ZOMBIE BIBLE (And Other Books)

"Nothing is broken that cannot be remade"

2012-02-22T11:39:00.002-07:00

Check out this promotional poster for The Zombie Bible, featuring the words of Father Polycarp (from What Our Eyes Have Witnessed) and the art of the remarkable Danielle Tunstall. Share the poster, spread the word!

Oregon Trail. With Zombies.

2012-02-19T22:31:00.006-07:00

So, the same friend who was responsible for introducing me to this and this, just showed me this:

http://hatsproductions.com/organtrail.html

Organ Trail. Yep. You heard right. In the midst of an impending nuclear holocaust, you have to navigate your station wagon from Washington DC all the way to that green valley heaven on the West Coast, all the while foraging for supplies while putting bullets in the brains of green pixellated zombies, and on occasion putting down infected passengers.

This is inspired brilliance. Check it out.

And speaking of great zombie mashups, while you're en route through the zombie-infested heartland, make sure to check out What Our Eyes Have Witnessed, the newest installment in the Zombie Bible.

Ancient Rome. And zombies. Need I say more?

Stant Litore

To my daughters

2012-02-16T15:35:00.008-07:00

My little girls are going to be getting bigger before long. Going to school, learning to add, read, write, look into a microscope, and kiss. I know the years are going to swoop by inexorable and majestic and swift as dragons. So I'm trying to think of what I'll need to teach these girls. This is what I've got.

To my daughters -- what you need to know about life:

1) The world wants to kick your ass.
2) Don't let it.

That's about it. You'll figure out the rest for yourselves.

Oh, wait. One more thing. You two are just damn beautiful. Don't ever let any magazine cover, man, or car-salesman-promoted-to-politician tell you different. They're idiots, and the only reason they can't really see you for who you are is they have their eyes shoved so far up their sphincter they can't see past all the sh*t they're pouring out on the world. Pardon my language, girls, but your mother isn't in the room right now and you need to hear it like it is.

You're beautiful, you kick ass, and as you grow up, anyone who tries to make you feel small is going to answer to me.

- your dad

Let Your Love Burn Hot as a Torch in a Dark World

2012-02-14T08:45:00.007-07:00

I write love stories. They are often dark, it’s true, and they don’t all end well, but flickering within them is the conviction that our own love stories (whether a love for a mate, a love for God, or a love for one's People) can burn hot as torches in a dark world.

Sometimes the torches burn themselves out.

Sometimes, they light up the night for eternity, and those near us come close and warm their hands at the fire, taking joy in it with us.

I’m still fighting to understand this great mystery called love.

Love can make us yearn as though we are gasping for air:

He woke now from the joy of it, the touch of her skin on his, the way she held him tightly, warmly inside her. And as he drew in a shuddering breath, his eyes open but unseeing, he was suddenly back in the stench of the dead and the aloneness of his cistern tomb. The darkness around him, so different from that gentle night, was as a stab in the belly. He yearned for her. He yearned now for fresh water and sunlight on his skin and for every sweet thing he had ever known, but especially for her. (Death Has Come Up into Our Windows)

Another’s love – and learning that we are loved – can change everything about us, rewriting our past and everything our past ever meant. As though we were naked and are now clothed, lost and are now found:

Regina sat very still for a while, in this shed that had become an unexpected refuge, a quiet place where she could rest in the dark and search her own heart. She searched her heart now. She had been a slave once. She had been a slave a long time. A man had come and freed her, given her a warm coat and a place of safety. He had reached into the empty dark and found her heart there, and cupped it in his hands and pulled her near, to where there was light and warmth. (What Our Eyes Have Witnessed)

Love can prompt us to take unthinkable risks and make unthinkable sacrifices. It is the one thing in this universe that makes us more than just fearing, urinating, sweating primates. It is the one thing that makes us in the likeness of God.

“Please – you must do this. Please. The father mustn’t stand alone.” With a moan of pain, she lifted herself from the straw; Brutus pressed a hand to her back and helped her sit up, though his touch on the welts made her scream again.

She sat there, breathing. Then she lifted her shoulders, took a graceful sitting posture, folded her hands in her lap. “Will you do it?” she whispered against the pain.

“I will,” he murmured. He looked at her in the dark. There was a touch of awe in his tone. “I never knew a woman could be so brave.”

“Then you haven’t known many women. We endure much for the ones we love.” (What Our Eyes Have Witnessed)

Most of all, love is the great Gift. It may provoke passion (a desire to possess or be possessed), it may provoke affection, but it is much more than these. Love is the willingness to gaze in another's eyes and see them as they truly are (not what you fear they are or desire them to be), and to embrace what you see there. It is the opening of the self. It is the highest act of surrender, the highest act of worship.

...her eyes opened to him, and he gazed inside the rooms of her heart, as he so often had gazed into the eyes of the walking dead. He saw rooms that were locked and chained; he could almost hear the screams behind those shut doors. He saw other rooms that were vast and wide as oceans; in one, her love and faith in him, a faith so profound and unshakable that it shook him to see it. In another room, the many moments when she’d held others in her arms and given them refuge, and the love, deep and maternal and fierce, that she bore now toward each of those she’d sheltered. He saw her loss at having borne no children, and her joy at having found children in the men and women who lived in the insula under Polycarp’s care. He saw her determination to preserve them – and him – a resolve that was like a hard, cold wall of rock in her heart. (What Our Eyes Have Witnessed)

I want to wish you Happy Valentine's Day. I know it's a commercialized holiday, and I know it's designed as a grinding torture for those who live alone. But here's something worth celebrating today, no matter who you are. I don't care if you are single or have a life companion. I don't care if you have a God or have no god, or have several. I don't care if you see yourself as one of a People, or as a loner with a leather jacket. Just the fact that there is love in the world, amid all the darkness and despair -- that is worth celebrating. It's worth a bottle of champagne.

Will you do this with me?

If you have someone you love, take some time tonight to show it to them in a way that is entirely and completely about them. Make your love an act of surrender, an act of worship.

If you are alone but have ever loved, treat yourself to some champagne and dance (if you're able) in your living room tonight. Tell yourself -- and mean it -- that the world is infinitely more beautiful because you are in it and you have loved.

If you are alone and are yearning for love, set all sad thoughts aside. Do something tonight, something small but heartfelt, that is a gift for others. Tell yourself -- and mean it -- that what gives your life value and makes your heart a work of inescapable beauty, an artwork even God can be proud of, is not what you receive but what you give. Say, I love these lives who are near me, I will give and serve. I am beautiful because I give. Someone will see this in me and love me. But even if all the world were blind, it would not change that I am beautiful, and that I love, and that I give.

Happy Valentine's Day, friends and readers.

Yours in truth and fiction,

Stant Litore

Interview with Rhiannon Frater (As the World Dies)

2012-02-08T16:20:00.009-07:00

THE BOOKS

I don't know how to introduce Rhiannon Frater's series in a way that will do it justice, except to say this: You know all those B-movie-style zombie apocalypse novels out there, all clones of each other? This series is the real thing. It's horrific, deeply human, and very, very visceral. You will not exit the first chapter unscathed. - Stant Litore.

THE INTERVIEW

Stant Litore: Rhiannon, it’s a delight to interview you. As the World Dies is such an evocative title for the series. Can you tell us a little about how you arrived at the title, and what it evokes for you?

Rhiannon Frater: As the World Dies became the name of my zombie trilogy by accident. Originally, the story was conceived when I was at work. I wrote the opening as a short story and posted it online under the subtitle “Tiny Fingers.” Later, when I decided to continue the story online I needed a better name. I can’t remember what it was supposed to be originally, but I was in a rush to go somewhere and just wrote As the World Dies. It fit. I liked it. And it caught on. Of course, I never dreamed it would end up being a three-book series (The First Days, Fighting to Survive, Siege).

Stant Litore: Rhiannon, why do you think zombie fiction is so popular? What do zombie stories have to offer us – why are we so hungry for them?

Rhiannon Frater: I have heard so many theories about the popularity of zombies. I think the most popular one is based in wish-fulfillment. People like the idea of killing off the annoying and aggravating people in their lives, being free of societal constraints, and living an adventure. I hear this from people quite a lot, but then I ask them, “Are you prepared to see your loved ones die?” It’s like I douse them with cold water.

People want to believe they would be a survivor, that their family would somehow survive, too, and that they wouldn’t die, but that isn’t very realistic.

Zombies are so terrifying and life-altering, we like scaring ourselves with the idea, but we wouldn’t really want it to happen.

Stant Litore: What is the single most moving scene or most emotional moment for you in the series?

Rhiannon Frater: Well, this is a hard one to answer. I don’t want to give away any spoilers. I kill a lot of characters over the three books, the highest death toll being in Siege. I kill off at least three characters that were dear to my heart and I cried my eyes out when I wrote those scenes. It was hard to let them go. It was hard to have them leave the story. I missed them enormously. But death would be a cold reality of the zombie world and there is a whole lot of death in Siege.

Stant Litore: If you could say just one thing to potential readers of your series, what would that one thing be?

Rhiannon Frater: I am told by my fans that the strength of the story is the characters as they fight and struggle against the undead. Fans often tell me that the characters feel like friends and they worry about them as the story moves along.

Stant Litore: Your fiction deals so poignantly with loss. What did you learn about loss in writing it?

Well, I was dealing with loss when writing it. The second book, Fighting to Survive, is dedicated to my cousin Claudia. She was murdered by an ex-boyfriend. Losing someone is very difficult, especially to violence. It feels completely different from a death from illness or an accident. It’s a piercing pain unlike any other I have ever experienced. I actually ended up drawing on those emotions as I wrote.

I also heavily researched how people cope with death in cataclysmic situations and how they move on. In some ways, that helped me find peace and move on, too.

Stant Litore: That really strikes a sympathetic chord with me, as my own work is often focused on the unbearable tragedy of loss and the absolute necessity of hope. Rhiannon, what is one thing we spend too little time thinking about or feeling, that the death of the world would remind us to think about more, feel more? What should we be paying more attention to now, today, this moment?

Rhiannon Frater: Any cataclysmic event most likely will mean the death of loved ones and the loss of our home and security. People often take for granted how precious and fragile life is. We never really allow ourselves to consider how a terrible event could rob us of the people we love. I have a friend who has a policy with her husband that they never leave each other with harsh words. Even if they are furious with each other, they say they love each other before parting. I really like that policy.

Stant Litore: I think I might adopt that policy. About your writing: What's easiest about writing horror? What's hardest?

Rhiannon Frater: Since I’m plagued with nightmares, horror ideas come very easily to me! So in some ways that is what makes it easy. I’m never at a loss for story content. The hardest part is when I scare myself silly and have to turn on all the lights in the house.

Stant Litore: If the world were dying in a zombie apocalypse, where would you want to be? And who would you want there with you?

Rhiannon Frater: I would want to be in that zombie proof house outside of Warsaw, Poland with my loved ones! That house is amazing.

The stylish and sturdy zombie proof house.
Steel comes down to cover the windows.
There is only one door, with a drawbridge to access it.

Stant Litore: Rhiannon, what’s your next project?

Rhiannon Frater: I have multiple projects going right now. I’m working on a futuristic zombie novel right now called The Last Bastion of the Living and I’m almost done. Afterward, I will be working on the sequel to my vampire/necromancer/zombie novel Pretty When She Dies. The sequel is called Pretty When She Kills. I’m also putting out the second As the World Dies Untold Tales. Volume 1 has done very well and fans are clamoring for more. So Volume 2 should be out in the very near future.

Stant Litore: Thank you for the wonderful interview, Rhiannon, and I am looking forward to getting my copy of Siege.

Learn more about Rhiannon Frater's fiction at:
http://astheworlddies.com

Zombies in the Guest Room!

2012-02-02T17:19:00.002-07:00

My beautiful and long-suffering wife, who has been quite supportive of my phobia of and fascination with zombies, suggests that while this doesn't go in the master bedroom, we might perhaps make use of it for the guest bed:

It's the work of the remarkable Melissa Christie, and was sent my way by a family friend. Take a look!

Stant Litore

Interview with Thea Isis Gregory (Zombie Bedtime Stories)

2012-01-31T14:02:00.025-07:00

THE BOOKS

Thea Isis Gregory, if she'll forgive me for saying so, is the spunkiest of the new generation of zombie fiction writers. Embracing the gore and camp of zombie fiction unabashedly and with gusto, Gregory paints scenes that are both visually and viscerally memorable. Where most writers have taken a panoramic view of the zombie apocalypse, Gregory has chosen to zoom in tightly on one or two characters and to focus on a few pivotal scenes. It's exciting to interview her here at the start of her writing career; with a few novellas out in her Zombie Bedtime Stories, she's now stretching for the next lap, and I look forward to seeing what's next. - Stant Litore.

INTERVIEW

Stant Litore: The events of Locked In suggest the fragility of human relationships in the face of hunger and the exigencies of survival. Thea, is there a metaphor here for the human condition?

Thea Isis Gregory: I think that zombie stories can reveal much to us about the precarious balance that is the human condition. Human beings, and by extension, their relationships are incredibly fragile. I originally intended the story to be an examination of helplessness, but in many ways helplessness can relate back to hunger and basic needs.

Human relationships are dependent on letting yourself be vulnerable. But, in cases of hunger, need, and zombies, the vulnerability is our downfall. Being vulnerable means you can be hurt, and human relationships are not only fragile, but they tend to splinter into glass shards. Death by one thousand cuts.

Stant Litore: On that note, what did you find most compelling or frightening about the concept of being "Locked In”?

Thea Isis Gregory: I’d say it’s the helplessness of being taken by this force, the hunger, and watching yourself turn into a monster. The people who are “Locked In” still have their mental faculties, but they have no way to intervene in their behavior, or stop tasting the flesh and blood of their loved ones.

Stant Litore: Thea, from your perspective, why is our culture so fascinated with the hungry dead?

Thea Isis Gregory: There are two reasons that I can think of:

One would be that the idea of the hungry dead is so contrary to our way of life that it terrifies us. It means the end of our society, and worse, we could become one of them! It’s an enemy that we can’t reason with or just make disappear. And, they used to be just like us.

The other reason would be that element of the fandom who wants the hungry dead to rise so they can shoot their mom/boss/neighbor and get away with it.

Stant Litore: What zombie novels or films do you find most gripping or haunting (and why)?

Thea Isis Gregory: I’ve watched a lot of zombie movies, and many of them just merge together in my mind out of their sheer mediocrity. Yes, they’re still watchable, but with a cast of unlikable characters and gratuitous stupid mistakes that lead to yet another feeding scene, it’s hard not to say that Dawn of the Dead (1978, not the abomination of a remake) was the most gripping zombie movie. It wasn’t super gory or extreme, because it didn’t need to be. Dawn of the Dead was scary because of the interactions between the survivors themselves, isolated in that mall. I will give an honorable mention to Dead Snow, a Norwegian film about Nazi zombies, just because it was so utterly ridiculous.

Admittedly, I would say the most noteworthy zombie book I’ve read was part two of The Zombie Bible, What Our Eyes Have Witnessed. I’m not sucking up to the boss; I’m just tired of reading things that are functionally equivalent to watching yet another zombie B-movie. The Roman perspective adds character to the telling of a tale about the undead. A starving population that finds itself to be on the menu is an intriguing concept.

Stant Litore: Of course, I love hearing that. About your own work, what is your own favorite scene that you’ve written (and why)?

Thea Isis Gregory: Near the top (if not the top) of the list is the infamous boyfriend-eating scene from Locked In. It combined the elements of zombies, heartbreak and chaotic uncertainty to come through as one of the defining scenes of that story. It combined gore with a lot of grief and hopelessness—it was a lot of fun to write, but very difficult to get something I was fully happy with. I was presented with the challenge of a character that is effectively mute, and I needed to find a way for her to express herself without making it boring or excessively melodramatic.

Ties (or runners up) would be Locked Out’s girl-on-girl cannibalism scene simply because it was hilariously gross, and Deadlocked’s club-him-and-run-for it scene.

Stant Litore: I hear you write science fiction, too. Can you tell us a little about your current project? What does it have in common with your earlier stories, and in what ways (other than genre) will it be a departure from the Zombie Bedtime Stories?

Thea Isis Gregory: My current science fiction is a novel, and the working title is Sanity Vacuum. It takes place in the far future, and it revolves around a young woman named Vivian who leaver her home for the first time to be an intern on a deep-space telescope called the Extra-Galactic Observatory. Her assignment is to upgrade the station’s quantum supercomputer, quIRK. Her presence draws the jealousy and ire of ambitious station administrator Bryce Zimmer, who sees her as a threat to his future and undermining his authority. He pits Vivian and quIRK against each other to advance his own agenda, and to cover up his own mistakes. Vivian must survive Bryce’s escalating hostility and finds herself contending with the emerging super intelligence that is quIRK. Even without a zombie in sight, Sanity Vacuum does share some commonalities with my earlier stories (Thus far at least, Zombie Bedtime Stories part 4 is being written, and some of these will change as I complete the series.)

It’s a profoundly dark universe. Contact with Earth has been lost for over a century because Earth’s supercomputer, ABACUS, gained sentience and the administrators panicked and severed the only link Earth had to the rest of the galactic community. Prejudice and bigotry are still alive and well, they’ve just changed targets.

The characters are conflicted, deep and have their own goals, and fears. There’s a lot of introspection, and confusion over the situation they’ve been thrust into.

There is an element of focusing on the outsider’s perspective. In my earlier works, that’s done through the eyes of a zombie. In Sanity Vacuum, the outsider is quIRK, and he’s quite the opposite of a mute zombie suffering from the hunger. quIRK is eccentric, very much alive (as much as a computer can be), and likes cats and has a favorite color.

That’s about where the similarities end. The Zombie Bedtime Stories feature a visceral bloodbath that features a hero swept away by the suddenness of the apocalypse. Sanity Vacuum sets a more deliberate pace, and the body count is notably lower. There isn’t much that’s particularly apocalyptic about Sanity Vacuum. Sure, the universe is dark, gloomy and it sucks to be an Auroran sometimes, but the world isn’t ending tomorrow. You might find yourself flying into intergalactic space, though. That sucks too, in its own way.

Sanity Vacuum’s antagonist isn’t a nameless force of nature. Humans do terrible things to each other, without a possessive force taking control of them. It’s a look into the darkness of the human spirit in as much as it is a story about a girl and her new friend the supercomputer learning to trust each other.

Stant Litore: Thea, thanks for joining me for this interview. I look forward to reading Sanity Vacuum.

Visit Thea Isis Gregory's website:
http://nerdygnome.wordpress.com/

Interview with Jonathan Maberry (Patient Zero)

2012-01-31T14:02:00.024-07:00

THE BOOKS

Very few writers do dialogue like NY Times bestselling author Jonathan Maberry. Well, other than perhaps Jim Butcher. There is a quick, sharp wit to Maberry's dialogue and it is excruciatingly real. That is what first drew me to his fiction: this sense that you are listening in to a conversation next door and it is riveting, catchy, and informed by real pain and real grit, and you are listening very, very closely because the gloves might come off and that conversation might explode into violent action in the next instant. Midway through Patient Zero, a mashup of conspiracy thriller and zombie horror, I knew I had to interview Maberry for Your Zombie Bookshelf. - Stant Litore.

INTERVIEW

Stant Litore: Jonathan, thanks for joining me for this interview. I’d like to ask -- what draws you to zombie stories – or to supernatural stories in general?

Jonathan Maberry: I’m often asked why I write about monsters, but in point of fact I don’t write about monsters. Not really. I write about the people who fight monsters. That’s a huge difference, and a very important distinction.

When I was a kid I lived in a very abusive household and I grew up in an intensely violent neighborhood. I’m familiar with monsters and I neither admire them nor find them fascinating. Fictional monsters are metaphors for real-world things that we fear, and as such the monster can be a stand-in for a different fear to each person. Horror fiction allows me, as a writer, to explore many sides and layers of fear, oppression, abuse, attack, and vulnerability. It also allows me to delve into human psychology, particularly that of people in crisis, which is when our affect crumbles and reveals our true natures. In a time of crisis we discover who’s a real hero, who’s a coward or a villain, who’s a leader, who’s a follower, and who is an outsider/loner/predator. I get to really deconstruct the human psyche and the dynamics of interpersonal relationships by placing my characters in horrific situations.

Stant Litore: I think that's what makes your fiction so compelling, both dark and real. Let me ask a slightly different question -- what draws you to thrillers and to noir?

Jonathan Maberry: I’ve always been intrigued by the action genre –the breathtaking race against time to prevent something catastrophic from happening. In times of crisis we all have to rise to our better natures, to step outside of the comfortable persona we wear on a daily basis. Or, conversely, to descend to our baser natures. The high-stakes nature of the thriller story allows us to enjoy this transformation.

At the same time, I’ve been drawn to thrillers because so many of them are deeply intelligent, well thought-out and superbly researched. I’m a bit of a research junkie, so I appreciate a story with a strong nonfiction background…and thrillers require that.

Noir is different for me. My real introduction to reading fiction was through the police procedurals of Ed McBain, and to a great degree these had a nourish vibe to them, particularly the early ones. A lot of damaged people shambling in and out of crisis situations, a lot of moody self-reflection. Great stuff. From there I began exploring classic noir fiction, including a ton of pulps, and I devoured every noir flick I could watch. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve watched The Maltese Falcon, and every single Hitchcock flick.

Stant Litore: Tell us about the inspiration for Joe Ledger, the protagonist in Patient Zero.

Jonathan Maberry: Even though I never served in the military or in law enforcement, I’ve always known many people who did wear the uniform. Many are friends, some are relatives and quite a few were students in my various martial arts and self-defense programs. I created training programs for law-enforcement, SWAT, and the military. I respect anyone who has the honor and courage required to put their life on the line for their community or their country. That said, I’m not a believer in the philosophy of ‘My country right or wrong’. I think that is a betrayal of the ethics upon which this country was founded. Joe Ledger is the embodiment of my political and ethical point of view. He is rarely motivated by political ideologies or party politics, but is instead a free-thinker who believes in the Arthurian philosophy of ‘might for right’ rather than ‘might is right’. Joe is an idealist and a bit of an optimist (however damaged), but in defense of freedom or the innocent he is a holy terror.

There are bits of different people seasoned into Joe Ledger. My martial arts teachers, some real-world heroes I’ve known, my smart-ass sense of humor, and a bit of the nobility of my great-grandfather, John B. Maberry, who won the Congressional Medal of Honor at the Battle of Gettysburg.

Stant Litore: For you as the author and as a reader of your own novels, what’s most compelling for you about Patient Zero and Dead of Night?

Jonathan Maberry: Patient Zero and Dead of Night represent two very personal aspects of my political worldview –and my fears. I am by no means a conspiracy theorist, but I do believe that many of the people in positions of political power are not their because of patriotism or to serve higher aspirations. Greed is a common factor. What’s that saying: money is the root of all evil. I believe that greed –and the power that can be purchased with enough money—are at the core of most of this world’s problems. If you scratch the surface of most wars, you’ll find an economic foundation. Ditto for most holy wars. The guys in the trenches may be true-believers, but the people who send them there certainly don’t believe strongly enough to want to lay down their own lives.

In Patient Zero, I got to explore the damage that can be done by multinational corporations, and how enough money can even be used to bribe, coerce or entice religious fanatics. At the end of the day, it’s all about profit, no matter how many lives are lost.

In Dead of Night, I explored the ethics of the arms race. During the Cold War (and beyond) there were insane risks taken to develop nuclear and biological weapons. We know for sure that since the fall of the Soviet Union a lot of this technology, and even some of the materials, have gone missing. Our government obtained some of this research –ostensibly to prepare counter-measures; but we’d be naïve to believe that our side didn’t continue some of those experiments. In Dead of Night, one of those bioweapons gets off the leash.

In both cases, Patient Zero and Dead of Night, I used zombie outbreaks as a vehicle for telling much more complex political and ethical issues.

Stant Litore: You’ve written a lot of short stories and novelettes, as well; I just read Like Part of the Family, which I loved – it’s a gritty story told about our gritty world but it’s told with a heroic sensibility. There’s a moody, black-and-white-film feel to it, yet the characters are violently contemporary. Could you talk about your short fiction? What does it have in common with your longer work, and what is starkly different in it?

Jonathan Maberry: Like Part of the Family was a deliberate homage to noir fiction. That it was also supernatural was just a bit of fun I decided to have. In fact, I’m currently reworking that story into a novel.

One of the things I love about short fiction is that it allows for tremendous creative freedom that you might not otherwise get in novels. There’s less of a risk –if a short story fails to make a splash, no one’s going to lose their shirt. That encourages writers to take some real risks, and to step outside of their comfort zones. I’ve done things in short fiction that I might otherwise never have gone near in my novels. For example, I was invited to write a short story for an anthology of folklore-based stories set in West Virginia. I’m from Philadelphia, so that’s not part of my experience. And they assigned me a very particular piece of folklore, the Legend of the Greenbrier Ghost –one of the most famous ghost stories in that state. So…to make the story my own, and to give it an original spin, I wrote it as an adventure of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. That was enormous fun, and the story has been reprinted several times, and even resulted in my being invited to the annual dinner of the Baker Street Irregulars (where I sat next to Neil Gaiman and talked shop all night!).

I’ve done a bit of everything: comedy/horror about moonshiners, gangsters, zombies and the Great Chicago Fire: “Pegleg and Paddy Save the World”; an psychological thriller about a little girl who wants to be a serial killer: “Doctor Nine”; military science fiction with just a dash of social commentary, “Clean Sweeps”; a novella for an anthology of GI JOE stories, “Flint and Steel” (in GI JOE: Tales of the Cobra Wars); a tale about a serial killer adopting a group of orphan children during the apocalypse, “Saint John” (The Monster's Corner, 2011, St. Martin’s); a fantasy story involving college student and demons, “Spellcaster 2.0” (to be published in Apple for the Creature, Ace Books, 2012); a meditation on dying set in the same world as Dead of Night, “Jack and Jill” (21st Century Dead, coming in June from St. Martin’s Griffin); a John Carter of Mars adventure tale, “The Death Song of Dwar Guntha” (Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, in February from Simon & Schuster); a pair of very downbeat zombie tales, “Chokepoint” (for issue #2 of The Uninvited, an iPad-only magazine) and “The Wind Through the Fence” (an original e-story available for all e-readers); a wacky SF comedy, “Plan 7 from Sin City” (for Before Plan 9: Plans 1 Through 8 From Outer Space, 2012); and even a straight gothic ghost story, “Property Condemned”, which is a prequel to my Pine Deep Trilogy. And I have a ton of other stories in the worlds for anthologies ranging from new stories set in Oz to a collection of Steampunk western tales.

Stant Litore: Jonathan, your output as a writer has always amazed me. If someone is reading this interview and they have never read a Jonathan Maberry story before, where should they start?

Jonathan Maberry: For adults, I recommend Patient Zero. It’s a very accessible book (even if you don’t like zombies, which is has). For teens, Rot & Ruin is the best place to start.

Stant Litore: Now, on to the serious questions. Jonathan, you’re in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. Who do you want with you?

Jonathan Maberry: I want my wife and son with me if there is a zombie apocalypse. My wife is spiritual and she can cook, mend and knows healing. My son is practical, fit, strong, and resourceful. I’m an advanced martial arts instructor and I understand the concepts of leadership and survival. We’d make it. Plus…having my loved ones with me would give me a damn good reason to fight back and fight well. Bottom line, if I’m protecting my family and you’re in the way…sucks to be you. I’ll feed you to the zombies to get my family to safety.

Stant Litore: As I'd expect. Night-walkers and zombies aside, what is the single most chilling, terrifying thing in our world?

Jonathan Maberry: The thing that scares me most is the misuse of technology, either because of incompetence, arrogance, or greed. If anything brings us down, it will be that.

Stant Litore: What’s your next project?

Jonathan Maberry: I recently wrapped Flesh & Blood, the third book in my Rot & Ruin series, and that’ll be out in August. And I’m currently writing Extinction Machine, the 5th Joe Ledger thriller. The 4th in that series, Assassin's Code, debuts in April. And I just wrapped V WARS, a shared-world anthology of science-based vampire stories I edited for IDW. That also drops in April.

Stant Litore: Thanks for the interview, Jonathan! I really appreciate the time and the sharing of your thoughts. All those listening: check out Patient Zero.

Visit Jonathan Maberry's site:
www.jonathanmaberry.com

Calling it like it is.

2012-01-26T21:44:00.004-07:00

Source of the poster: John Magers on Facebook.

Folks, this is one of the most clear-minded political statements I've heard all year. We cannot invoke our personal heroes and religious founders in one breath and in the next, turn our back upon everything they lived and died for. Please share this poster.

To everyone who's asked me what The Zombie Bible is about: it's about this. It's about what you see and what you refuse to see when you look into a suffering face, and it's about the necessity of responding, decisively, to the plea and the demand we encounter in the eyes of our fellow human beings. Only the ravenous undead have the dubious luxury of gazing at a human face and seeing no more than food or foe. If you possess a beating heart, you are called to look in another's eyes and see them as they truly are, not as you fear them to be or desire them to be. And then to act justly. That is the one thing, the primary thing, that truly separates the living from the walking dead.

Stephen Colbert's quote above calls for honesty, the most difficult and necessary of virtues. Because our lies -- the lies we tell ourselves, individually or as a people -- will claim godhood over us, and eventually devour us.

Yours in truth and fiction,

Stant Litore
Author, The Zombie Bible

Why Horror?

2012-01-17T21:40:00.017-07:00

I've been asked by various serious-minded people why I write horror and dark fantasy. I'll try and answer. Here goes.

Writing horror is a way of saying, Life is so beautiful, so blindingly beautiful, it moves me to tear out my eyes and hand them to you so you can see.

To write horror novels is to guard the pilgrims on the road, peering under the shadows of trees for monsters of which they're unaware.

Writing horror is like screaming on camera, to the audience's excitement, except that you see the dark thing standing behind the cameraman.

Horror fiction flays from us the tough outer skins we've grown, baring our hearts to the darkness or beauty of the world's truths.

There's an exhiliration to it, a defiance of death and suffering. Writing horror is like dancing on the edge of a sawblade. Bloody, but you feel very quick and alive.

In a world overwhelmed by the ravenous dead, stand with your back to the fire. Lift the machete. Sing against the dark. The soul, and not the body only, must survive.

A madman sees the madness of the world that isn't; a horror writer sees the madness of the world that is. Horror fiction is our answer to the sheer amount of evil in the world. We bare our teeth at it.

To write a horror novel is to find a girl whose eyes are torn out and who has no tears, and to hold her tightly and cry for her.

Your novel needs to tell the truth and take no prisoners.

What about you? What drives you to read about dark things, or write about them?

Stant Litore

Stant Litore writes about the restless dead, and the first two volumes in his series The Zombie Bible are now available at Amazon. The debut installment is called Death Has Come Up into Our Windows and tells the story of an Old Testament prophet imprisoned in a well in a dying city; each day, his gaolers toss one of the ravenous dead in after him. You should read it; the book will leave a mark on you. Stant lives in Colorado with his wife and two daughters, and stays out of certain parts of the mountains during the dark of the moon.

Interview with Jesse Petersen (Married with Zombies)

2012-01-12T18:16:00.014-07:00

THE BOOKS

Little do Sarah and Dave know that they scheduled an appointment with their marriage counselor for the first day of the zombie apocalypse -- or that partnering as zombie-slayers will prove the best way to bring the romance back to their relationship. This madcap yet touching mashup of zombie horror and romantic comedy is packed with some genuinely funny one-liners ("Just because she tried to eat us," Sarah quips about their undead therapist, "doesn't mean she was wrong"), as well as some genuinely romantic moments. Rather than spend next date night watching Sleepless in Seattle again, you might consider reading Married with Zombies together. Here's what the author has to say about the series, which also includes titles Flip this Zombie and Eat Slay Love. - Stant Litore.

INTERVIEW

Stant Litore: Jesse, can you tell us a little about your decision to mix the genres of zombie horror and romantic comedy? In other words, how does telling a zombie horror story help you tell a great love story -- and how does telling a love story help you tell a great zombie story?

Jesse Petersen: I'm definitely not the first person to merge the two (thinking of Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland). The idea of Dave and Sarah, who are on the verge of divorce and then get thrown into an even worse situation when the zombie apocalypse hits... there's just so much fun to play with there, so many snarky jokes and so many opportunities for them to either figure out how to work together or... pretty much die.

Stant Litore: It certainly ups the ante! Jesse, for you, what's most important in telling a love story?

Jesse Petersen: I think it's really all about building a strong enough relationship that the reader feels like they can make it after the book is over. With Dave and Sarah, that was a challenge because they were starting out not as a new relationship, but as an established one that was almost over due to fighting. I had to rebuild them via the dangers they were encountering and remind them that they had respect and love for each other.

Stant Litore: Speaking of that respect and love, what do you find particularly touching in Sarah and David’s relationship?

Jesse Petersen: I loved the little moments where they remembered things they liked about each other. When Sarah is a badass, Dave comments on it. Or when Dave is dependable, it reminds Sarah that he's a stand-up guy. Those little moments add up to them rebuilding into a stronger and stronger relationship. Not that it isn't challenged again, especially in Flip this Zombie and again in Eat Slay Love.

Stant Litore: I have to ask - what is your favorite romantic comedy - and what do you love about it?

Jesse Petersen: Tough. I love While You Were Sleeping; it always makes me laugh and cry. Music and Lyrics was great, more recently. I like a romantic comedy that has heart and emotion, as well as humor.

Stant Litore: What current project are you working on?

Jesse Petersen: I just finished a monster book set in New York and a proposal for a YA zombie project. And I'm thinking of writing and self-publishing a fourth Dave and Sarah book or novella to tie up any loose ends for the readers.

Stant Litore: That's an exciting thought. On the topic of the hungry dead, what zombie story hasn’t been told that you desperately wish someone would write?

Jesse Petersen: Oh gosh, if I thought of a story that appealed to me, I'd probably just write it. That's what I did with Married with Zombies. I thought it would be funny, so I wrote it. And I'd do it again!

Stant Litore: Well said! May you write many more books, and keep us laughing for many years. Thank you for the interview, Jesse.

Jesse Petersen's website:
www.jessepetersen.net

GET THE BOOKS

Video Review of The Zombie Bible: Book Two

2012-01-10T21:21:00.002-07:00

Curious about the second volume in Stant Litore's The Zombie Bible? Here's a close look at Litore's What Our Eyes Have Witnessed through the eyes of Thea Isis Gregory, author of the Zombie Bedtime Stories. She discusses history's "most efficient zombie slayer" and her experience of reading about zombies in second-century Rome.

You can get What Our Eyes Have Witnessed in its ebook editions from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Also, swing by and visit Thea Isis Gregory's site. She is a writer with a ravenous appetite for horror and something fresh to say about the undead.

Interview with Kim Paffenroth (Valley of the Dead)

2012-01-08T11:50:00.007-07:00

THE BOOK

Valley of the Dead has as its premise that Dante's Inferno was inspired by the poet's encounter with the walking dead in Eastern Europe during the years of his exile. The novel includes some of the most haunting horror scenes I have ever read, alongside Dante's reflections on the nature of human suffering, human sin, and hope. The novel is scary, it's smart, and it demands that the reader gaze on the worst that humanity has to offer without either flinching or caving in. The author, Dr. Kim Paffenroth, is a professor of religious studies at Iona College. - Stant Litore.

INTERVIEW

Stant Litore: Dante Alighieri undertakes a profound journey in Valley of the Dead. Can you talk about how his journey in the novel parallels Dante’s journey in the Inferno, and what both Dantes learn from the journey?

Kim Paffenroth: Well, I hope the Inferno framework isn't too noticeable or intrusive for those who haven't read the original - but for those who have, they'll notice immediately that each episode in Valley is based on some scene in Inferno (though I don't have every scene from Inferno in Valley). Of course, what and how I've changed each one is different, and varies a lot between episodes. So, for example, the Francesca (Dante uses Francesca as the epitome of Lust) scene is pretty close to the original, though the addition of a female interlocutor (who is based on Beatrice, Dante's idealized Love of his life) gives the scene a whole new twist: I was struck in the secondary literature about how Dante contrasts Beatrice and Francesca, and I wanted to have them actually meet and discuss. That was the huge rush I had as I wrote the novel - I really got into Dante's perspective, and what he was trying to say about each sin.

I think, ultimately, Dante is an oddball optimist (in either his own work, or my version of him). He's bitter and hurt, but he never gives up. And despite (or because of) everything he's seen, he comes away from the journey knowing that Reason and Love are very powerful indeed - very nearly as powerful as sin, and if (and he's hopeful) those faculties can just get the barest nudge from some Higher Power (IF!) then they'll prevail. But again - I say oddball optimist. He's never treacly, and at many points in his version or mine, he's all but overwhelmed with despair. There's just so much pain going on, while waiting for Grace to intervene, and he can barely stand it. And I know where he's coming from with that perspective - that didn't take any stretch or imagination on my part.

Kim Paffenroth at his studies

Stant Litore: As a writer who also does mashups of zombie fiction and theological fiction, I’m fascinated by the choice to blend Dante’s Inferno with zombie horror. In what ways did you find this a fortuitous and natural combination?

Kim Paffenroth: It all goes back to when I started this zombies and theology kick, back in 2005, with my nonfiction work, Gospel of the Living Dead. I was rereading Inferno, and I read the description of the Damned as "those who have lost understanding and made Reason slave to appetite" (quoting from memory, so it's not verbatim). Mindless humans, driven by insatiable, never-ending hunger? Those are zombies! And then, as I dug deeper, I saw in Romero's work, the same distinction as in Dante: sins of appetite (like the zombies commit) are less heinous than sins of perverted reason (like the living humans commit against one another in Romero's films). So it all came together for me with those two insights.

Stant Litore: What, to you, is the most frightening thing in Valley of the Dead?

Kim Paffenroth: For me, it was the ever-present idea that Dante would give up. Of course, he couldn't, and I wouldn't let him, but I had to make clear at each turn, he's right on the verge of just capitulating to all the horror, and either participating in some act of senseless slaughter, or just sitting down to die. I remember when I first read Elie Wiesel's Night - the frightening people there are neither the guards nor the "regular" prisoners: what frightened me in that real world Hell were the kapos (prisoners who cooperated with the Nazis), and the people who just sit down on the ground, pulled a blanket over their heads, and wait to die.

Stant Litore: From your perspective, why is our culture so fascinated with the hungry dead?

Kim Paffenroth: I think they have all the fascination monsters have always had - the threat of a horrible death, the threat of the unknown, the inability to control our lives and our environment. Then they combine that with peculiarly contemporary fears - the threat of sinking into an anonymous, pointless existence and becoming one of "them," the fear that our current world is meaningless and driven by meaningless appetites (like going to the mall). And then, in the most recent surge of popularity, you have all the extra fears of plague, terrorism, and the possibility that we'll destroy ourselves with one of experiments or weapons.

Stant Litore: I found Bogdana – the pregnant, Romanian woman who travels with Dante – to be a particularly well-drawn and moving character. Can you talk a little about her role in the story and what she brings to the ethical or theological questions that are important in Valley of the Dead?

Kim Paffenroth: I love my female characters the most (as I love women in real life more, and differently, than I do men). And I hardly claim to understand women better than other people do - but I do spend some time observing how they relate to me and to other men, and I think that comes across with my female characters as a believable, authentic dynamic. (And hence, why my descriptions of her are always from the perspective of the Dante character - a male describing the effect this female has on him.) So what I wanted with her, as an analog to Beatrice, is to provide an emotional, subjective counter-balance, to the male characters' over-reliance (almost parody, I'd say) of (what they claim to be) rationality and objectivity. At several points (inlcuding the Francesca scene, as I said, which just makes me cry every time I reread it) she puts the men in their place, by either showing how their rationality is wholly inadequate to the rather incredible (in the literal sense) situation they face - OR, their rationality is really just a ruse and an excuse and they're not being honest about their real motives. So, in a way, this is one of the points at which I could go somewhere Dante choses not to: he doesn't have Beatrice appear until the end of the Purgatorio, but I wanted to see what a Beatrice-like woman would bring to the analysis and experience of human sin and misery.

Stant Litore: Kim, what current projects are you working on?

Kim Paffenroth: I'm working on a theological study of why and how I think my fellow Christians needn't worry so much about evangelizing their atheist brothers and sisters: if there is a God, and if He's as great as we claim, He's probably got something better in mind for all of us than anything our meager minds could fathom, or our meager acts could accomplish, so we should just do with our atheist brothers and sisters what we're commanded to do with all people - love them. And I' halfway through a novel which I used to describe as a zombie version of Moby-Dick, though that sends the wrong signal of "OMG - A ZOMBIE WHALE! I LOVE IT!" No, they're just humanoid zombies, but I am trying to take Melville's idea of a man obsessed with the unfairness, meaninglessness, and brutality of life, and transposing it into a post-apocalyptic zombie world.

Stant Litore: I would love to read that. Thanks for joining us, Kim!

Check out Kim Paffenroth's blog at:
http://gotld.blogspot.com

YOUR ZOMBIE BOOKSHELF

2012-01-07T23:11:00.022-07:00

Dig your teeth into the best zombie fiction out there.

Click any cover below for info and an interview with the author.
1-2 titles added each week. Subscribe by emailing zombiebible@gmail.com.

Interview with Harry Shannon (The Hungry)

2012-01-07T22:57:00.009-07:00

THE BOOK

The Hungry is to zombie fiction as Die Hard is to cinema; the novel reads like one rapidly-building adrenaline high, expending massive amounts of ammunition, spilling entrails liberally, and crashing vehicles along the way. Readers are advised to clear an afternoon and "lock and load." I reached out to interview Harry Shannon, who along with Steven W. Booth is the co-author of this zombie action thriller. - Stant Litore.

AN INTERVIEW WITH HARRY SHANNON

Stant Litore: While fighting zombies, Sheriff Penny Miller spends much of your novel running around in a bloodied wedding dress, and of course your book cover features the image of Penny Miller in her dress, with a locked and loaded rifle, ready to raise hell. Can you tell us about that wedding dress and why Penny Miller is in it?

Harry Shannon: From the start I envisioned Sheriff Miller as a tough country girl, outspoken and bold. One of our conceits in writing the short story "Jailbreak," which brought Penny to life, was that she would end up being smarter and far more capable than the men around her. Anyway, that story prompted me to suggest to Steven that we go ahead and do an entire novel. Near the beginning of the book, Penny drives to her ex-husband's home because she is wounded and has nowhere else to go. When co-author Steven W. Booth send me the first draft, he'd somehow thought of having her husband cut off her uniform and then offer her a change of clothes--but all Terrill Lee has in the house is her old wedding dress. I thought that dress was such a delightful metaphor for everything Miller had wanted to escape. I expanded that scene to have the options be the dress or some flimsy undergarments his new girlfriend had worn. Of course, Penny takes the dress. For me, it was kind of a visual anchor, a way of keeping her frustrated and chafing during the zombie apocalypse, unable even now to escape the bonds of sexism. Somehow that evolved into making her wear the damned thing all the way through. Most women got the joke right away. We recently decided to offer the actual dress worn by actress/model Gillian Shure as first prize in a contest.

(From left to right: Steven W. Booth, Gillian Shure, Harry Shannon)

Stant Litore: Throughout the novel, you keep raising the stakes on what scenes a zombie action thriller can pull off (or get away with). What is an action scene you are particularly proud of?

Harry Shannon: I have a few personal favorites, but the one where poor Miller goes into a bathroom at an abandoned service station rocks, if I do say so myself. It hits a lot of nerves, urban legend style, and for me is both wildly funny and genuinely creepy. Our band of folks trapped in a squad car, surrounded like human sausages by dozens of the slavering undead is pretty wild. So many things happen in that book. Sometimes we dug ourselves into some pretty deep holes. Personally, I think the smaller, more tense scenes are best, though the big action stuff is always just a blast to write. In the end, all I care about is that people have a good time reading the novel.

Stant Litore: Is there a quiet, more intimate scene you are particularly proud of (and why)?

Harry Shannon: Not exactly intimate. Truthfully, I'm most proud of the ongoing sense of humor in The Hungry. It's non-stop action, but there is also lot of sexual tension between Penny Miller and Scratch, Penny and her ex-husband Terrill Lee, Penny and the Army guys. Keeping all that going while the end of the world unfolds before our eyes was quite an assignment.

Stant Litore: Your novel is aptly titled The Hungry. Could you comment on hunger? The dead are certainly hungry. What are your living characters hungry for? What are your readers hungry for?

Harry Shannon: As you point out, the title has a few different meanings. The infected folks are hungry for flesh, the living hunger for each other, for their freedom and just to keep breathing. Sheriff Penny suffers through an experience that speeds up her metabolism and leaves her sexually agitated and literally starving for food all the time. The scientists who set all this chaos in motion do so because of a hunger for money and power. As Buddha said, "the world is suffering and the cause of suffering is desire."

Stant Litore: The Hungry had its origins in a short story, "Jailbreak." What did you find exhilarating -- and what did you find difficult -- in opening that short story up into the larger scope and landscape of The Hungry?

Harry Shannon: At the end of the short story, Penny Miller survives and goes out into whatever is left of Nevada intending to do her duty. Speaking for myself, it just seemed perfectly natural to ask where she would go next. She was wounded and feeling all alone. It was our only serious roadblock. Steven and I debated that for a while and decided all humans would seek out someone they'd felt connected to. We made her ex-husband a veterinarian and went on with the story from there. The dress sprang from that chapter. It was remarkably easy to do an outline, once we had that first piece. We'd already decided on cliff-hanger chapter endings--just one seemingly impossible situation and then the next. Unlike a lot of my other novels and scripts, the rough story for The Hungry came pretty easily. We set out to have fun ourselves and create an entertaining, light-hearted read. Looks like it worked.

Stant Litore: I have to ask. If The Hungry was made into a blockbuster film, who would you want in the movie?

Harry Shannon: I'd cast the woman on the cover, Gillian Shure! For those who don't know, she played the Constable in my little Lionsgate movie Dead and Gone several years ago. Gillian was already featured in the art for my novels CLAN and Running Cold, and then also posed for the cover of The Hungry. By the way, Yossi Sasson directed Dead and Gone and shot the cover for us as a favor. Gillian is a tall, strong woman and a great actress. That cover is already iconic in some strange way, it's redhaired Gillian Shure as Penny Miller. Period. It's now difficult for me to picture anyone else doing it. If I had to choose someone else, I've always liked Katee Sackoff from Battlestar Galactica. She could also do it quite well. And Norman Reedus, Daryl from The Walking Dead, has just got to play Scratch, the biker. A ton of female readers have already insisted. And me, I'll play that crotchety old redneck who owns the abandoned gas station. I've always wanted to die in a zombie classic.

Stant Litore: You and me both! Harry, one last question. What current project are you working on?

Harry Shannon: We are already halfway through a sequel to The Hungry, since the reception has been so amazing. I'm also working on a fifth Mick Callahan thriller, tentatively entitled Rough Men. I have a novella in the works for Top Suspense Group. Yossi Sasson and I are kicking around doing some webisodes as a demo a possible TV series. It looks like another busy year.

Thanks for inviting me to hang out for a while, and all the best for 2012!

Learn more about Harry Shannon's fiction at:

www.harryshannon.com

Interview with Stant Litore (The Zombie Bible)

2012-01-07T22:13:00.009-07:00

THE SERIES

"This book is -- if you can believe it -- a contemplative zombie novel": that's how one reviewer described a recent installment in The Zombie Bible. Retelling biblical stories and church legends as narratives of humanity's long struggle against hunger and the hungry dead, the series brings to the zombie genre a concern for ethics, metaphysics, and social justice. It is not light reading; it will provoke you, move you to tears, and demand that you think hard about what it means to live, what it means to die, and how to treat your fellow human beings between those events. - Stant Litore.

INTERVIEWS

A. K. Marshall (in October 2011 on her blog A Diamond in the Dark): Where are you from, and what were you like as a child?

Stant Litore: I was raised in the Pacific Northwest, and as a child I was a daydreamer. I spent a lot of time in the woods with a wooden stick, fighting off invisible giants and enormous, predatory birds with remarkably bad tempers. My father had a herd of goats, and each February I’d leave my bedroom window open a crack and listen for the does giving birth. Then I’d run out into the pasture, with the permafrost cracking and crunching beneath my boots (we were up in the foothills of the Cascades, and it was colder then). That’s what I was like as a child: in a hurry to see anything that was beautiful, and to help if I could.

A. K. Marshall: How has your environment or upbringing colored your writing?

Stant Litore: I was in love with things being born, and with things growing. Some of my favorite hours as a child were spent in my mother’s garden with warm earth in my hands
even though I have no green thumb at all. Maybe this is what attracted me to horror – a sense of the inconceivable preciousness of life. My other genre is fantasy, which is about the encounter with the marvelous and the fear and wonder it engenders.

My fiction tends to pivot on themes of social justice, the priority of human compassion over ideology or blind faith in the rituals of your ancestors, and the need to look very intentionally at the history of your culture and of your own life. I grew up poor; I saw things some people haven’t. Right now that’s all I have to say about that. The rest you’ll find in my books.

Wednesday Lee Friday (in an October 2011 Zombie Zone News interview): Author Kim Paffenroth, among others, also explores themes on religion and the undead—retelling Dante’s inferno in his newest book. Why do you think religious scholars are attracted to zombie lore?

Stant Litore: You can Google zombie fiction and in five minutes you can find maybe a hundred apocalypse stories set in our own time. But you have to realize, a zombie outbreak in almost any century would represent a metaphysical crisis. Their existence speaks directly to the core questions of Western religion.

Think about that core belief that we are each made in the image of God. Every living being. But what do you see when you look at another human face – what do you let yourself see? Do you see God’s face, radiant and divine, shining in and through that other person? Do you see someone to love and serve, someone whose very existence and proximity to you is a reminder to worship? Or do you see an object to feed your own hungers? An enemy to feed your hate and bitterness? A potential lover to feed your sexual hunger? A tool to further your ambition? An ear for your dreams or your rants?

When you look at another human being, do you see food?

Zombies can’t see or recognize any human face. They can’t see the face of God. They are the ultimate epitome of the human being whose unreasoning, insatiable hunger blinds them to God’s face. An encounter with the extreme of the ravenous dead forces us to confront our own moments of extravagant hunger and our choices in how we relate to other people. They demand that we figure out what it means to be human and what it means to be alive.

Kim Paffenroth is getting at that, too, when he retells Dante’s journey into hell as a journey through a valley of the dead; seeing the helpless, unstoppable hunger of the dead, Dante has to wrestle with the paradoxes of human desire. What should we desire? How should we desire it? What really matters? How do we keep from becoming mere zombies?

Wednesday Lee Friday: Who is your target reader?

Stant Litore: I suspect my readers are going to be popping up all over the place, so I’m not sure I can tell you who they are (I’ve been hearing from pastors, pagans, goth students, and moms), but I can tell you what they like.

They like zombies.

And beyond zombies, they are fascinated with the past – they know that even if we lock our past safely away in a photo album or a history book or a tomb, it’s always ready to lurch out of nowhere and devour us.

My readers like stories that are big and about ‘larger-than-life’ events. They want a bit of the old comic-book glamour in their novel. They’re not ashamed of reading a good pulp novel, if it’s smart pulp. They want to see Samson smashing his way through a thousand dead with a donkey’s jawbone. They want to see Polycarp moving down the street, sending the dead sliding to the earth with a touch of his hand and the sacrifice of his heart. They want to see one of those ‘five greatest kisses of all time’ mentioned in The Princess Bride, and they want to see miracles.

But they also like to read intensely poignant, human stories. They know that when the blood and gore stops flowing, it’s the quiet moments that really matter. It’s an aging man offering to make dinner tonight for his wife, knowing that in the morning she’s going into a life-and-death situation. It’s the tender words between a woman and her husband as she cleans his wounds. It’s a man at his friend’s shoulder, urgently convincing his friend to teach orphan children to read and write, pro bono.

My readers have always thought that the bible stories were great stories, but that a lot of the time when people talk about them, they water down all the good parts. They’ve always wished that someone would come by and give them the hard version of the stories, with all the passion and fury and intense, deep religion-where-it-really-matters. Just look at Samson and Delilah – that story shows up in my books as Out of the Eater, Something to Eat (coming 2013). That’s a sweaty, sexy, brutal story, and it has a whole lot of spillage of guts and human messiness in it. The tale of Samson and Delilah has a lot of profound things to say, but there’s no real way to pretty that story up and make it look well-dressed and polite and ready for Sunday morning. You try to do that, and you do your listeners a disservice, you do yourself a disservice, and you do God a disservice.

What do my readers like? My readers like a little violence, a little passion, a little philosophy. That’s why The Zombie Bible is such a great read for them.

Katie M. John (in a Christmas interview on her blog): In 140 characters, describe your private self.

Stant Litore: Will stop on a blizzard day to help someone whose car is busted. Have an incurable phobia of zombies, jellyfish, and Westboro Baptist Church.

Katie M. John: In 140 characters, describe your writerly self.

Stant Litore: Knives flashing in the dark. Sometimes you have to cut deep to find the real beating heart of the story.

Katie M. John: [As a horror writer] how do you like to bring 'the dark side' into Christmas?

Stant Litore: I’ll be honest, Christmas is the one day of the year that my mind is not dwelling on horror. In Hamlet, the guards describe how all the ghosts and bogeymen go to sleep when the cock crows at dawn on Christmas day. It’s the day when peace and goodwill lies over the earth.

But I will say this: While we eat our Christmas dinners and spend time with family, in many parts of the world children are starving, women in remote villages are walking ten miles to fetch a bucket of clean water while other women in crowded cities – right here in our own country – are working strip clubs under duress because if they don’t, they’ll have the shit beat out of them. Still other people are watching their homes be burned, or are packing in a hurry to get out. The dark side of Christmas is that a whole lot of people are suffering, and most of us aren’t thinking about them or acting to see justice done. Most of us are just breathing a sigh of relief that we managed to buy so many things before they sold out; in many cases, these are things manufactured in sweat shops and slave factories on distant shores.

I think if we really want to talk about wishing a merry Christmas and a happy New Year, we should have a moment of silence somewhere in the day and resolve to do what we can to make one hell of a difference this next year. Even if we just make a big difference for one person. Because otherwise, our Christmas dinner is a dinner served on the backs of broken and enslaved people and on the beaten bones of children, and the beautiful truths we tell ourselves about the season start to become lies.

Katie M. John: Which six famous figures (dead or alive) would you love to have sitting at your Christmas table?

Stant Litore: Since it’s the Christmas table, I’d pick the famous people who knew how to party and how to laugh fit to shake the room. I’d want Hafiz there – I think he’d be belly-laughing over pretty much everything, and trying to get the rest of us to. I think Abe Lincoln, because I admire him and he really needed a break and some people to cheer him up, there toward the end. Think we might could do that; my family is a cheerful crew.

Let’s see, how many left, four? Anne McCaffrey. She’d be spinning yarns, and a Christmas dinner isn’t anything without a few good yarns. And, well, I miss her. How about Themistocles, the hero of the Persian Wars? Frankly, you need a veteran at the table. He’ll show off his scars, his voice will boom out when there’s a lull, he’ll belt out carols off-key, and he may well try to dominate the table, but we’ll enjoy having him there.

Also, I’m sure this is one of those ‘oh come on, you didn’t pick him’ answers, but let’s get the Rabbi Jesus there, too. We won’t run out of wine, and he always seemed to have just the right thing to say. And since I’ve got one left, Barack Obama. If you’ve seen the benefits dinners, you know. Man can tell a joke.

GET THE BOOKS

I am going to OWN 2012

2012-01-02T11:37:00.009-07:00

Here's how it is.

In 2012, I am going to live as fiercely as though the world depends on it.

In 2012, I am going to make sure that when I kiss my wife, she knows she is far more treasured than work, hobby, or blue sky.

In 2012, I am going to remember how to sit in silence and breathe for a piece.

In 2012, I am going to entertain my readers til their hearts pound and move them until they weep over their Kindles.

In 2012, I am going to dance most evenings with my toddler until we both fall down laughing.

In 2012, I am going to change zombie horror forever. One book at a time.

In 2012, I am going to do my mighty best to conquer my irrational terror of chicken nuggets.

In 2012 I am going to take a little more time to celebrate with coworkers. Winter grimness be damned.

In 2012 I am going to do more to remember and share the stories of those many who suffer, world around, while we in the First World celebrate and watch fireworks. If 2012 is not a year of greater justice, then all our personal little resolutions become empty and transient and meaningless as scraps of paper in the wind.

In 2012 I am going to make sure my wife feels both listened to and provided for. Did pretty good in 2011 but there's no summit, just journey.

In 2012, I am going to spend a few evenings with a box of crayons and some paper. Or whatever white surface is near at hand.

In 2012, I am going to strain mightily to win my wife more time with her camera, and some more hours of sleep. Taking care of two little ones is no walk in the park.

In 2012, I am going to make it big(ger) and still spend time conversing with my readers. After all, these stories are theirs -- I'm just the one delivering them.

In 2012, I am going to teach my toddler to speak English. Or be retaught the language by her, which I suspect is more likely.

Resolutions aside, I am going to OWN 2012. Are you?

Stant Litore

Stant Litore's Next Book

2011-12-28T20:16:00.011-07:00

I have been deeply delighted (and humbled) by the positive reception of the first two installments in The Zombie Bible; I have been receiving great reviews, fan email, and intelligent questions from readers and writers of all flavors. Most wonderfully, people have told me that the debut novella, Death Has Come Up into Our Windows, moved them nearly to tears. I have no words to express how much it means to a writer to hear that.

I wanted to give a quick glance at the next project in the series. Coming in 2012 -- The Zombie Bible: Galilee Night (novel) and a novella-length companion piece to the novel (working title: The Zombie Bible: Horses in the Wind). Set circa 1200 BC and loosely based on the events of Judges 4, these two installments will tell the story of an invasion of the Holy Land by the walking dead, and how some men and women faced terrible choices, how some rose tall from amid the bruised ruins of their former lives to defend their People and their Covenant.

Would you like to meet the characters?

There's Devora, the old prophetess. She can see the future, but she fears the past more: the memory of a little girl who put down her undead mother -- a little girl she can never forgive.

And Barak, the captain who will lead a fragmented people into dark hills to give battle to the dead. In his heart he longs for his vineyard, for warm earth and smooth vines in his hands. He has never seen the dead, until this night.

And Yael, the heroine of Horses in the Wind -- she is in the novel, too. Enslaved, named after her captor's God. Her own charred wooden goddess, small enough to grip in her hand, lies buried outside her abuser's tent, waiting for the night when she will reclaim both her deity and her freedom.

In Death Has Come Up into Our Windows, you saw one man's struggle with hunger and with the hungry dead, driven against all despair and all hope to defend his wife, his People, and his God. In What Our Eyes Have Witnessed, you saw the injustices and passions of men and women struggling to survive and hope in a rapidly decomposing world -- this time set against a larger stage, that of the city of second-century Rome.

In 2012, the stage widens to an entire land, and a threat that could devour an entire People even in the very moment when they are fighting to learn who they really are. This next installment is when The Zombie Bible takes on an epic scope. I hope you'll join me for it. There are many months to wait, but I promise that when the next two books arrive, they will -- at different moments -- have you cheering, crying, or thinking deep --and then leave you shaken.

Yours in truth and fiction,
Stant Litore

Current volumes (click the cover art for more information):

Covers by Danielle Tunstall.

Christmas Contest Winners!

2011-12-27T08:28:00.004-07:00

Thank to you everyone who participated in the recent 12 Days of Creepfest holiday blog tour. It was a blast! Now it's time to announce the winner(s) of the contest. Entrants were asked to describe a holiday tradition or practice of theirs -- how do they hold back the winter dark and bring in holiday light? I then invited a pool of people close to me to vote on their favorite responses. Turns out ... we have a tie!

The winners are:

Charles W. Jones - for reminding us that at the holidays, "if you don't have somewhere to go there is always someone to welcome you in and make you feel as part of them"; would that it were so year around.

Teressa Oliver - for reminding us that not everyone spends the holiday around a nice hearth with a tree; some people work, some people keep our world going while the rest of us sleep. And get by reading zombie novels all night long. :) Teressa, I'm sorry this book won't arrive in time for your Christmas night reading binge, but I hope it will help on other work nights!

What they've won:

A free copy of Death Has Come Up into Our Windows, the first volume of The Zombie Bible, currently in the top twenty horror bestsellers for the Amazon Kindle.

I'll also be sending a copy out to Nora B. Peevy as an honorable mention ... she told her Christmas traditions (uniquely hers and her family's) with humor and panache. :)

Until next time, dear readers, Merry Christmas and may this winter bring you joy and many good reads.

Yours in truth and fiction,

Stant Litore

Guest Post: 4 Things Every Horror Reader Should Know (Annetta Ribken)

2011-12-17T08:29:00.007-07:00

Friends and readers,

With the holiday Creepfest horror tour in full swing, I thought I'd invite a few of the other participating authors over for an interview or a chat. Today, we have Annetta Ribken, author of Athena's Promise. Annetta suggests some things that every horror reader should know. Here's the list.

"1. Horror, as a genre, has a long and distinctive literary history. You're talking the likes of Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, H.P. Lovecraft to name but just a few. Their stories will scare the beejeebuz out of you even a hundred years later. Now THAT'S staying power.

2. When you read horror, there is some must-have equipment you should have at hand. To wit:

A back-up light source with extra batteries
Poise undergarments for those unfortunate accidents
A machete, a cross, a stake, and access to fire
A teddy bear
Xanax

3. You will be forgiven for throwing the neighbor at the zombie horde to get away. After all, it is about survival, right?

4. And finally, that bump you hear from the closet? The scratchy sound at the window? That awful odor emanating from underneath the floorboards? Yeah. RUN. Don't look, just run. Fast."

Annetta has been writing since words were carved on stone tablets with chisels. Not only does she write her own words, Annetta is also an accomplished editor. She lives just outside of St. Louis with her evil feline overlord, a rescued shelter cat named Athena. Her debut novel, Athena's Promise, is available on Amazon and Smashwords.

Visit Annetta here:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/netta50
Facebook Fan Page: https://www.facebook.com/Annetta.Ribken
Blog: http://wordwebbing.com/
GoodReads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3414795.Annetta_Ribken

And make sure to visit all of the writers who are touring this beautiful season. There are a lot of contests with good prizes, and you get to meet a good many writers of indie horror.

Dark Nights Before Christmas: A Contest & Giveaway

2011-12-09T13:49:00.013-07:00

According to medieval lore, though the dead walk by night, Christmas Day is near, and at the cock's crow at dawn that morning all ghosts must sleep.

But the nights leading up to that day are dark and long and cold. They are nights of waiting, and listening. They are nights of your breath freezing on the air. They are nights of brighter stars, cold and violent in their beauty.

It is winter, and it may be dark even before you leave work. The best thing is to curl up with your Kindle or your Nook or a good, solid paper book, and read a few ghost stories. Just be careful. If the one you read is too chilling, you may be jumping at an owl's cry or shivering at some tiny sound at your window.

To help you find some great horror tales, I'd like to introduce you to the 2011 "Twelve Days of Creepfest" blog tour; quite a few horror writers are participating, and hosting contests and giveaways at their sites. I hope you'll take a look and find someone you like, and maybe a new book to read during the long dark. The tour opens on Tuesday, December 13 and closes at the end of Christmas Eve ... a few hours before the cock crows and the ghosts must sleep.

Since you're here on my site, let me offer you a contest, too. Just post a comment and tell me about one wonderful thing you plan to do this Christmas Eve (or Hannukah, or Solstice, or whichever winter holiday you've chosen or whichever has chosen you). If you don't have anything 'wonderful' included in your plan, now is your chance to add something! Is there a unique family tradition you have, or a tradition all your own, or one you are making up on the spot? What are YOU going to do to welcome a little warmth back into the world and keep the night-ghouls at bay?

I will have a pool of friends vote on their favorite response, and the winner will receive a free (e-book) copy of my the first volume in The Zombie Bible. And if you haven't encountered The Zombie Bible yet, you definitely want to check it out. It’s a series of biblical tales retold as episodes of humanity’s long struggle against hunger and the hungry dead. This isn’t your parents’ Sunday School. It isn’t your college bible study or history class. It’s the old stories coming back, with teeth, carved open so you can see every beat of their hearts. The Zombie Bible is a lethal series that wrestles with the violence of human hunger and the power of hope. You can learn more about the series here.

Enjoy the contest -- post your entries below by December 24! (And include a way for me to contact you if you win -- or drop me a line at zombiebible@gmail.com to let me know you've posted your entry here.) Then check out the other writers in the blog tour (zombies, ghosts, knives in the dark), and as we light up these dark and creepy winter nights with lights strung on trees and rooftops, may you find some frights in good stories by the fire, some laughter in time among friends or family, and may you revel in this season of joy.

Stant Litore
Author, The Zombie Bible

Video Review of The Zombie Bible

2011-12-01T19:38:00.004-07:00

Been wondering whether to grab a copy of Stant Litore's The Zombie Bible?

This might help you decide. Thea Isis Gregory, author of the remarkable Zombie Bedtime Stories, just uploaded this video review of the first book in The Zombie Bible. She comments on the book's artistic approach to horror, the vulnerability of God, and the violently emotional ride of the story. Take a look!

You can get Death Has Come Up into Our Windows in its ebook editions from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. The paperback will be arriving in January 2012, coinciding with the release of the second volume in the series, What Our Eyes Have Witnessed.

Also, swing by and visit Thea Isis Gregory's site. She is a writer with a ravenous appetite for horror and something fresh to say about the undead.

You Might Be Dating a Zombie if...

2011-11-30T23:29:00.007-07:00

Let me preface this list by admitting that I write dark, dark fiction. Reviewer Lucinda Rose wrote of the first book in my series that "a good novel should go for the throat; this novel goes for your heart, rips it out, and eats it before your eyes," and Jennifer Bielman called the book "terrifying in its no-holds-barred type of truth." That's what I write -- my work carves into you and leaves you bleeding afterward.

So my blog is sometimes a bit of a relief -- it's where I can share a little humor or crack a joke with friends, outside the intensity of the books themselves. In that vein, I wanted to share this.

It has occurred to me that zombies are now proliferating at such a rate that they really can appear anywhere. As the protective father of two daughters, this gives rise to a few concerns. I have seen otherwise quite intelligent young women date the worse sort of young men (and vice versa, certainly). So if you are a young woman or know a young woman or were once a young woman or would like to be a young woman, please take this list to heart and make sure that when courting a potential mate, you are not in fact dating one of the dead.

You might be dating a zombie if:

1) He falls to pieces on you at the dinner table, and maybe spills his guts before you even get past "Nice weather today."
2) He treats you like you're nothing but meat.
3) He goes for your body before the first course even arrives.
4) His communication skills are worse even than his halitosis.
5) You share your feelings & he does nothing but groan.
6) You can't sleep ten minutes at a time without him nibbling on you and demanding a midnight snack from you.
7) He shows up for your date and his unwashed clothes smell like dead things.
8) Every time he comes home from a long day, you find he's swerving and can't walk in a straight line.
9) Instead of an engagement ring, he leaves your ex-boyfriend's half-eaten corpse on the table. (Then again, I recognize that some of you may find that quite romantic.)

I hope you'll take the list to heart and be wary. Lord knows there are a lot of zombies out there masquerading as living men.

I also hope you'll check out Death Has Come Up into Our Windows, the first book in The Zombie Bible. While it will not make you laugh (except grimly), you will feel it deeply, and you will always remember it.

Yours in truth and fiction,

Stant Litore

Zombie Attack Barbie, and a Father's Search for Good Role Models

2011-11-30T18:17:00.005-07:00

As some of you know, my family has been facing some medical issues over the weekend, and a friend shared this with me to cheer us up. My good friend doubtless is aware that as a father of two daughters, I am increasingly concerned with the ways that our society teaches women to devalue themselves ... and the importance of both paternal affection and strong role models for young girls.

So my friend sent me word of Sarah Anne Langton's collectible Zombie Attack Barbie (pictured to the right). This post-Buffy zombieslayer sports an assault rifle, katana, ground-to-air bazooka, and grenades, together with traditionally-Barbie ultra-feminine fashion. (Because no zombieslayer should venture into the field without fully accessorizing, the bazooka can be painted with a pink floral design, and this Barbie also wears a stylish pink beret.)

I am especially tickled by the zombie-Ken.

Well, there you have it, folks. A fun way to prepare your daughters for the zombie apocalypse at an early age ... and teach them some valuable life lessons:

You can be both independent and feminine.
To thrive in a dog-eat-dog, zombie-eat-people, man's world, you need to develop a versatile skill set. Each situation you will encounter in life requires a different touch. Some challenges you may be able to balance on the razor's edge of a samurai sword. But sometimes you really need to stroll into that board meeting with bazooka-like self-assertion -- especially if the board members think you're just a pretty face.
Sometimes that casanova who catches your eye actually turns out to be a decaying, flesh-eating zombie in prince's clothing.
When said casanova needs to be put down, there are times when a bullet to the brain is a better response to the situation than trying to be nice.

I'm being very tongue-and-cheek, of course. Still, I'm absurdly delighted to see Barbie branching out in her career choices and preparing for survival. I note, however, that she remains painfully anorexic. I may need to continue my search a while for good role models for my daughters.

Stant Litore
Author, The Zombie Bible

In Memory of Pern: What I Learned From Anne McCaffrey

2011-11-22T17:29:00.012-07:00

Things I learned as a teen from Anne McCaffrey:

Talent and beauty can be found anywhere, in even the poorest of fish-holds; in the meanest and most abusive of environments, something can still blossom. All that is needed is the courage to believe in one's own worth. Menolly taught me that.
Compassion must always triumph over tradition. Lessa taught me that.
When you and your wife are irritating each other, sometimes the only proper answer is not to plead with her, tolerate her, or ignore her, but simply to draw her close and kiss her senseless. F'lar taught me that.
Sometimes, there is no evil in being a follower rather than a leader, if the cause is one that touches your heart and the leader is one you believe in. F'nor taught me that.

And as a young writer, McCaffrey was one of those novelists who taught me that genre is an artifice, and that the only thing that might keep musicians' schools, flights of dragons, and derelict spacecraft from co-existing in the same pages is our own lack of imagination. Just as the only thing that might keep fishermen's daughters and nobles from eating dinner together is our lack of imagination when it comes to people and our unwillingness to look into each other's eyes.

Michael Whelan. Moreta.

I did not love every book Anne wrote, and I did not read further than the first nine or ten Pern books. But I can think of only a handful of writers who opened up my imagination as a young reader as deeply and poignantly and captivatingly as Anne McCaffrey did.

Please join me -- post a comment -- in wishing her well. She is no longer here. She is now off the map -- in the white spaces, the unknown, "where there be dragons." But I would still wish her well and thank her for her fiction.

Yours in truth and fiction,

Stant Litore

------------------------------------------------

Dear Anne McCaffrey,

You will be sorely missed. For five decades you have been an inspiration to other writers, having built on the back of one wonderful short story ("Dragonflight") a long and lucrative career -- and you have been an inspiration to millions of readers. In a world where little is certain, you wrote with bravery and courage about the unstoppable power of hope, and it was that hope, more even than the magnificent spread of a dragon's wings (dragons the size of Boeing 747s, we're told), that drew me to Dragonflight and later to many of your books. I read this novel to my wife when we were dating; when I studied abroad as a college student, I found a tattered paperback of the book in French. Your characters have touched many parts of my life, repeatedly. I wish I'd had the chance to meet you. - Stant

The Author's Family Grows

2011-11-17T11:02:00.011-07:00

Yes, there is a new addition in Stant Litore's family. His second daughter, Inara, was born 8 lbs 5 oz November 15. She is beautiful and strong, and has Stant dreaming of things other than zombie horror for once. :)

From Stant: "I'll still be wrapping up the final editing on What Our Eyes Have Witnessed as we move through the Advent season, but I ask my readers' patience -- this beautiful girl has my heart caught every time she opens those big, big eyes. And I'll be perhaps a little short on sleep."

To drop Stant and his family a note of congratulations, leave a comment below! For a preview of the upcoming installment in The Zombie Bible, go here.

It's time. An aggressive reimagining of the bible stories you grew up with. And yes, there are zombies.

2011-10-29T09:10:00.010-06:00

The Zombie Bible is an ongoing series of horror novels (and some novellas) retelling biblical stories as tales of humanity's enduring struggle with the undead. The philosophy is deep, the gore is brutal, and the human loss and love are poignant and heart-wrenching. You really shouldn't miss it, because neither zombies nor the Bible have ever been done this way before.

Book One - Amazon $4.99 | Barnes & Noble $4.99

From the author, Stant Litore:

Do you remember the first time you ever saw a zombie on film? I do. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in all its black-and-white glory: a whole pack of the dead feasting on that poor girl’s body, tearing off an ear, a chunk of hand, passing around the bits of flesh in unholy communion.

It shocked me, and chilled me to the heart.

I’ve watched a lot of zombie movies since; my wife will tell you that the first time we watched one together, I stowed a wood-axe behind the armchair while the opening credits began to roll. Just in case. Luckily, my date was more amused than terrified, and we got married.

Zombies scare the bejeezus out of me.

I’m going to let you in on a secret. Religion used to be like that. The old stories – they used to shock. Crucifixion is shocking. And horrific. Raising the dead is shocking. Healing lepers, filling an empty lake with fish, fire and brimstone hurtling from the sky, cats and dogs living together, the whole stock-up-on-canned-food-and-pray apocalypse – these are shocking things!

Even the “good news” idea that in the midst of a rapidly decomposing world, we might still live lives of unstoppable hope, focusing (heedless of the cost) on the things that break God's heart rather than focusing on our own private hungers – that’s a shocking idea, too.

We’ve lost sight of that.

The new fiction series Zombie Bible isn’t your average gore flick reproduced on paper or e-ink. And this isn’t your parents’ Sunday School, or your college bible study. It’s the old stories coming back, with teeth, with their innards spilling out messily before your eyes. Zombie Bible isn’t going to pull any punches. It isn’t going to water down the truth. It isn’t going to look for a PG-13 rating and it definitely isn’t going to tidy anything up with a happy love story at the end.

But over the course of this series, you're going to see human beings living the bravest lives they can in a world that wants to eat them alive. You’ll see men, women, and children facing impossible choices and fighting to live lives that are about far more than just surviving. I hope that you’ll be shocked. And horrified, as well as inspired, entertained, and maybe even moved.

Zombie Bible is coming to your local e-bookstore (Amazon, Barnes & Noble) and in paperback from Dante’s Heart Publications. The first volume, Death Has Come Up into Our Windows, is available now in its e-book edition (Amazon | Barnes & Noble)! I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Get ready for this series. Tell your friends about it. Subscribe to this page, or better yet – email me. Let me know you’re out there. Let me know you’re hungry.

See you in Zombieland.

Stant Litore

zombiebible@gmail.com
@thezombiebible

"Anonymous" is Not Only Utter Bunk, It's Offensive Bunk

2011-10-27T10:17:00.009-06:00

As a writer who grew up in poverty (and as a past Shakespeare teacher), I just want to take a moment to say how awful the premise of Anonymous is. And how much I loathe everything it stands for. Read between the lines, and the message you get pretty quickly is "The impoverished working classes could never produce a genius. It must have been a rich, educated, cultured man with connections." For example, take this quote:

Anonymous is about Elizabethan-era political scheming over the royal succession. The intrigue is set against the claim that the author of the most hallowed plays and poems in the English language was not the barely educated commoner William Shakespeare, about whom we know virtually nothing.
Instead, it was Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford (played by Rhys Ifans), the highly educated, well-traveled aristocrat with royal connections, who penned "To be or not to be" and all the other deathless lines we know as Shakespeare. Why hide his authorship? Because high-born types of the era did not mess about in rowdy theaters during the rise of the art-fearing Puritans.

I have to ask, Are you serious?

I am disturbed by the barely veiled claim that only a well-connected and "highly educated" aristocrat could produce "deathless lines" or genius. I am very curious as to where exactly the makers of Anonymous believe that such history-changing people as Abraham Lincoln and Jesus of Nazareth came from.

Also, the arguments made in the article are just bad history. The rich in Shakespeare's time did dabble in theatre -- they just had it performed in private, courtly settings. Putting on a drama in a giant playhouse was a corporate endeavor -- it wasn't something the wealthy needed or wanted to do. And if there was an aristocrat who was in need of cash, he wasn't likely to speculate in such a risky business as playhouses. He would instead invest in tobacco or perhaps in "marrying up." Second, we actually know a lot about the man William Shakespeare; the idea that we don't is an enduring myth. We just don't know a great deal about his personal life; we know a lot about his business affairs and the events of his life.

In any case, please don't let anyone ever sell you on the idea that the works of a great writer and cultural icon "couldn't" have been produced by a middle-class man with poor or small-town roots.

This is Stant Litore. Thank you for listening.

Coffin Hop: What Character Are You Looking Forward to Seeing in the Zombie Bible?

2011-10-25T23:19:00.003-06:00

As part of Halloween Week's memorable Coffin Hop web tour -- in which you can visit the sites of more than ninety horror writers and novelists --I want to introduce you to The Zombie Bible and to a contest with giveaways!

You can read about The Zombie Bible here. It's an ongoing series of horror novels (and some novellas) retelling biblical stories as tales of humanity's enduring struggle with the undead. The philosophy is deep, the gore is brutal, and the human loss and love is poignant and heart-wrenching. You really shouldn't miss it, because neither zombies nor the Bible have ever been done this way before. You can check out the first book and see what other readers have been saying about it - click the cover in the sidebar to the right. --->

ZOMBIE BIBLE:
DEATH HAS COME UP INTO OUR WINDOWS

In two days, they will lock the city gates. We will run out of food and only the dead who are locked in with us will eat.

Which brings me to the Zombie Bible Coffin Hop Contest! Are you ready?

CONTEST: PART ONE: MACHETE AND ROSARY

Break out your memories of Sunday School, and tell me in the Comments what bible character(s) you are most looking forward to seeing pitted against the ravenous dead, and why. The most intriguing answer will win a free copy of the electronic edition of the first book in The Zombie Bible!

You can also see what books in the series are in the works for 2012.

PART TWO: VISIONS OF THE DEAD

To win a free copy of the second book in the series as well as the haunting novelette Lilith (about one mother's face-off with a primeval, infant-devouring goddess), break out your artistic skills and make a poster about The Zombie Bible. You can see examples and contest rules here.

Please have a wonderful time!

- Stant Litore

Also, please join me in "hopping on" through this week's Coffin Hop web tour! Hop from website to website to meet some of today's up-and-coming horror writers, the chilling and the creepy and the profound. My fellow writers are all hosting contests on their sites with free giveaways -- you really should check them out.

Have a hauntingly good time and spread the word -- there is a lot of good writing out there and a lot of tricks and treats. Don't miss it.

This is Stant Litore. Thank you for listening.

Coffin Hop: Meet Today's Horror Writers!

2011-10-23T17:43:00.002-06:00

Friends and readers, please join me in this week's Coffin Hop web tour! Hop from website to website to meet some of today's up-and-coming horror writers, the chilling and the creepy and the profound. Chances are, most of my fellow writers are hosting contests on their sites with free giveaways -- you really should check them out. Here's mine.

Have a hauntingly good time and spread the word -- there is a lot of good writing out there and a lot of tricks and treats. Don't miss it.

This is Stant Litore. Thank you for listening.

The Dead in Venice: A Ghost Story

2011-10-23T17:19:00.009-06:00

This is indeed a true story, and I have never forgotten it, though I also never thought I'd write about it.

I was raised in a house inhabited by the unquiet and unrestful dead. Footfalls on the stairs in the empty hours, and a revenant that would shake the bed at 3:53 am each morning without fail. The house had been built in 1903 and it was in every way unsound: black mold thick as cobwebs in the attic, rotting wood porch, and all the memories of some family that had lived there before and no longer did. My father kept a shotgun by the front door, and we had the county’s largest, loudest dogs outside to watch over both house and livestock.

But that was just the character of the house; it wasn’t chilling, it just was. Waking up at 3:53 you could get used to, and you or your brother, whoever woke first, could always chuck a pillow at the offending spirit. One time I sat up and rubbed my eyes and, because I was a little older then, I told the spirit quite soberly that I was sorry but I couldn’t help it.

It got a little quieter after that.

None of that was scary – certainly not fearful like being stalked by a cougar in the woods, which happened to me once. That was fearful – you knew there was a good chance you might be eaten, and you couldn’t see a thing through the ferns.

But this was our house, and these were its dead, and none of them particularly malignant, just full of sorrow and loneliness and insomnia. Other people’s dead are scarier.

It was the cold, windy December of 2002 and I was in Venice traveling with other students. What you have to understand about Venice is that for all its gondolas and its moonlit night-time beauty, it has more dead than most places in the world and many of them died in nasty and unmentionable ways, and a good many of them linger there now without name or memory. The people they might wish to communicate with are gone, and the things they might want to communicate about are gone, and they’re all that’s left.

I don’t know why this night was as scary as it was, but I’ll tell it the best I know how. We had just come back from visiting the Jewish Quarter with its somber monument of apology (in four languages) to the innocent sent away to die in WWII. Why we went there by night in December I have no idea. We were coming back and waiting for a vaporetto by the canal, there in the back of Venice, the part you don’t see in movies. The houses were ancient and drowning and water-logged and looked as miserable as people sitting naked in a swamp. There were broken windows and rooms that maybe hadn’t been lit in years. It would have been just mournful, but seeing what we’d already seen that night, those lonely windows just seemed to whisper: Terrible things happened here, terrible things, we saw them, but we won’t tell you about them, we’ll just sit here and look at you.

One of the girls in our group shrieked. We all looked up, but she and I were the only ones that saw it. The others said afterward they saw nothing or maybe just a sort of white blur. One of the other students said they actually thought they saw a doll in a white dress.

I know Allison had nightmares about it for weeks. I can’t say that I did, but it sat with me and has ever since, and I think of it sometimes and when I do I go get a sweater or an afghan and pull it around my shoulders like an old woman with a shawl.

What I saw that night I will write here with reluctance. It wasn’t like the dead in my father’s crumbling old house. It wasn’t like the dead I’ve seen or think I’ve seen since. I saw a young girl who couldn’t have been more than fourteen, dressed in white and slamming her palms on the glass and screaming without sound. I will never forget her eyes. I won’t forget the way she was there – extremely, visibly there. And then the way she wasn’t. And the way she was back again a moment later, not because she’d moved or been pulled away but because one moment she existed at that window, and the next she didn’t, and the moment after that she was there again screaming as though there had been no interruption or pause. Like flicking a light switch on and off. And I will never forget the looming shadow behind her, and the way my heart pounded in my chest at the sight of it.

If I ever feel the kind of terror I saw in that girl’s eyes, I don’t think I’ll survive it. I think it would leave me a mindless, shaking animal without thought or speech. And afterward, I might not even remember how to scream.

By the time the late-night vaporetto chugged up to our drenched station with a noise of bubbles and old motors, the light switch had flicked off for a while and the girl hadn’t come back. Allison was crying softly and one of the other girls was holding her and trying to calm her down. I was just watched the window, and I kept my eyes on it until the waterboat took us around a bend in that little back-of-Venice canal.

That’s the only real ghost story I have to tell, because most ghosts are just lonely and restless, not unlike some people are even before they die. But that one wasn’t just lonely and restless, and I hope before God that whatever man or thing hurt her in whatever century she lived in felt the remorse of it for the rest of his existence.

---

Stant Litore writes about the restless dead, and the first two volumes in his series The Zombie Bible are now available at Amazon. The debut installment is called Death Has Come Up into Our Windows and tells the story of a prophet imprisoned in a well in a dying city; each day, his gaolers toss one of the ravenous dead in after him. You should read it; the book will leave a mark on you. Stant lives in Colorado with his wife and two daughters, and stays out of certain parts of the mountains during the dark of the moon.

---

This ghost story originally appeared as a guest post for Ruth Barrett's site, Spirited Words.

Reviews

2011-10-06T18:11:00.033-06:00

The Zombie Bible: Death Has Come Up into Our Windows
Amazon: $2.99 | Barnes & Noble: $2.99

VIDEO REVIEW

FROM REVIEWERS & BLOGGERS

"A good novel should go for the throat; this novel goes for your heart, rips it out, and eats it before your eyes. It elevates this genre from blood and guts spilled for amusement to something with a greater meaning." - from a review (5/5) by Lucinda Rose at RoseReads

"It's compelling and heart-pounding without being overly graphic or exploitative. It’s a page-turner that I could not put down. There are scenes that break your heart, that make you angry, that make you want to (I’m sorry) slap the author upside the head
because you don’t want THAT to happen." - from a review (5/5) by Amy Marshall at A Diamond in the Dark

"This story was both original in its premise and terrifying in its no-holds-barred type of truth. This book is not wrapped up with a pretty bow at the end. We get heartbreak and we are shocked and horrified by the conclusion. ... This book will disturb you, it will enthrall you. It's a new take on the zombie craze that has a deeper meaning. I was literally speechless for a couple minutes after I turned the last page." - from a review (4.5/5) by Jennifer Bielman at Reading and Writing Urban Fantasy

FROM THE EDITOR

"It is a mirror in which we can see something of ourselves, and if we see something of our own ravenous hunger there or the sound of our own occasional cry of despair (or hope), it is only because The Zombie Bible is saying something true to us. Shall we listen? I would not have thought zombie stories could be this good, or this profound." - Andrew Hallam, Dante's Heart Publications

FROM READERS

"This is Jeremiah's challenge in Death Has Come Up into Our Windows, to go on living despite the horrors he has witnessed and experienced firsthand. ... It isn't light reading. Be prepared, this is a dark book filled with even darker questions about the nature of mankind. Think dark night of the soul, or three nights in a cistern with death as your companion."

"I'm just getting into small publishing houses/self-published works. At first I came across such a volume of awful fiction that I was put off. I'll tell you honestly: this novella is in an entirely different league to nearly everything I've sampled so far. Zombies are generally considered a mass-market topic, viz., only someone like Cormac McCarthy can get away with a 'literary' zombie work. I say this without qualification: Death Has Come up into Our Windows is a literary piece. Whatever that means. What I mean by it is that this novella is steeped in beautiful, intelligent language. There is no ostentatiousness here, no waste."

"The writing is refined and the story is brilliant and original. The line 'God wept behind her veil in the temple while the dead ate the city' is right up there with classic horror movie lines such as "Death has come to your little town, sheriff' and 'They're coming to get you, Barbara.'"

"This stunning debut installment of the Zombie Bible from Stant Litore will leave you feeling haunted and questioning whether or not the dead haven't always walked among us... This story hooked me with its fascinating premise and beautifully written prose."

"Stant Litore has come up with a totally unique way of telling a zombie story."

"Truly vivid, often disturbing and thought provoking. The author clearly did a great deal of research in preparation."

The Zombie Bible: Death Has Come Up into Our Windows
Amazon: $2.99 | Barnes & Noble: $2.99

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE:

Lilith (Christine Emmert)
Amazon: $2.99

"Lilith is the woman who would not bow down to a patriarchal universe. All women have that wish not to defer born into them as little girls. We suppress it as we grow up and evolve into members of a society, but freedom still tastes like the finest wine to us." - the author

"Full of myth and wind and coming dark and human love and our oldest and most primitive fears, this gripping little jewel of a story will hold you until its surprising end." - Stephanie Cowell

About Stant Litore (The Zombie Bible)

2011-10-05T22:08:00.009-06:00

Click here for quotes from Stant Litore.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stant Litore doesn’t consider his writing a vocation; he considers it an act of survival. As a youth, he witnessed the 1992 outbreak in the rural Pacific Northwest firsthand, as he glanced up from the feeding bins one dawn to see four dead staggering toward him across the pasture, dark shapes in the morning fog. With little time to think or react, he took a machete from the barn wall and hurried to defend his father’s livestock; the experience left him shaken.

After that, community was never an easy thing for him. The country people he grew up with looked askance at his later choice of college degree and his eventual graduate research on the history of humanity’s encounters with the undead, and the citizens of his college community were sometimes uneasy at the machete and rosary he carried with him at all times, and at his grim look.

He did not laugh much, though on those occasions when he did the laughter came from him in wild guffaws that seemed likely to break him apart. As he became book-learned, to his own surprise he found an intense love of ancient languages, a fierce admiration for his ancestors, and a deepening religious bent. On weekends, he went rock-climbing in the cliffs without rope or harness, his fingers clinging to the mountain, in a furious need to accustom himself to the nearness of death and teach his body to meet it. A rainstorm took him once on the cliffs and he slid thirty-five feet and hit a ledge without breaking a single bone, and concluded that he was either blessed or reserved in particular for a fate far worse.

Finding women beautiful and worth the trouble, he married a girl his parents considered a heathen woman, but whose eyes made him smile. She persuaded him to come down from the cliffs, and he persuaded her to wear a small covenant-ring on her hand, spending what coin he had to make it one that would shine in starlight and whisper to her heart how much he prized her.

Desiring to live in a place with fewer trees (though he misses the forested slopes of his youth), a place where you can scan the horizon for miles and see what is coming for you while it is still well away, he settled in Colorado with his wife and two daughters, and they live there now. The mountains nearby call to him with promises of refuge. Driven again and again to history with an intensity that burns his mind, he corresponds in his thick script for several hours each evening with scholars and archaeologists and even a few national leaders or thugs wearing national leaders’ clothes who hoard bits of forgotten past in far countries. He tells stories of his spiritual ancestors to any who will come by to listen, and he labors to set those stories to paper.

Sometimes he lies awake beside his sleeping wife and listens in the night for any moan in the hills, but there is only her breathing soft and full and a mystery of beauty beside him. He keeps his machete sharp but hopes not to use it.

zombiebible@gmail.com
@thezombiebible

Quotes: Stant Litore

2011-09-18T20:18:00.047-06:00

Here are quotes from Stant Litore, including:

Quotes about The Zombie Bible
Quotes from The Zombie Bible
Quotes about writing
Quotes about zombies & zombie fiction
Quotes about love, marriage, religion, & life

You can also check out a (fictional) biography of Stant Litore or a (true) ghost story from Stant Litore, entitled "The Dead in Venice."

QUOTES ABOUT THE ZOMBIE BIBLE

"This is horror. This is life stripped bare of pretense. There is sex and violence and death. And under and above all of these, there are human beings struggling to live the best lives they can in a world that is touched by God yet rotting at the same time." - from an interview at Zombie Zone News

"If you love The Walking Dead, you'll love these. But they're all kinds of different from AMC's series. The Walking Dead is a 123mph scream down a crowded street. The Zombie Bible is a sweaty last stand armed with a shepherd's staff."

"My readers have always thought that the bible stories were great stories, but that a lot of the time when people talk about them, they water down all the good parts. They’ve always wished that someone would come by and give them the hard version of the stories, with all the passion and fury and intense, deep religion-where-it-really-matters. Just look at Samson and Delilah – that story shows up in my books as Out of the Eater, Something to Eat (coming summer 2012). That’s a sweaty, sexy, brutal story, and it has a whole lot of spillage of guts and human messiness in it. The tale of Samson and Delilah has a lot of profound things to say, but there’s no real way to pretty that story up and make it look well-dressed and polite and ready for Sunday morning. You try to do that, and you do your listeners a disservice, you do yourself a disservice, and you do God a disservice. What do my readers like? My readers like a little violence, a little passion, a little philosophy. That’s why The Zombie Bible is such a great read for them." - from an interview at Zombie Zone News

QUOTES FROM THE ZOMBIE BIBLE

"Nothing is broken that cannot be remade. Nothing is ill that cannot be healed, nothing captive that cannot be freed." - Polycarp, in What Our Eyes Have Witnessed

"She bore old lines on her back, a savage record of what could be witnessed and what could be survived." - from What Our Eyes Have Witnessed

"We must live lives of unstoppable hope. That is the only way. Even if we cannot see above the wheat." - Polycarp, in What Our Eyes Have Witnessed

"God cannot stand in the street and cry out what is in her heart. You must do it for her." - Miriam, in Death Has Come Up into Our Windows

QUOTES ABOUT WRITING & READING

"Your novel needs to tell the truth and take no prisoners."

"Writing horror is a way of saying, Life is so beautiful, so blindingly beautiful, it moves me to tear out my eyes and hand them to you so you can see."

"Writing, for me, is storytelling – telling a great story that moves, horrifies, or entertains both myself and other people. It’s an act that happens in community. It’s wrapped up in how we choose to remember our past together and how we choose to describe our present and imagine our future. That’s a community thing. I want to write the stories and share the stories; I want to be connected with my readers. I want to hear what made them laugh, cry, think, or gasp. I want to tell stories that matter to them. On top of that, writers don’t sell books. Readers do." - from an interview at Zombie Zone News

"Horror fiction is our answer to the sheer amount of evil in the world. We bare our teeth at it."

"Midnight is a word for when everything you hoped would never happen and everything you secretly wished would happen, does."

"Insomnia and I are old and familiar acquaintances. Perhaps ex-lovers. Insomnia still has a copy of my house key."

"Writing keeps me from getting bitter at humanity. To tell a story is to rediscover the power of hope and the endless possibilities of endings."

"Every book cover is a door to a dreamland. Open the cover. Tinkerbell might ballet out, or it might be a nightmarish chainsaw monster. Your risk."

"Kisses are hot, sweet magic. Writing a good kiss is harder than it looks. Even in a zombie horror novel."

"Writing a first draft is like parking at the lake and going at it like teenagers. Revision is candlelight and taking your time with her."

"Publishing is like juggling grenades while balancing a teacup on your nose & riding a donkey at full gallop across the desert. I love it."

QUOTES ABOUT ZOMBIES

"You’d think that after millions of years of being born, growing up, growing old, and dying, we’d be used to death – that as a species, we’d be able to deal with it. I mean, we’ve had a lot of practice. But this just isn’t the case – death still scares the bejeezus out of us. We spend a lot of our time not thinking about it, but the reality is, at some point each of us comes face to face with the terrible realization that someone – a living, breathing human being with hopes, loves, fears, and dreams, and a name – can be snuffed out like a candle. Gone. Never see them again. That’s the saddest thing I can think of. And sooner or later, we have to realize it will happen to us, too. If we go too long without realizing it, it eventually catches up with us in some especially uncomfortable way, and then you get a midlife crisis. Some of us find out early; we lose someone we love deeply, and we grieve. You may believe in heaven. You may believe that you’ll be reunited with your loved ones. I hope you do. But let’s face it, here on this earth, today, death still sucks. We live in a world that has cancer, starvation, and serial killers. A world in which people who matter to us sometimes die in horrible ways. Zombie stories give us a way to start dealing with this -- because when you get right down to it, every good zombie story is partly about watching someone you love die in a horrible way and not being able to help them or save them, and then having to find some way to say goodbye." - from 3 Reasons Why We're Not Bored of Zombies Yet

QUOTES ABOUT LOVE, MARRIAGE, LIFE, & RELIGION

"Reason to kiss your wife passionately tonight: there are 1,446 ways for the world to end, and you don't know which one tonight will find."

"Marriage advice for men: if she's irritating you, don't get mad or distracted or withdrawn. Instead, just kiss her senseless."

"Remember that religious belief is a forest to walk in, not a shovel to duck. Only swing for the head if you're up against ghouls." / "God is a sheltering forest, not a bludgeon. A persistent concern of mine about our culture is that too many people can't tell the difference between a tree and a two-by-four."

Zombie Bible Contest!

2011-09-13T20:37:00.015-06:00

Welcome to the Zombie Bible October 2011 Witching Hour Contest! If you know the author, Stant Litore, you know that he loves posters. Now he is calling on readers, fans, zombiephiles, and zombiephobes to submit posters about The Zombie Bible!

All contest entries will be judged by the author and the best ones will be posted here on this site. The top two will receive free copies of the e-books What Our Eyes Have Witnessed (the second volume of Zombie Bible) when it releases December 3, 2011, and Lilith by Christine Emmert. The two winners will also have their websites featured on this blog.

You can see sample posters below -- but please get as creative as you like!

Rules:

1. Entries must be received at zombiebible@gmail.com by 1 am November 1, the end of the witching hour this Halloween.
2. Send entries as .jpg or .png files, sized to 600x800 pixels.
3. Submit entries with a name and an email address to which you'd like your prize sent, if it should win! Optionally, include a website or blog URL you would like featured if your poster wins the contest.

Now the samples. First, two from the author:

And one from his friends at Zomburbia!

The first volume of the series, Death Has Come Up into Our Windows, is already out. We hope you enjoy it, and we are excited to share Stant Litore's groundbreaking series with you!

Here's to a great contest!

The Editors
Dante's Heart Publications

Excerpt from Zombie Bible: "What Our Eyes Have Witnessed"

2011-08-20T21:32:00.014-06:00

What Our Eyes Have Witnessed
Zombie Bible, book two
by Stant Litore
Coming December 2011
from Dante's Heart Publications

EXCERPT

Sleep hadn’t come for her. She sat with her back to the rough boards of the shed’s wall, still in her night-dress. Marcus’ head she cradled in her lap; from time to time the boy moaned in the dark, stirring fitfully, and she stroked his hair. Having someone to care for helped her breathe calmly, kept her from shuddering into sobs. She had to keep it together.

There were bruises about Marcus’ face, and she was careful not to touch them. He’d seen the guardsmen take Polycarp away – he’d been watching from a high window. He’d wanted to run after them – he’d even taken up a dagger. She hadn’t known he owned one. But the guardsmen had left four men at the door of the insula, and they beat him until he lay still. One of the men had lashed Regina’s wrists in cord that bit savagely into her skin, leaving a length of it free. This he used to drag her behind him, leashed like a slave new from the docks. He tossed Marcus’ limp form over his shoulder, took a firm hold on the leash, and took them through the narrow streets of the Subura, uphill toward the richer parts of Rome. The other guardsmen remained at the insula.

Regina knew many residents of the slum must be watching from their windows, and she hung her head, hiding her face with her hair. She burned with the shame of being dragged so, in her night-dress, through the streets in the deep dark before dawn.

She tried to tell herself, against a blur of tears, that she was Regina Romae, a deaconess of the gathering in Rome. But as she stumbled over the uneven stones, bruising her toes, and as her hands went numb, she didn’t feel like Regina. She felt like Dora. Something welled up in her breast and her throat, a desire to beg, to do anything to be freed of this terrible, biting rope. The feeling terrified her.

As they left the Subura, her captor stopped a moment. Regina glanced over her shoulder, gasped. Dark shapes were stumbling out of an alley and lurching into the street behind them. One of them let out a deep groan. Marcus stirred faintly on the guardsman’s shoulder.

The man cursed and dragged her forward at a run, yanking on the cord so violently that she sprawled to the stones, smacking her shoulder and crying out. At the cry, more moans erupted behind them – down the street, but too near, too near! Regina kicked out in panic, tried to get her feet under her; a hard hand gripped her arm and wrenched her back to her feet.

Then they ran.

The stones battered her feet; she sobbed for breath. Her side burning, she began to pray to Polycarp’s God. She cried out the Phos Hilaron in frantic Greek syllables; in this terror it was all she could think of. Phos hilaron hagias doxes athanatou Patros, she cried as they ran: a prayer for light and joy on a street where the buildings leaned so close that running over the stones was like racing through a tunnel in the earth.

Something grabbed at her ankle and she shrieked, falling again; something fell on her in the dark, and she felt a cold, dry hand clutch at her face. A hiss above her. She kicked wildly, writhing, a jagged stone beneath her cutting her back. Wetness trickled hot over her thighs. The reek of urine. A face above her, its mouth open, teeth bared....

What Our Eyes Have Witnessed
Zombie Bible, book two
by Stant Litore
Coming December 2011
from Dante's Heart Publications

Get Book One: Death Has Come Up into Our Windows

Excerpt from Zombie Bible: "Death Has Come up into Our Windows"

2011-08-20T21:09:00.009-06:00

Fear is a sickness.

To treat it, Yirmiyahu wandered alone and unsteady through the wide streets of his memory, only sometimes noticing the reek of the corpse or the wet clammy mud around his legs or the terrible fire the sun made on his eyes when he glanced up. It was still dark at the bottom of the well, but he could see the lumpy shape of the dead body rotting in the mud. His feet felt swollen and numb, his tongue large inside his dry mouth. He rested against the wall and had conversations with people who weren’t there, though his lips barely moved.

Though his eyes were open, he slipped into an exhaustion that resembled sleep, a dream of the past. He felt sunlight on his skin through a window, and felt that he was in Baruch’s shop. The scribe sat behind his desk with a papyrus scroll spread before him. Baruch, his name meant “blessed,” and he was. A man who could afford bread and who knew how to read and write Hebrew letters, as Yirmiyahu did not. He was bald, so that the sunlight shone on his head as on a warrior’s shield. His little shop sat against the northern wall, and the sun came through a window on the south, at the shop’s front. Baruch slept in a little room upstairs, and Yirmiyahu slept on a few blankets before the desk, ever since he had sold his father’s house and sent his wife away.

Often in the hour before the sun dropped beneath the south wall and cast them into night, Yirmiyahu would pace across the shop – four strides each way – and pour words from his mouth like water from an ewer. When God sent the words like a river, he could not dam the river or channel it; it rushed through him.

A voice is heard in Rama
cries and bitter weeping
God is weeping for her children
she refuses to be comforted
for they are gone

Baruch’s hand moved with speed and certainty, sketching with his stylus the angular shapes that were letters, the gift God had given to the Lawgiver, that His words might be heard whenever the Lawgiver’s scroll was read.

But God had not stopped speaking, and Yirmiyahu wept as her words, terrible words, rushed through him. The words had been words of horror and dismay, ever since the gates closed: words of warning and of pleading, words telling of the destruction that was already creeping within the city. Often he wept as he recited them; sometimes the evening ended before the sun fell, for Yirmiyahu would collapse in grief and lie on the floor, fighting for breath. Then Baruch would quietly set his stylus aside, stopper the flask of blueberry ink, and breathe slowly over the scroll to dry it. After a while he would roll up the scroll and bind it with a yellow string, then kneel beside Yirmiyahu and sit with him, not speaking, sometimes with his head bent in prayer. Sometimes he just watched his friend’s face while the navi wept, squeezing tears out through clenched eyelids. Sometimes Yirmiyahu was like that through the whole night, and Baruch sat with him through the long watches in the dark, listening to the occasional scream in the streets. He would sigh and settle his legs more comfortably, set his hand on the navi’s shoulder, and wait for his grief to pass.

The Zombie Bible: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the ravenous dead, I will fear no evil..."

2011-07-28T19:24:00.061-06:00

You loved World War Z.

You were on the edge of your seat for The Walking Dead.
Now, experience the newest zombie bestseller:

Stant Litore's
THE ZOMBIE BIBLE

Two months on Amazon's horror bestseller list
Two weeks at #7 in horror

A dark retelling of biblical tales
as narratives of humanity's long struggle
against hunger and the hungry dead.

Get Book One for just $1.99

Three days in a dry well while your tormentors
throw the dead in after you. Can you survive
the dead -- and your own memories?

"I was literally speechless after reading the last few pages."
Jennifer Bielman, Reading and Writing Urban Fantasy

"A good novel should go for the throat; this novel goes for your heart, rips it out and eats it before your eyes. It elevates this genre from blood and guts spilled for amusement to something with a greater meaning."
Lucinda T. Rose, Rose Reads

"The author does not disappoint ... The story arc involving Yirmiyahu's wife is especially poignant and moved me to tears several times."

Courtney Cantrell, author of Colors of Deception

Check out the book

DIG IN DEEPER

THE ZOMBIE BIBLE (Stant Litore)
What Our Eyes Have Witnessed

The Dead in Second-Century Rome.
From Dante's Heart Publications | $3.99
Amazon (Kindle Edition)
Cover art by Danielle Tunstall

Polycarp can bring rest to the walking dead.
But he may be burned for it.

FORTHCOMING BOOKS

THE ZOMBIE BIBLE (Stant Litore)
Galilee Night

1200 BC | Based on Judges 4
Characters: Devora, Barak, Ya El
Dante's Heart Publications | 2012
Read a brief excerpt | Read longer summary
Cover art by Danielle Tunstall

Devora can see the future, but she fears the past
more: the memory of a little girl who put down her
undead mother, a little girl she can never forgive.

THE ZOMBIE BIBLE (Stant Litore)
Out of the Eater, Something to Eat
1150 BC | Based on Judges 14-16
Characters: Samson and Delilah
Dante's Heart Publications | 2013
Cover art by Danielle Tunstall

Samson can slay a thousand walking dead
with a donkey's jawbone.
But can he tame the rages of his own heart?

and:

THE ZOMBIE BIBLE (Stant Litore)
When There Were Fish
30 AD | Based on Luke 4
Characters: Simon, Andrew, Yeshua (Jesus)
Dante's Heart Publications | 2013
Read a brief excerpt

The villagers have taken to tossing the dead bound
into their inland sea. Now the fish no longer come.
When a traveling rabbi arrives and the nets begin to teem,
can Simon and his brother relearn the power of hope?

The Power of Your VIPs

2011-07-25T21:37:00.003-06:00

Every writer needs a pre-launch VIP list. It startles me that more writers aren’t doing pre-launches and finding intelligent ways to reward and build deeper relationships with their most connected readers (and other writers).

Here’s how this works.

First, I am going to make a couple of assumptions:

1. You’re actively using social media to build a meaningful network of readers and other writers.

2. You really care about getting to know your readers, hearing their feedback, and well, just chatting about your book.

3. You’re truly genuine and, well, real in your communications with your network, no matter what goofy thoughts might tempt you at 2 a.m. when you’re lying awake thinking “Man, I need to sell more books.” If you’re not genuine in how you approach your network, I can’t help you.

4. You’ve got a book coming out soon, and it's good.

If those four fit, here’s how you can use a pre-launch. I’m writing this primarily with indie writers and indie publishers in mind, but if you are working with a traditional publisher, some of this may apply – you just need to talk it over with your editor/agent. They might love the idea.

OK, let’s talk about the pre-launch. Essentially, you are going to offer an exclusive, VIP pre-launch of your book one month before the official launch. If you are both genuine and successful in how you create and communicate with your VIP list, you should be able to achieve several things:

Reward and build stronger relationships with the most critical and interested people in your network
Have some great conversations during the pre-launch weeks, as your VIPs give you praise, feedback, and even constructive criticism – this is going to both build you up and also give you a larger pool of “real-reader” feedback that you’ll need to consider as you’re working on your next book
Have multiple customer reviews of your book at Amazon.com or other online retailers prior to actively marketing the book (readers are more likely to buy books that have a lot of positive reviews; it’s a basic tenet of marketing: we like what other people like)
Have a great chance to just chat about the books with readers you trust and admire before you launch yourself into the big marketing flurry (cherish these weeks, because you are essentially going to enjoy a small book club that’s all about your book, and filled with people you like who have meaningful things to say to you)

Now let’s talk about how you do it. The beauty of this is that it’s a very simple idea.

First, schedule your VIP pre-launch. This needs to be several weeks before your official launch (your official launch or “hard launch” is the date when you’re going to send out the first big round of marketing messages about your book – whether that’s an email campaign or an appealing blog entry that you’ll share with your social network, a la John Locke). At your pre-launch date, your book will be available for sale at Amazon and other online retailers, at a discounted, VIP price. I recommend a generous VIP price – say 25% off your list price.

Second, prior to the VIP pre-launch, invite people! You need to build a list of people from among those in your social network who are most dedicated to your work (or most dedicated to you). An invitation to the VIP pre-launch is a thank-you to your most connected people. This doesn’t need to be a big list; in fact, it’s better if it’s a smaller list of very meaningful connections. If this is your first time doing a pre-launch, I recommend aiming for 100 VIPs.

You want to invite those people with whom you are most connected. If your social network of choice is Twitter, then you are looking for those followers who actively retweet you, and who have expressed genuine anticipation and excitement about your upcoming book. These are the people who, at their own initiative, have let you know that they really can’t wait to read it (and they aren’t just saying that to be polite). These are fans and potential friends. These are probably also the people whose ideas or projects you are often sharing with others. At the risk of sounding cheesy, these are people you like and people who matter to you. Maybe invite a few contacts, too, with whom you haven’t spoken as much but whom you are 100% certain would be totally into your book.

Third, on your pre-launch date, email the link to your VIPs. Thank them for being your VIPs, express your (genuine) excitement to know them as well as your excitement about the book coming out. Invite them to read the book at the VIP price and let them know that it would be wonderful if they left a customer review at Amazon (but make it clear that they aren’t obligated to).

Over the next few weeks, chat with your VIPs about the book, gather their reactions, have fun. If you can, hold an online launch party for them a few weeks in (once they've had a chance to read). This could be an online group chat, a Twitter hashtag, or a blog to which they can all post and comment. (See Hatchet Rosary for an example!) Most important -- make it fun!

On your hard launch date when you lift the price and launch your mission to let the world know it needs to read your book, send your VIPs a follow-up thank you email, ask them to spread the news, and maybe offer them a link to some content they can share. (If you’ve read John Locke’s How I Sold a Million E-Books and are familiar with Locke's marketing strategy, this would be a good moment to begin sharing the link to a blog post.) Your VIPs would probably be happy and even enthused about sharing the news with everyone they know; after all, they've read the book, some of them have posted public reviews, and some of them have had great conversations with you about the book.

Now this is important. You can’t be phony about this. Either you really want to get to know your readers, or you don’t. I really want to repeat these points:

Be genuine and be generous (with the VIP price, and with your own praise and support of your people)
Make sure your VIP list really is a VIP list - invite the right people!

And remember – it’s good to be the VIP. Treat your VIPs well!

Daniel Fusch
Senior Editor, Dante's Heart Publications
@zombiebible

3 Reasons Why We're Not Bored of Zombies Yet

2011-07-23T17:08:00.015-06:00

Do a search on Amazon.com for “zombie.” Go ahead. I dare you.

I just did. I got 8,764 results under “Books” alone.

You can find hundreds -- and hundreds -- of zombie novels, novellas, and anthologies. They’re everywhere. They’re swarming the bookshelves like a moaning crowd of ravenous dead. And many of them have the same plot: zombie virus hits world, world dies, survivors pull together courageously or get eaten, one by one.

So why do we keep asking for more? Why do we keep looking for more zombie stories, more zombie movies, more zombies on TV? There’s even zombie poetry and zombie T-shirts. Why do we readers keep lifting our arms and moaning in our deep, unanswerable hunger for everything zombified?

Why aren’t we bored yet?

Reason # 1. Zombie stories speak to us because we’re increasingly worried that in this rapidly overpopulated society, we’re surrounded by vast and uncountable hordes of brainless people who do nothing but feed. They turn to the TV or the Internet with hungry, desperate eyes and get spoonfed whatever a few richer, more cunning people want to feed them. Then they vote as they’re told, live as they’re told, and they buy, buy, buy, and then they die. And this growing suspicion that we’re surrounded by all these nameless hungry faces is starting to freak us out a little. Just saying. This may or may not reflect actual reality, but it reflects what a lot of us are afraid reality looks like. Zombie stories bring that fear out of the dark.

Reason # 2. You’d think that after millions of years of being born, growing up, growing old, and dying, we’d be used to death – that as a species, we’d be able to deal with it. I mean, we’ve had a lot of practice. But this just isn’t the case – death still scares the bejeezus out of us. We spend a lot of our time not thinking about it, but the reality is, at some point each of us comes face to face with the terrible realization that someone – a living, breathing human being with hopes, loves, fears, and dreams, and a name – can be snuffed out like a candle. Gone. Never see them again. That’s the saddest thing I can think of. And sooner or later, we have to realize it will happen to us, too. If we go too long without realizing it, it eventually catches up with us in some especially uncomfortable way, and then you get a midlife crisis (fun). Some of us find out early; we lose someone we love deeply, and we grieve. You may believe in heaven. You may believe that you’ll be reunited with your loved ones. I hope you do. But let’s face it, here on this earth, today, death still sucks.

We live in a world that has cancer, starvation, and serial killers. A world in which people who matter to us sometimes die in horrible ways. Zombie stories give us a way to start dealing with this -- because when you get right down to it, every good zombie story is partly about watching someone you love die in a horrible way and not being able to help them or save them, and then having to find some way to say goodbye. This is what makes AMC’s The Walking Dead so poignant – think of the scene with the two sisters in Season 1. The Walking Dead is all about how hard it is (and how unfair, and how necessary it is) to say goodbye.

Reason # 3. Zombies demand that we ask really tough questions about how we treat and use each other. Zombies are hunger incarnate. They see everyone living as food, and their imperative is to feed, to use and consume other beings to sate a hunger that cannot ever be satisfied. You don’t have to look too deep to see that they’re an exaggeration of us. Too often, other people are either a threat to us, or food (for our desires, our ambitions, etc.). In my series The Zombie Bible (which retells stories from the Bible as tales of humanity’s enduring struggle with its dead), many of the characters believe that when you look into a human face, into any human face, you see God’s face. But the zombies don’t see anything but food; they look in a human face, and they see something to attack and eat.

When you look in your neighbor’s or coworker’s face, what do you see? A threat? Someone who can help you get something you need? Or a living, breathing human being, with fears and dreams, whose face is a mirror of God?

This is Stant Litore. Thank you for listening – I look forward to hearing from you.

This post originally appeared as a guest post at SM Reine's fabulous blog.

The Zombie Bible

2011-07-20T21:44:00.006-06:00

WHAT OUR EYES HAVE WITNESSED

The Zombie Bible

by Stant Litore

BASED ON THE EVENTS OF MARTYRIUM POLYCARPI

COMING DECEMBER 2011
TO iPAD, KINDLE, NOOK,
SMARTPHONE, & PRINT

Cover Art by Danielle Tunstall

Get on the mailing list for announcements by sending an email to:
zombiebible@gmail.com

Polycarp can bring peace to the hungry dead.

At his touch, each wakeful corpse lies still at last. But to do this, he must first look into each one's blind eyes and find the remnant of the soul locked within the shambling corpse. He must witness each one's secrets, each one's sins, each one's suffering -- all that each had loved and feared and regretted in their brief lives. Only then can he absolve them and set them free, and let the hungering corpses slide lifeless to the street.

He must see each one's heart not through a glass darkly -- not as he might see a friend's heart or even his own -- but as clearly as God sees, without any veils to protect his mind from the pain of another's.

And he may be burned for it.

WHAT OUR EYES HAVE WITNESSED

Read a brief excerpt

The Zombie Bible

2011-07-20T21:43:00.004-06:00

GALILEE NIGHT

Zombie Bible # 3

by Stant Litore

BASED ON THE EVENTS OF JUDGES 4

COMING SUMMER 2012
TO iPAD, KINDLE, NOOK,
SMARTPHONE, & PRINT

Cover Art by Danielle Tunstall

Get on the mailing list for announcements by sending an email to:

zombiebible@gmail.com

A prophetess with the ache of age in her hands, an iron sword in her grip, and a memory she fears worse than any future: the memory of a little girl who put down her undead mother, a little girl she can never forgive.

A weary captain leading his men into the dark hills, but longing for his vineyard, for warm earth and smooth vines in his hands. He has never seen the dead, until tonight.

A slave girl who has been named after her captor's god, while her own charred wooden goddess, small enough to grip in her hand, lies buried outside her abuser's tent, waiting for the night when she will reclaim both her deity and her freedom.

What do these three share?

You guessed it.

An invasion of the Land by the ravenous dead,
and a night that will change them forever:

GALILEE NIGHT

Read a brief excerpt

The Zombie Bible

2011-07-20T21:42:00.004-06:00

DEATH HAS COME UP INTO OUR WINDOWS

Zombie Bible # 3

by Stant Litore

BASED ON THE EVENTS OF JEREMIAH 38

COMING OCTOBER 2011
TO iPAD, KINDLE, NOOK,
SMARTPHONE, & PRINT

Cover Art by Danielle Tunstall

Get on the mailing list for announcements by sending an email to:
zombiebible@gmail.com

Being in political prison is tough.

Being in political prison while your gaolers and tormenters toss the undead in after you ... that's even tougher.

Experience the passion, the prophecy, and the darkest days of the prophet Jeremiah in:

DEATH HAS COME UP INTO OUR WINDOWS

Read a brief excerpt

Zombie Bible # 4

2011-07-20T21:38:00.001-06:00

WHEN THERE WERE FISH

Zombie Bible # 4

by Stant Litore

BASED ON THE EVENTS OF LUKE 4

COMING IN 2012

Get on the mailing list for announcements by sending an email to:

zombiebible@gmail.com

Read a brief excerpt

Zombie Bible # 5

2011-07-20T21:33:00.001-06:00

30 years ago, one man gave his life for the world.
He taught us that the dead, and the living, can find peace.

Now, when the moaning of walking corpses can be heard approaching in the night under rainswept cypress trees, who will have the faith to live lives of unstoppable hope?

LOOKING INTO THE EYES OF ALL LIVING

Zombie Bible # 5

by Stant Litore

BASED ON THE EVENTS OF JOHN 19 & ACTS 28

COMING IN 2012

Get on the mailing list for announcements by sending an email to:

zombiebible@gmail.com

Read a brief excerpt

Lilith

2011-07-01T17:03:00.035-06:00

LILITH

by Christine Emmert

"LILITH is a mesmerizing and poetically written story of a young mother who discovers that the barn owl outside their house is really the incarnation of the evil and mythical Lilith, hungry to eat the mother's new child. But why should this not be so? The young mother is writing a long thesis on Lilith which possesses her. 'Keep the doors closed and the windows locked,' she tells her bewildered husband. Full of myth and wind and coming dark and human love and our oldest and most primitive fears, this gripping little jewel of a story will hold you until its surprising end." - from a review by novelist Stephanie Cowell

Lilith strikes sweet wounds to the heart of any mother who has ever wakened in the middle of the night fearing for her child's safety, or any artist who has labored to complete a long work and felt the weight of unexpected sacrifices.

Amazon Kindle edition : $1.99
A Haunting, One-Sitting Read
From Dante's Heart Publications

AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTINE EMMERT
Dante's Heart Publications : July 20, 2011

Christine, what made you want to write Lilith?

It was an odd crossroads of buying a book on Medieval Mythology and a barn owl that was living in our open-air garage when we moved to the country. Lilith has many sides. She is the woman who would not bow down to a patriarchal universe. All women have that wish not to defer born into them as little girls. We suppress it as we grow up and evolve into members of a society, but freedom still tastes like the finest wine to us.

Could you tell us -- what is your own favorite moment in Lilith? The moment that sits with you most deeply when you close your eyes?

When her husband tells her to paint Lilith. My husband is a visual artist, and he can often depict visually what I cannot say in words. The depth of the visual is stunning and scary at the same time.

I couldn't agree more. What writers do you admire?

I love Katherine Harrison. I think her novel POISON is one of the finest pieces of writing I ever read. I also admire Steven Saylor for his historical fiction -- especially THE VENUS THROW which seems to understand the weaving of good and evil in us on a level that is heart rending.

My friend, Stephanie Cowell, who also writes historical fiction is a big inspiration to me in the depth at which she looks at the lives of famous people. Of course I love Shakespeare who could make us sympathize with the blackest heart or make us laugh at our own foolishness. Erica Jung's poetry as well leaves me speechless before her honesty.

What else inspires you as a writer -- what gives you energy?

I have always found myth as a great source of inspiration. Myth expresses what is behind the great curtain in simple ways we can understand, even if we can't verbalize it. My animals too help me since I must always try harder to see what they want than what people want. To be really syrupy I have to say love inspires me. I could not do what I do without the support of my husband. Before I met him I drowned in my dreams rather than swam through them to the far shore.

What is next for you after Lilith?

I write plays...and just finished one on Mary Magdalene that I would love to see produced. It is a very different take on what has become an overly familiar story. In addition I want to write more on the mythology of the East. Buddha and the heritage from his teachings has given me new ways of looking at the world. I began a novel, THE DAKINI IN THE CAVE, that braids many myths together.

Dante's Heart Publications

2011-07-01T17:03:00.033-06:00

ABOUT DANTE'S HEART PUBLICATIONS

Dante's Heart is an independent publisher founded in 2007 by Daniel Fusch. This online press is dedicated to finding and sharing fresh work related to the fantastical and the marvelous: work dealing with myth, fairy tales, folklore, and fantasy. Dante's Heart publishes an online journal, as well as e-books such as Lilith (Christine Emmert) and The Zombie Bible (Stant Litore).

DANTE'S HEART MISSION STATEMENT

Dante's Heart offers an online venue for established and new writers and artists to share creative work that explores how myth and fairy tale define and are defined by the human experience(s). We want to celebrate the shock, wonder, bewilderment, suffering, and enchantment of myth, of the fantastic; we want to hear about rivers running with wine and ghosts jumping the Mississippi on motorcycles.

We're concerned with the neglect of myth, with the blindness of a culture determined by myths it hasn't thought about; we demand (beg, entreat, scream) that myths be thought about, made and remade, handled with a delicate & angry/sad/ desperate/joyous exuberance.

Dante's Heart has no investment in being either traditional or avant-garde, in genre or trans-genre, academic or popular; our whole commitment is to discovery, to surprise or be surprised.

Excerpt from Zombie Bible: "Looking into the Eyes of All Living"

2011-07-01T17:03:00.031-06:00

Silas had been the first to sing. Paul still woke shaking from dreams of the oubliette of Philippi. That hole in the earth where the city’s condemned were tossed, to be forgotten. There were dead in that hole, many of them, chained to the walls and writhing. Moaning. Eyes wide and unseeing as though they had looked at something even God cannot see or will not see and chosen a blindness that was eternal and hopeless rather than risk ever seeing it again. Those dead had been all around them, just out of reach, their jaws snapping on the air. The shriek and clatter of chains, the musty clinging of old straw under his naked feet and limbs. Paul felt the slick warmth of urine on his leg, but the fear was such that later he did not feel ashamed of it.

But Silas!

Silas had simply shut his eyes, lifted his voice, and began to sing. Paul stared at him, aghast.

The dead did not go still to listen, but Silas filled that dark hole with song until the wailing of the dead bruised their minds no more than the hum of cicadas can drown out the laughter of running children on a summer day. It took some time, but at last Paul lifted his voice, too.

Excerpt from "When There Were Fish"

2011-07-01T17:03:00.030-06:00

Every evening at sundown, Simon made sure that his mother bolted the door behind him (with heavy planks of wood; through the door, he could hear her breathing hard with the effort). Then he went down to the shore to ready the boat for his night’s long battle with the sea. The fish they brought back, a few dancing in wide nets, were just enough to keep them all alive—never enough for them to buy another boat or gather any wealth. The sea had been plentiful once, so much so that the grandfathers told them that their grandfathers had been able to walk across the water from one shore to the next in calm weather without getting more than the soles of their feet wet—the fish had been that thick, they had just walked on their backs. The sea had been full of the blessings of God. But the townspeople had taken to tying weights around the ankles of the undead and then dropping them into the deep water. It was believed that in this way the dead could be made to suffer for the pain they had caused, the kin they had eaten. But Simon knew, with an ache in his hands as he pulled the oars and they went out to sea—Simon knew the dead had poisoned the water. Somehow the dead in the water and the lack of fish were connected. He felt it. Sometimes he thought he heard the emptiness of the sea in his dreams, a kind of silent cry, like the cry the womb makes in a young woman who longs for a child and has none. The sea, once so full, longed for fish.

And some days, out on the sea, they would haul up one of their too-empty nets and feel some weight in it, and looking down they would see rising out of the deep, one of the dead tangled in the net, its face lifted toward them, eyes pale and white like those of a dead fish. Already reaching a hand toward the surface, its jaw opening.

About Christine Emmert (Author of Lilith)

2011-07-01T17:03:00.029-06:00

Christine is a writer, actress, and educator who finds that myth gives her life impetus. She is propelled by the beauty of the story and the message beneath it - and this is expressed in her novel, ISMENE. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband Richard.

AN INTERVIEW

Christine, what made you want to write Lilith?

It was an odd crossroads of buying a book on Medieval Mythology and a barn owl that was living in our open-air garage when we moved to the country. Lilith has many sides. She is the woman who would not bow down to a patriarchal universe. All women have that wish not to defer born into them as little girls. We suppress it as we grow up and evolve into members of asociety, but freedom still tastes like the finest wine to us.

Could you tell us -- what is your own favorite moment in Lilith? The moment that sits with you most deeply when you close your eyes?

When her husband tells her to paint Lilith. My husband is a visual artist, and he can oftendepict visually what I cannot say in words. The depth of the visual is stunning and scary at the same time.

I couldn't agree more. What writers do you admire?

I love Katherine Harrison. I think her novel POISON is one of the finest pieces of writing I ever read. I also admire Steven Saylor for his historical fiction -- especially THE VENUS THROW which seems to understand the weaving of good and evil in us on a level that is heart rending.

My friend, Stephanie Cowell, who also writes historical fiction is a big inspiration to me in the depth at which she looks at the lives of famous people. Of course I love Shakespeare whocould make us sympathize with the blackest heart or make us laugh at our own foolishness.Erica Jung's poetry as well leaves me speechless before her honesty.

What else inspires you as a writer -- what gives you energy?

I have always found myth as a great source of inspiration. Myth expresses what is behind thegreat curtain in simple ways we can understand, even if we can't verbalize it. My animals toohelp me since I must always try harder to see what they want than what people want. To be really syrupy I have to say love inspires me. I could not do what I do without the support ofmy husband. Before I met him I drowned in my dreams rather than swam through them to the far shore.

What is next for you after Lilith?

I write plays...and just finished one on Mary Magdalene that I would love to see produced. It is a very different take on what has become an overly familiar story. In addition I want to write more on the mythology of the East. Buddha and the heritage from his teachings has given me new ways of looking at the world. I began a novel, THE DAKINI IN THE CAVE, that braids many myths together.

HATCHET ROSARY: The VIP Launch Party

2011-07-01T17:03:00.020-06:00

Hatchet Rosary is a day-long, online, come-when-you-can launch party for the first three installments of the Zombie Bible. It's a Gathering to:

Celebrate the Zombie Bible -- share quotes, thoughts, how it hit you, what scenes left a vivid or violent imprint on your mind
Chat and connect with other people fascinated by the undead
Share zombie-related art and film clips
Vote on what biblical stories you'd like to see covered in future volumes
Enjoy fun and surprises

Those of you who already converse with me regularly know I keep things interesting. This will be a good party. :)

The heart of Hatchet Rosary will be a Tweetparty held for the Zombie Bible VIPs (date TBD - probably Saturday, Dec 3). You can read about the VIPs here. If you haven't received a VIP invite but you think you might be one -- and if you think Zombie Bible might just be the best thing since Night of the Living Dead -- drop me a note at zombiebible@gmail.com. We'll talk!

Why's it called Hatchet Rosary?

Well, that's a reference to the author's personal approach to and phobia of the undead:

"If I'm going up against ravenous corpses,
send me in with two things.
A hatchet, and a rosary.
I'd be a fool to go in with just one of those."

(Stant Litore)

What do you get when you mix zombie gore, religion, and a good dose of human desperation? This December, you get to find out.

Excerpt from Zombie Bible: "Galilee Night"

2011-07-01T17:01:00.002-06:00

She'd danced for him, at the Feast of Tents. No longer a girl, she'd begun to hear the voice of God. But she did not hear God that night; she danced the hill dances of her people, and she danced for this man. His eyes shone as he watched her. She knew he did not remember her; probably he had not seen her face, that other time. Probably he had seen only a movement of the tall grass as she ran. But now he gazed on her, and she burned as he looked at her, burned as though he’d touched her. How she danced! She let her hips sing of her desire as she moved in the moonlight.

She'd thought of him so many times, as she lay on her pallet in the tent at Shiloh. After the fires at the Feast of Tents were coals and the people had gone to sleep, she rose from her place and sought out his tent. There was no woman there; he was alone. She slipped onto the wool carpet he lay on, and woke him with a whisper in his ear, a whisper she herself could not hear, for her heart and her blood in her ears was louder. It was the boldest moment in her life. She had no family, no tent of her own, only the words that came to her sometimes from the God of the Covenant, and the memory of her first sight of this man, a memory she'd held close for years. Those two were the only things she had, the only things that meant anything to her then. She whispered to him about her longing, how strong and like a man he’d looked to her when she first saw him. When his hands grasped her arms and he pulled her beneath him, so that she felt his weight on her and gasped, his face above hers was struck with wonder, like a man who has been told that though he had never known it, he was the son of a chieftain. Or like a man who comes upon gold hidden in a field.

“Who are you, girl?” he asked hoarsely.

“Devora,” she whispered. “Your wife.”