Zombie Books in Order

Madeleine Roux's zombie books start with a smart, grim little hook: what if the apocalypse was happening, and somebody still had a laptop open? Allison Hewitt Is Trapped begins in a bookstore, where Allison and several coworkers find themselves stuck as the outbreak spreads. Instead of giving the story a distant, polished voice, Roux builds it around Allison's blog posts and online updates, which makes the danger feel immediate, messy, and a little absurd in the best way.

It is a zombie story with browser tabs still open.

That format changes the tone. Allison is trying to survive, yes, but she is also narrating in real time, hoping to reach other people and especially hoping to reconnect with her mother. The result is a book that understands panic and blood and barricades, but also understands customer-service exhaustion, group tension, and the weird stubbornness of everyday habits. The zombies matter. So do the people trapped together long enough to become one another's problem.

The second book, Sadie Walker Is Stranded, shifts the focus but stays in the same broken world. By then the outbreak has moved into a more organized stage of collapse. Seattle has walled itself off, which sounds like safety until you remember that sealed cities also trap hunger, fear, crime, and bad ideology inside with everyone else. Sadie is trying to find her kidnapped nephew while the city frays around her, and the pressure comes as much from other survivors as from the undead outside the wall.

That change in perspective helps the series. The first book feels close and improvisational. The second feels broader and meaner, full of black markets, cultish movements, dwindling supplies, and the hard truth that an emergency can become a system if it lasts long enough. Roux lets the world get uglier without losing the practical, character-first feel that made the opening work.

These are adult zombie novels, but not in the sense of endless macho posturing. They are adult because they care about stress, responsibility, ugly compromises, and the logistics of staying alive when nobody is coming to fix anything. They also have a real Pacific Northwest flavor, especially once Seattle becomes central to the second book.

So if you are browsing the Zombie page, expect an outbreak series that remembers the internet, the workplace, and the fact that people do not become noble just because the dead start walking. Expect fast pressure, dark humor, and characters who keep going because stopping is not really on offer. If you want the more intimate setup, start with Allison Hewitt Is Trapped. If you want the walled-city escalation, keep going to Sadie Walker Is Stranded.