Year of the Zombie (Rich Hawkins) Books in Order

The Plague Winter is Rich Hawkins's entry in the wider Year of the Zombie project, and it works well even if you know nothing about the larger line. Rather than going broad and cinematic, Hawkins keeps this one close, cold, and intimate. The story follows a grandfather trying to keep himself and his young grandson alive through a brutal winter after the dead start walking and the last scraps of normal life have already burned away.

It is a winter story in every sense.

The weather is not just background. The cold presses on every decision, from where to shelter to how long food might last to whether leaving cover is worth the risk. That makes the danger feel two-sided. The undead are out there, but so are hunger, exposure, exhaustion, and the slow panic that comes from knowing tomorrow could be even worse. Hawkins has always been good at writing survival as a physical grind, and this novella strips that idea down to its bare essentials.

The relationship at the center gives the book its shape. This is not a squad story or a big cast story. It is about an older man trying to stay steady for a child when there is very little left to be steady with. That changes the tone in useful ways. There is still dread, blood, and pressure, but there is also a quiet sense of duty running through the whole piece. Every risk matters more because someone vulnerable is depending on the person taking it.

That smaller scale also helps the setting. Instead of grand explanations or military panoramas, Hawkins shows a world that has narrowed to houses, hiding places, supply runs, and the next bad sound in the dark. The outbreak feels huge precisely because the characters have so little power over it. They are not going to solve the crisis. They are only trying to get through another day without being found, starved, or frozen out.

It is simple in the best way.

If you are coming to this page expecting a huge franchise arc, that is not really what Hawkins does here. The Plague Winter is better read as a tight, emotionally hard survival novella inside a shared zombie framework. It has the hopeless weather, the shrinking resources, and the constant threat you would want from winter horror, but it also has a family bond strong enough to keep the story from becoming just another exercise in misery. For readers who like intimate apocalypse fiction, this is one of Hawkins's clearest examples of how much tension he can build from a small cast, a bad season, and almost no room for error.