During the last day of middle school, Margot Jean Johnson wrote a manifesto of things to achieve in high school.

She will be popular. More popular than Amanda Culpepper. She will be invited to parties Amanda won’t be invited to. She will have a boyfriend. She will be prom queen, and so on.

But now, with only two years to go, Margot is nowhere near achieving her goals.

All changes, though, when one Monday morning Margot and her best friend Sybil arrive at school to find the rest of the students and most of the teachers are zombies. But not Principal Taft.

Principal Taft is human still, and running the school as if nothing has happened. Most amazing of all is that the zombies follow his orders and move from class to class as the bell rings, as they always have.

Principal Taft has a reason for pretending everything is all right: he is about to be promoted to district supervisor in six months. If the authorities were to learn his students are zombies, he will never get his promotion, he tells Margot and Sybil. When he begs them to help him keep up the illusion that nothing is wrong until the end of the year, Margot agrees and Sybil reluctantly follows her lead.

Margot has realized that being the only humans left has its advantages. Now at last her manifesto will come true.

For a while, Margot has all she ever wanted, even if the arrangement with her boyfriend is a little odd. He is not especially talkative for one, and she has to feed him beef when he gets aggressive or snap him on the nose with a newspaper. And, of course, she can’t slow dance with him.

But overall it is not so bad, she reassures herself.

Not yet.

Soon, the situation gets out of control, and Margot and her friend are fighting for their lives.

Never Slow Dance with a Zombie does not withstand scrutiny by a logical mind, but if you are willing to give your brain a break and go on with the story, you will find it is a lot of fun, especially if read on a stormy night sipping hot cocoa by the fireplace.