Starting from the title this went wrong for me. The premise is that a zombie starts from knowing nothing about anything, except for all the stuff it does know and conveniently remembers when plot relevant. I didn't know what to expect from the title. Was it going to be rationalist fiction or simply a zombie that maintained some higher level functions? I don't know what it was intended, but it's definitely the latter and much more empiricism than rationalism. Most of the time I felt like I was reading about a biological AI than a zombie. However, the zombie does experience emotions.

I can only assume that the initial draw was the progression-like acquirement of basic knowledge that was continually built upon which then led to steady improvement of skills. The zombie starts as intelligent though ignorant, so it's a rather odd mismatch that leads to all sorts of misunderstandings. This results in an overall utilitarian approach to what it does. That is to say that it does whatever it believes to be efficient and effective without the slightest regard to morality or ethics. I don't know if it was intended to be an utility monster, but that's close enough to what it is in practice.

I've read a fair bit of zombie fiction, mostly short fiction, and quite a few about have been from the zombie's perspective. One in particular was about zombies that formed their own community and could communicate among themselves. I'd have to count this among the worst of zombie fiction I've finished. The reasons for that are the dismal quality of its prose, the choice of having every perspective be first person stream of consciousness, it was boring and repetitive, and nothing about it interested me.

I'm not usually one to say much about prose unless it's an outlier in quality to me. As long as it meets a certain subjective threshold I usually won't have any complaints. This doesn't get anywhere near that threshold. Usually I when I read something that doesn't reach the threshold it's because it's self-published and without an editor. This was originally published on RoyalRoad, a webnovel site that focuses on progression fiction. (Un?)fortunately I'm not one who can appreciate something when I believe it to be terribly written. I don't personally think my threshold is that high, but I could be wrong.

The problem with the perspective is mostly one of personal annoyance. When there are several perspectives that are all "I" it may not be immediately obvious who it's about, especially when it's a new character that has been just added in, so I would've liked to have seen a chapter heading with the viewpoint character's name. Most of the human perspectives weren't differentiated enough for my preference. I doubt this was a stylistic choice to show that the humans were all the same while the zombie was the one individual.

The entirety of the book is the zombie going from location to location killing all the prey (humans). Fortunately for the zombie, the humans have bows at most and mostly improvised melee weapons to fend for themselves. They're also usually incredibly dumb and irrational. As in how-can-you-possibly-be-this-idiotic horror movie levels. It's much more often that the zombie wins because of happenstance, incompetence, and disbelief than skill on their part. Yes, how this is all done changes over time to be more and more elaborate, which I have issues with as well on a practical basis, but it's all really the same.

This is a clearly meant to be a horror novel and there are some moments that would seem to be gross out scenes, but their matter-of-fact and straightforward presentation saps them of any impact. Maybe it's me, but when the characters are dispassionate about everything it's difficult to feel much about what they're doing. Nothing else that it was supposed to be about interested me either. Maybe it was meant to some have greater depth, but if it did, I didn't notice it. There are a few offhand comments that make statements, but that's all they were. I read what others have written and I still don't specifically understand what they enjoyed about it. Novelty? Not to me. An amoral utilitarian protagonist? Meh. Basic and limited progression as it were? Yawn. Wish fulfillment and power fantasy? Uh, was it though? I don't so. Honestly, I don't know what's meant to be interesting about it.

I didn't hate this, it didn't offend me, and I otherwise don't have any strong feelings about it, not even disappointment. Really, it's amazing how apathetic I feel about it. I've written a decent amount, though my feelings can be summed up as, "Huh." It wasn't even a waste of time because it was sufficiently informative in how and why I don't like certain types of books. The rating is because I would never personally recommend reading this and that it's just nothing to me. Maybe that's too harsh for its circumstances, but I don't believe in judging it differently than I would otherwise simply because it wasn't traditionally published. So, yeah, enjoy what you will or won't either way.