Filled with action from the first to the last page, and having loads of gore? Sign me up. The janitors having a fun group dynamic? Here for it!
I really enjoyed the backstory and the scientific explanations behind the outbreak. Aside from it being fun, it really puts it above a lot of zombie books that lack this element

My thoughts after reading the first chapter or so was that this book was one of my first forays into extreme horror, but the note at the end leads me to believe it is actually more splatterpunk. Not exactly sure of the difference but whatever it is, this was a wild ride I won't soon forget.

Stephi and her jerk husband Teddy live in an elite, closed-gated community outside Sedona. Teddy is a lying, cheating jerk but he is also a scientist who is working a secretive government experiment. One night he comes home but unbeknownst to him, he is carrying a lethal parasite. Something happens to Teddy which sets the parasite free and before you know it, the trusty janitors, along with a couple of governmental officials with guns and grenades, are left to clean up Serenity Canyon before it's too late. In the meanwhile, Teddy's coworkers are back at the lab trying to find a cure before the whole world goes to hell.

This book is action-packed from the first chapter and never slows down. It wasn't really a book which encourages the reader to form any emotional attachments to any of the characters, but I will say the janitorial crew really stole my heart. Speaking of hearts, this book is not for the faint of heart. There is blood, gore, feces covered zombies, body fluids being spewed everywhere and as well as limbs and other various body parts.

This book was a fun romp. I know no other real way to explain it but I think the action-lover horror fans out could really find this to be a hidden gem. My only complaint was the extremely long chapters which seemed to make the story lag just a bit, despite all the action. I will definitely look to read more from these authors in the future.

Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and publisher for an advanced copy to honestly review.

In Janitors vs. The Living Dead, Michelle Garza and Melissa Lason—collectively known as the "Sisters of Slaughter"—deliver a darkly humorous and inventive take on the zombie apocalypse. Set in a world where a mysterious virus transforms society's elite into grotesque, bile-covered monsters, the narrative flips the traditional hierarchy on its head. The janitors, once belittled and overlooked, emerge as the unlikely heroes tasked with confronting the chaos and restoring order.

Spanning 284 pages, this horror-comedy blends visceral action with sharp social commentary. Garza and Lason's signature brutal storytelling is evident throughout, offering readers a fast-paced and engaging experience. Their portrayal of the janitors as resilient and resourceful protagonists adds depth to the narrative, challenging preconceived notions about heroism and societal roles. For fans of horror that doesn't shy away from gore while also providing satirical insights, Janitors vs. The Living Dead is a compelling and refreshing read.

This was such a fun and gruesome horror story! The title immediately caught my attention and the story jumped right into the action and kept me on my toes the entire time. Definitely not for the faint of heart, but fans of splatterpunk horror will enjoy this as much as I did.

3.5 rounded down to 3 stars.

Thanks to NetGalley and Death's Head Press for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

This book was fun. It reminded me of a B-horror movie, and I say that in a positive way. This book was pure chaos; it was gory and disgusting, and didn't hold back. I also thought that the zombie origin story was pretty unique/creative, which made it stand out to me. I appreciate that, as there are a lot of horror books and movies saturated with zombies. In theory, zombies are pretty basic and can be boring. The authors definitely gave it a little twist and made it memorable. This made me think of a combination of the movies Night of the Creeps for the campiness, and 28 Weeks Later with the military involvement.

This was definitely extreme horror, and the amount of blood/gore/vomit/feces were at epic levels. A lot of people might be turned off by this, but if you're not new to the genre of extreme horror and have the mind of a 12 year old boy (occasionally), then you'll enjoy this one. It was a quick, easy read, and was completely unserious and surprisingly lighthearted compared to a lot of horror I've been reading.

This book is absolutey vile in the best way possible. We hit the ground running start to finish and the pacing was great. Unfortunately, I am that person that hates long chapters, and was disappointed that this wasn't broken down a bit more considering how short the story was. However, the overall story itself was disgusting and giving plant terror.

I absolutely loved this book! It started off with a bang. The author definitely kept me interested thought this book! If you like gory and fun then this is for you!

Thank you netgalley for the Arc of this book!

This story was WILD from start to finish. I anticipated the horror aspect of it (it's zombies after all) but I didn't expect the graphic detail the book would go into. (But again, its zombies, so I feel like I should've expected that). I enjoyed how you get to see all parts of the story and all the different POV's that go with it. It was a bit confusing at times because the POV jumped so suddenly but I liked seeing the doctors side of things and all of the SCUM crew. I also loved how you get the zombies (or I guess the parasites?) POV too! This story really had it all with the guts, gore, and cool death scenes. I wished more of the SCUM crew actually survived though. I was partial to Jason and Sunny surviving but literally none of the kids survived (Idk if I can call them kids I know some of them were pretty young but a few of the SCUM crew was older). Regardless, I enjoyed the story!

I love zombies and I love gore and this book had lots of it. The zombie genre has gotten stale over the years and there's only so much you can do to add interest. Who knew all it took was throwing in some high school janitors the freshen up the zombie outbreak?

This book was not at all entertaining and there were no characters to root for,. I hated almost all of them and the rest I just didn't care about. It was disgusting. If you hate any mention of vomit, do not read this book. The only thing I liked about this was the dog.

First and foremost as always thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the advanced copy of this book. This was an incredibly good read! The story was beautifully written and the characters were flushed out really well! Definitely worth the read!

Disgustingly horrific. I loved it. Gory as hell with a twist that I've yet to see on the zombie genre.

thank you to netgalley and the publishers for the arc!

It was a good book. I really liked the story behind the virus and how they found it. My issue was with the pacing of the story. I feel like it takes a lot of pages to get to the action of the book (more than half of it) and then it goes away quickly. I also felt like the characters could have been given names more diverse since there were a lot of scenes where characters with similar names were together. As it’s a short book, I didn’t know enough about them to recognize and assimilate them. It happened a few times for me when Lalo and Larry where together or when Agent Jackson and Jason where fighting the zombies.

I was going to give this book 2,5 but honestly I found the ending so funny that made me go up to 3.

I love horror that is gross and gore filled so this zombie book was perfect for me!

It's got body horror, bodily fluids, and lots of zombies! Very much gave me Night of the Living Dead vibes. The characters were great and for a short book the chapters were very in depth and went by quick! The story flows beautifully and gives you tons of entertainment in a short read! Also who doesn't love women in horror!!!

***ARC from NetGalley***

This was a wild ride. Originally, based on the cover, I thought this would be a graphic novel. Nope, but that is fine. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Not sure if the final version will have trigger warnings at the beginning, but the book opens strong and never lets up. It is violent, but that is the point. And it really is janitors vs. the living dead. As I neared the end of the book I wondered if a different title would work (just for fun), but like the overall story, it is to the point and pulls no punches.

It is a very clever plot and the reader will come to care for the characters and actively root against the bad guys. The ending is a bit open in that the story could continue, but most likely will not.

If you like horror and/or zombies, highly recommend.

A fun, quick, gory read. Interesting spin on a zombie trope, and I very much appreciated just the “right amount” of gore. Absolutely there is gratuitous gore, but the plot didn’t rely on just that shock factor. Unlike some other extreme horror books rely too much on the extreme gore for lack of a plot, this book absolutely did a fantastic job balancing them. But please do understand, there IS an extreme amount of gore and graphic depictions of violence.

This book is perfect for those who want a fun horror read, that doesn’t take itself too seriously. I enjoyed the misfit heroes, and the backstory of how the parasite was discovered and how it turned the victims into zombies. Just don’t get too attached to the characters here, the fast pace of the book doesn’t lend itself to lengthy character development which, I actually appreciated. It is a zombie book after all.

If you’re looking for a fast paced, gory, unserious horror novel to cozy up to for a weekend, this is the book for you.

Janitors vs The Living Dead starts out gory and disgusting and continues throughout the entire book. It was great. A country club is overtaken by zombies and it’s up to the janitorial crew, also known as SCUM, to save them. These zombies are spreading the virus quickly. The quiet, pristine neighborhood turns into chaos. The chapters are long and usually that makes reading hard for me, however, this book is so full of action and gruesomeness, I was not deterred. I would definitely recommend this book to any extreme horror fan. Thank you Netgalley and Dead Sky Publishing for the digital arc.

What a read by the sisters of slaughter!!!

This is a horror, splatterpunk, and darkly funny book. A small community vs the janitorial crew for the community, zombie style. The descriptions in this book are amazing and make you feel like you are there with the dead surrounding you. The characters are easy to like, and the book has a constant steady pace of action happening.

Located just outside of Sedona, Arizona, the Serenity Canyon community is an exclusive place. Rich folks, nice houses, lovely neighborhoods. For those who can afford to live there, all the amenities are available. For those who have to work there, however, it’s a daily exploration of drudgery and excess. The Serentiy Canyon Maintenance (the SCM initials are usually expanded to SCUM by the workers themselves) crew are responsible for keeping the place clean and for bestowing free house cleaning services once a month. They take a lot of nonsense for the low wages they earn.

However, things are a’changing in the community, and those changes will tear apart expectations for both the privileged and the working class.

It all begins with Dr. Theodore Reinart coming home from a terrible day at the office. His put upon wife endures all manner of abuse until she’s had enough and kills him. Faced with the ugly reality of disposing of the body, she gets the idea to stuff him down the outhouse over by the golf course. It is supposedly only for official use and seldom cleaned. The idea of her horrible husband’s remains rotting down there among the mounds of waste is all too precious.

However, what Stephi fails to realize is that Teddy is not himself. In fact, he’s a breeding ground for parasites that can stitch his dismembered body back together, make him mobile and aware again, and give him a desire for destruction. Not merely against the woman who killed him but against the entire human race. The parasites want a breeding ground, after all. They want more space, more puppets to control, more food …

The SCUM crew are among the first to get clues that something is awry. Their once in a blue moon outhouse cleanup detail discovers something either blew up the place or crawled out from below. However, they have enough internal strife to distract them from the bigger problems. Instead, they focus on the cleaning element, thus allowing the reanimated Teddy a bit of time to kill. And as the evening’s soiree approaches, which will invite all the community to a can’t miss party and forces the SCUM crew to stick around after hours for late night clean-up detail, Teddy’s going to have an easy time taking down as many community inhabitants at one time as he could like.

Soon enough, the community becomes a battle ground. However, Teddy’s government run research group may offer some hope. The accident that ended up infecting him with the parasites infected others at his lab. Dr. Abilene there has some idea of what is going on, and if she can get the right data and act quickly, she may be able to intervene before the parasitic invasion gets completely out of control. But will she be able to crack the mystery, will Teddy run rampant, and will the SCUM get motivated and save the day? Michele Garza and Melissa Lason (collectively known as The Sisters of Slaughter) pen a short and nasty splatterpunk novel about the have-nots and the have-lots batting not to become the have-rots in Janitors vs. the Living Dead.

Say what you want about the American powder keg culture these days, but it’s certainly an overflowing wellspring of inspiration for satire and horror novels. The Sisters of Slaughter have taken up the banner, spinning a yarn about parasite zombies overrunning a community and adding in plentiful assaults on social privilege along the way. Not to suggest the book is a screed on such topics. These ideas mostly occupy the subtext and some sly asides, but the theme is clear as day for anyone bothering to look beneath the surface. This is a book written from the hearts of two authors who’ve known crap jobs, and their sympathies always lie with the workers forced to clean up other people’s waste. The wealthy might have money and opportunities that the workers never will, but they are also pretty much incapable of recognizing or defending themselves from the otherworldly. Not that the SCUM crew has a much larger chance, of course. Human beings don’t want to believe they’re living in a horror show, but folks used to being on the receiving end of the feces boulders that slide downhill seem to have a better chance of getting out of the way that the folks responsible for rolling them do.

Even the government funded progenitors of the book’s apocalypse seem utterly incapable of reading one another and dealing with their own nonsense. In cut away scenes to the lab’s woes, head researcher Reinart is revealed to have been a liar and philanderer, who was operating from an agenda wholly unknown to his colleagues. His infectious accident might not have been so accidental as it seemed … and within the organization itself there are plans within plans, agendas on top of agendas, and few of them have to do with the survival of civilians. Profits and domination are part and parcel of the American Way, after all …

On top of these meditations, Garza and Lason have put together a delightfully disgusting splatter novel about a particularly nasty strain of walking dead. This is a book that’s not afraid to employ all manner of bodily fluids in addition to blood in its pages to gross us out, and it’s effective at doing so. The master cadaver wanders about smeared with dried turds and urine, he and his minions use spit and projectile vomit in order to infect others when they aren’t biting and rending victims to pieces for sustenance. As we might expect, there’s some potty humor to go along with the gruesome horror, which probably should not work as well as it does. The whole experience will leave most readers yearning for a mental scrub to clear some of this stuff out of our memory banks. Nevertheless, it’s a fun, filthy, and repulsive ride into extreme horror.

And the reason it works as well as it does is the fact that The Sisters of Slaughter have not forgotten to give us characters to empathize with and a few to hiss at. Despite the short page count on this sucker, it’s got an epic cast of dozens, and while not everyone is fleshed out and layered, there are enough memorable characterizations to keep us turning the pages. So, we have the SCUM’s laidback leader Lalo, their uptight property manager Peter, the regular housecleaners Rosa and Isabel, the always bickering Shane and Jose, the nearing retirement Carl, the new girl Sunny, and a host of others on the SCUM crew. We also have old Miss Brandon and her Pomeranian Puffkins, Stephi the killer housewife trying to cover her tracks, the rich party thrower Claudia and her coming home from college daughters Kim and Andrea, we have the louse Joel, and other wealthy homeowners. On the side of the research, we have clever Dr. Sarah Abilene, the sinister Dr. Murphy, the over-their-heads security dudes Donald Freely and Trent “T” Carver, as well as a couple of brutally efficient on-site agents Boze and Jackson. And then there’s the loose cannon Big Jim, an Army vet suffering from psychological trauma who was let go from the SCUM crew, disappointed his catering wife Sandy, and is now looking for a little payback—will he wind up back at the Canyon in time to mess things up? You bet. It’s a big group of potential victims and heroes, and we’re never quite sure who will survive.

Horror afficionados who prefer their living dead as an uncoordinated stand-in for pure anarchy may be disappointed to find the mob is a more coordinated and directed source of terror. As well, the creatures in The Sisters of Slaughter’s book seem to be divided into strata, around 1% of them retaining conscious memory of who they were and the others being mindless automatons of parasitic destruction, which may cause ghoul apocalypse purists to turn up their noses. However, it all feeds into the larger picture.

Janitors vs. the Living Dead is a fun page turner of a read. Siding firmly on the splatterpunk side of the fence, it has some things to say about the society we live in, some extremes to visit, and a distinct conscience. However, it’s all delivered at a horror beat we can boogey to. Smart, sometimes surreal, and always nasty, the book belongs on the shelves of readers looking for a gory gross out of a good time.

I liked the beginning more than the middle and the end. It got to be too repetitive. The cover is so cool and I was intrigued to read it. I would recommend to other people but it just wasn’t my favorite arc to read.