Dead Ronnie and I to be published in Sanitarium Magazine, issue 44

My four and a half thousand word zombie tale, Dead Ronnie and I, set in the Isles of Scotland, is to be published in the next issue of Sanitarium Magazine (#44).

Cargo - A brilliant short Australian zombie movie

I have often thought that the best medium for the zombie tale is in the short story form. I am now beginning to wonder whether it is also ideal for the short film format too, as shown in this brief but excellent Australian movie Cargo, which is both poignant and clever in its use of a mere seven minutes and no dialogue. Directed by Ben Howling & Yolanda Ramke, it was a Tropfest Australia 2013 finalist. It's so short that a review is superfluous except to say that it is well worth watching.

The Mammoth Book of Zombies

This anthology, edited by Steve Jones, has been republished yet again, this time in the UK and the States. The American edition has been retitled Zombies! Tales of the Walking Dead, obviously intended to cash in on the popularity of the TV series.

There is also a kindle edition this time too.

Yet another airing for my novella Out of Corruption.

The Walking Dead

I watched the penultimate episode of the second series last night and was struck by just how great this show has become. Last week saw one major character go - traumatically - and this week saw another. Not only that, but at the end we could see just what an apocalyptic episode the series finale is going to be next week! That is definitely going to be an edge of seater!

Dead World by Shaun Jeffrey

Dead World

By Shaun Jeffrey

Published by Deshca Press 2012

£0.97 Kindle edition

Shaun Jeffrey has written an enjoyable romp through a post Apocalyptic world years after a zombie holocaust has devastated civilisation. Anna and her husband Isaiah live with their children in a tightly controlled community inside a former prison, safe from the undead that prowl around the outside world. Through a twisted theology the undead are regarded as gods because they are seen as immortal and any attempt to destroy them is regarded as heresy. Impoverished, living off what scraps of food can be produced inside their dreary concrete world, strict controls are maintained on numbers. For every birth there must be a counterbalancing loss in numbers. This is carried out through the use of a lottery; the names included normally being those amongst the elderly. The winner is honoured by being ejected into the outside world to become one of the gods.

Anna has begun a guilt-ridden affair with Roman, a leading priest. When she tries to end it Roman takes his revenge by falsely reading out the name of one of her children as the winner of the next lottery. Even though her young daughter believes she is being honoured, that she will become a god, Anna is distraught. Roman lets her know what he has done, intending to use this as leverage against her to resume their affair. This sets off a train of events that result in catastrophe for most of the people in the community and revelations about what has really happened as Anna escapes from their community with her children in tow, and Roman, her husband and a band of enforcers set out in pursuit.

This is a tense read, with plenty of action and credible characters. And a world in which it is often hard to decide who the real monsters are. Some humans have descended to cannibalism while others have succumbed to greed, enslaving others or selling them off as food. It is a harsh, cruel, merciless world in which there is little to hope other than to live through another day.

Extreme Zombies edited by Paula Guran

Pages: 384
Size: 6" X 9"
ISBN: 9781607013525
Publication Date: August 8, 2012
Price: $15.95

[This book will be published August 2012]
It's too late! The living dead have already taken over the world. Your brains have been devoured. Nothing is left but spasms of ravenous need—an obscene hunger for even more zombie fiction. Forget the metaphors and the mildly scary. You want shock, you want grue, you want disturbing, gut-wrenching, skull-crunching zombie stories that take you over the edge and go splat. You want the bloody best of the ultimate undead. You have no choice...you...must...have...Extreme Zombies!

• “Charlie’s Hole” by Jesse Bullington
• “At First Only Darkness” by Nancy A. Collins
• “The Blood Kiss” by Dennis Etchison
• “We Will Rebuild” by Cody Goodfellow
• “Dead Giveaway” by Brian Hodge
• “Zombies for Jesus” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
• “An Unfortunate Incident at the Slaughterhouse” by Harper Hull
• “Captive Heart” by Brian Keene
• “Going Down” by Nancy Kilpatrick
• “On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert With Dead Folks” by Joe R. Lansdale
• “Susan” by Robin D. Laws
• “Makak” by Edward Lee
• “The Traumatized Generation” by Murray Leeder
• “Meathouse Man” byGeorge R.R. Martin
• “Abed” by Elizabeth Massie
• “For the Good of All” by Yvonne Navarro
• “Home” by David Moody
• “Jerry’s Kids Meet Wormboy” by David J. Schow
• “Aftertaste” by John Shirley
• “Viva Las Vegas” by Thomas Roche
• “In Beauty, Like the Night” by Norman Partridge
• “Romero’s Children” by David A. Riley
• “Tomorrow’s Precious Lambs” by Monica Valentinelli
• “Provider” by Tim Waggoner
• “Chuy and the Fish” by David Wellington

Extreme Zombies

Prime Books have just revealed the cover for Extreme Zombies edited by Paula Guran, in which she will be reprinting my story Romero's Children, which was originally published in Charles Black's Seventh Black Book of Horror.

Interview of Otto Penzler re Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!

Just came across an interview with Otto Penzler about his massive anthology Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! (Zombies: a Compendium in the UK). The last question he is asked is: "If a reader has an opportunity to read only one story from Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!, which one would you recommend?" He would recommend two: "...the stories that jump to mind are Seabrook's "Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields" because it's such a comprehensive introduction in the genre, and David A. Riley's "After Nightfall" because it is, holy moley, so damned scary."

What can I say?

Romero's Children

Received an email from the States last night from Paula Guran, who is editing an anthology called Extreme Zombies, to be published by Prime Books in August, and she would like to use my story from The Seventh Black Book of Horror, Romero's Children. Absolutely delighted at this.

This makes the fourth story to be reprinted in recent months: The Lurkers in the Abyss in John Pelan's Century's Best Horror Fiction (Cemetery Dance), The Satyr's Head in Dave Sutton's The Satyr's Head: Tales of Terror (Shadow Publishing), and After Nightfall in Otto Penzler's Zombie! Zombies! Zombies! (Vintage).

Zombies: A Compendium of the Living Dead

For anyone interested in this anthology, edited by Otto Penzler, there is a lively ongoing discussion about it on the Vault of Evil.

Zombies: A Compendium of the Living Dead edited by Otto Penzler

Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! which was published in the States last year by Vintage has been reprinted in the UK by Corvus/Atlantic Books, with a new cover and a new title, Zombies: A Compendium of the Living Dead. Included in its 832 pages (the second story in) is my own After Nightfall.

I only discovered this when Pete Coleborn wrote about the book on Facebook. He had reviewed it on his blog Piper at the Gates of Fantasy.

It's great to see this 1970 story getting yet another airing! A nice surprise for the New Year.

His Pale Blue Eyes

If anyone would like to read my story from Bite Sized Horror, it is now available as a free downloadable pdf, complete with illustration, courtesy of the Vault of Evil's Advent Calendar: His Pale Blue Eyes.

Bite Sized Horror - now available as a downloadable e-book

Bite Sized Horror from Obverse Books, which contains my zombie horror story His Pale Blue Eyes, has now been made available as an e-book for £3.99, although there are potentially some issues between the writers and the publisher which need to be resolved over this. More about this later.

Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!

Picked up my copy of this mass market anthology, Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! this morning from the Post Office, which strangely decided the parcel was too big for our letterbox (it isn't!)

Lovely looking 810 page book, containing some great stories by the likes of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, etc., etc - and me.

I was surprised to see that mine is the second story in, immediately after what editor, Otto Penzler, describes as the first ever zombie story, W. B. Seabrook's Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields. In his introduction to my story Penzler quotes Hugh Lamb in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural: "...the nearest literature has yet come to creating George Romero's cinematic effects in words."

After Nightfall was first published in Weird Window edited by David A. Sutton (1970), then in The Year's Best Horror Stories edited by Richard Davis (Sphere Books, 1971). It will also be included in my collection from Noose & Gibbet next year, The Lurkers in the Abyss.

Revising Stories

I'm still working through the stories to go in Lurkers in the Abyss. While most have just needed the odd alteration here and there and a few typo corrections, the longest story in it looks like needing a major overhaul to me. Out of Corruption is also the most reprinted. It was originally published in Steve Jones' Mammoth Book of Zombies in 1993 (Robinsons and Carrol & Graf). Since then this anthology has been reissued as The Giant Book of Zombies (Magpie Books, 1996), The Monster Book of Zombies (Metro Books, 2009), ttranslated into Italian in Il Ritorno Degli Zombi (Mondadori, 1994), and into Russian in ЗОМБИ (АЗБУКА, 2010).

I could leave it mostly as it is, but it looks too wordy to me now and, though deliberately set in the 1920/30s, too anachronistic, sometimes in what I now see as not a good way. So it looks like I'm going to have to spend several days going through it far more throroughly, for my own peace of mind if no one else's.

The Eighth Black Book of Horror

The finished cover for The Eighth Black Book of Horror from Mortbury Press has now been revealed in all its gruesome detail:

"Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!" edited by Otto Penzler

It looks as if The Zombie Archives may have been retitled. This anthology, from Doubleday, is due out in September:

If so, it includes my story After Nightfall.

House - Zombie Killer

Zombies in New York

It's nice to see Sam Stone, who once taught at a school in Accrington before she was virtually hounded out by several local politicans, etc., who took exception to her vampire-filled website, has turned her hand to something even darker now: zombies.

Her new collection, Zombies in New York has just been published and is available via Telos publishing. It has a fabulous Vincent Chong cover - what more can I say?

The Walking Dead

trailer

I've waited till I've managed to watch the second episode of this new TV series before commenting on it. It's all too easy to get carried away by an opening episode, only to find that was the best you're going to get.

Thankfully, The Walking Dead looks to me so far as if it's not going to be like this at all. Instead, it looks to be shaping up to being an engrossing show that could - I stress could - be one of the best to have started for the past few years. It's not up to the quality of Dexter (how many are, though?), but it has a lot going for it, not least being an interesting group of characters. The production values are high and the apocalyptic situation in which the world has fallen is credibly mirrored by the scenes, particularly those set in the city, which are every bit as good as depicted in movies such as 28 Days Later, Dawn of the Dead, etc. And, unlike some of George Romero films, so far at least the characters don't act stupidly and do obviously stupid things - one of my main bugbears of the Romero zombie films, from Night of the Living Dead onwards. The acting is excellent too.

It will be interesting to see how this series develops. At the moment things are looking good, at least for the viewers, if not for the characters in it! I look forward to seeing episode three.