete reasons to understand what made their relationship so special, beyond people telling us it was. Some plot threads (what happened to that journalist storyline?) just disappear. But none of that bothered me. The ending raises haunting questions about choice and agency: what does the virus want versus what’s left of the person trapped inside it? Can you separate the two? This is less about zombie survival logistics and more about grief warping someone beyond recognition, about how far you’d go to save the person you love most, even when “saving” might be the cruelest thing you could do to them.
Looking for more 31 Days of Horror? Day Nineteen 2024 | Day Nineteen 2023 | Day Nineteen 2022 | Or check my 31 Days of Horror category for more!
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