ZomRomCom

I preorder anything Olivia Dade publishes, and ZomRomCom (August 2025) was no exception. It was great fat-positive fun, full of action from the very beginning!

Edie lives within the Containment Zone close to the Compound where zombies are supposed to be corralled after a breach nearly two decades ago. She won’t leave because her parents died in that breach when she was just 18, but she’s made a life for herself creating and selling handmade to-order soaps. Only right now her dudebro neighbor Chad is about to be attacked by a zombie, which shouldn’t have escaped, but here it was!

So she does the only thing she can think of, which is distract it with a kick to the chest and attack it with the only weapon she has–a burrito. After Chad slices the zombie in half with the sword he happens to be carrying and they retreat to his home which happens to have an underground bunker that is zombie-proof, she finds out that Chad isn’t really a dudebro–he goes by Max, and is actually a vampire with the most delicious name of Gaston.

Thus begins a hilarious grumpy-sunshine romance where a vampire and a human try to save the rest of humanity from the escaped zombies, falling in love and having hot sex in the process. Soon, Edie is making up especially bawdy lyrics to the Gaston song from Beauty and the Beast, which are alone more than worth the price of the book. There is consensual blood drinking, and some of the zombie-fighting scenes are gory, but I so enjoyed it–the humor, the sex, and the characters.

ZomRomCom is a solid first foray into paranormal romance–I look forward to what Dade dreams up in the future while I work my way through her self-published backlist. For my other reviews of Olivia Dade’s books, all fat-positive, see Spoiler Alert, All the Feels, Ship Wrecked, and At First Spite.