Zomblog II

Zomblog II

Written by: TW Brown

Introduction by: Tony Monchinski

^{Cover art by}

^{Cover design by Byron Rempel}

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

May December Publications LLC

Zomblog
II

©2010 maydecemberpublications

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living, dead, or otherwise, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the author or May December Publications.

* * * * *

Dedication

To Ronni Gregg,

my daughter, my first-born, and my princess

* * * * *

An Introduction by Tony Monchinski

Author of Eden and Eden 2: Crusade

If we can safely claim that there’s never a good moment for a zombie apocalypse, we can equally safely say that, in so many ways,
Zomblog II
couldn’t have come at a better time. An explosion of interest in zombies in popular culture, changes in the publishing industry, and a seemingly unquenchable thirst for horror and good stories sets our stage. Let’s face it: vampires have been growing soft and effete for the last two decades. Their undead cousin, the zombie, has waited patiently in the back-ground, rotting slowly and biding its time, the great untapped natural horror resource of a troubled psyche.

 
Defying expectations, the popularity of the can-nibalistic corpse continues to rise, much like the ghouls themselves. Zombies won’t go away and their expressions are multiplying exponentially. In literature (J.L. Bourne’s
Day by Day Armageddon
books; Kim Paffenroth’s
Down the Road
series) and  film (Romero’s
Survival of the Dead
; France’s
The Horde
or
The Dead
, set in Africa); on television (AMC’s adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s
The Walking Dead
; the British series
Dead Set
) and on gaming consoles (Capcom’s
Dead Rising
and
Resident Evil
franchises); the subject of  lampoon (Jane Austin’s
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
with an assist from Seth Grahame-Smith; Lewis Carroll’s collaboration with Nickolas Cook,
Alice in Zombieland
) and philosophy (Kenemore’s
The Zen of Zombie
; Greene and Moham-mad’s
Undead and Philosophy: Chicken Soup for the Soulless
); from guides offering advice to dealing with and dispatching the undead (Brooks’
The Zombie Survival Guide
;
Zombies for Zombies,
whose author, David Murphy, promises—in its subtitle—
Advice and Etiquette for the Living Dead
) to poetry in general (A.P. Fuchs’
Vicious Verses and Reanimated Rhymes
) to haiku in particular (Mecum’s
Zombie Haiku: Good Poetry for Your…Brains
) …
whew
! You get the idea. A veritable smorgasbord of zombies exists for those of us who can’t get enough of our favorite undead foils.

  
The market for zombie literature in the early twenty-first century reminds me of what I imagine the pulp fiction market in the middle of the last century must have been like. A lot of “zombie books” are coming out. Some of them are good but, let’s face it, some of them are not.
Zomblog II
is one of the better ones. There are characters you will care about. The novel begins with Jenifer, a teen protagonist and continues with a pregnant young lady, Meredith—not your typical heroine. The novel’s characters do not lose their sense of humor amidst the horror and cruelty surrounding them.
Zomblog II
posits what, for my money, makes novels featuring zombies interesting, and that has nothing to do with the undead. “If the living people worked against the dead people,” one character remarks, “I bet we’d be doing lots better.” Indeed. Todd Brown takes a well-defined genre and puts his own spin on things: there are zombie-bite victims who
don’t
turn; zombies, like dogs, can sense an earthquake before it hits. Speaking of dogs, we learn that man’s best friend hates the undead as much as we do.

  
All writers have limitations. I, for one, often wonder how writers I enjoy manage to pull off the first-person point of view. The problem with this perspective, from my perspective, is it lends itself to exposition and information dumps, to excessive
telling
and
not
enough showing, ever threatening to derail a storyline. I’m further wary of journal or diary-type tales, which are necessarily written looking backwards on a day’s events, recounting what has happened. And yet, so many authors I enjoy pull it off and pull it off well, from Andrew Vachss’
Burke
books to Jeff Lindsay’s
Dexter
series, from Charlaine Harris’
Sookie Stackhouse
novels to J.L. Bourne’s anonymous naval officer in his two
Day by Day
tomes. Add Todd Brown and the first two installments of his
Zomblog
series to this short list.

  
But
Zomblog II
represents more than a solid, entertaining novel that will please zombie fanatics.
Zomblog II
is an imprint of MayDecember Publications, Todd Brown’s own independent press. The landscape in which the publishing industry does its thing is changing as I write and you read. The traditional publishing houses are hemorrhaging and contracting. As I write, Barnes & Noble is looking for a buyer and Borders appears to be on the ropes. I read that fifty thousand is the new one hundred thousand when it comes to advances (
err
, okay; I know nothing of this first hand). As if it isn’t hard enough writing a book, the difficulty of getting your book published with an established house can drive you batty and leave you questioning your worth as an artist. Book publishing is not and has never been a meritocracy, though those of us who get published like to kid ourselves otherwise. The stories are legion: Madeleine L’Engle’s
A Wrinkle in Time
got the thumbs down from twenty-six publishers before it saw the light of day and over seventy printings; when David Lassman submitted selections from Jane Austin’s classic corpus to eighteen major players in the publishing industry, he received rejection letters and only one nod to what he was up to. And these are the “classics” we’re talking about here—not the red-headed step children of the publishing industry that our beloved zombie novels have been relegated to. Today, it’s still not enough to have talent; nor is it enough to write a good book that people are going to want to read.

  
Yet the audience for our dear undead is there, as seemingly insatiable as the rotting antagonists of their preferred subject matter. Cue the independent presses, like
Permuted
,
Library of the Living Dead
, and
May December Publications
, which are providing us undead junkies our fix. Don’t think Manhattan hasn’t noticed. In 2008,
Simon & Schuster
entered a deal with
Permuted
to jointly re-issue select
Permuted
titles as mass market paperbacks. But the original, bold and innovative voices in our genre are rising up through the independent presses and print-on-demand publishing and will continue to do so for some time. May December Publications gives voice to these previously voiceless, in works such as the anthology
Eye Witness
and the novels
Dead: The Ugly Beginning
and
Zomblog II
.  

  
We like to be scared. We like to be frightened when we know we are ultimately safe. Hence our love of roller coasters and Halloween haunted houses. Horror movies and books, when done right, fulfill this same desire. The zombie is uniquely sit-uated to scare us. Zombies are not charming; they’re not sexy. Zombies are not potential romantic interests, unless necrophilia is your thing. They rarely glitter (unless radioactive) and they’re never vegans. The undead are rotting, ever-hungry, and usually not too swift. A side of beef in your supermarkets’ butcher case has more smarts than the typical zombie.

  
When Todd Brown emailed for the first time a couple of years ago, complimenting me on a zombie-themed action-horror novel I’d written, I didn’t know him from Adam. When he asked me to write a blurb for the first
Zomblog
, I was honored. When he asked me to contribute a short story to
Eye Witness: Zombie
, I was honored again. When I read
Eye Witness: Zombie
and some of the stories in it—like Ron Harris’
Baby Killer
, which is exactly what it sounds like—I thought to myself, what kind of a deranged son of a bitch could be dedicating himself to this form of fiction? I figured MayDecember Publications referred to an age disparity between Todd and his wife; later I found out those are the months three of his kids were born. Todd Brown is a good man and a solid writer; MayDecember Publications is an upstart new house delivering the proverbial goods; and
Zomblog II
, rest assured, will not disappoint!

Tony Monchinski

Peekskill, NY

Halloween, 2010

* * * * *

Thursday, October 30

My name is Jenifer and now I have this stupid journal. It has been almost two weeks since Meredith shoved this in my hands and told Dominique and I to run. We haven’t gotten very far.

We are in a bar called
Buxom
. I’m not old enough to have actually been in a bar before the zombie thing happened… but I’m pretty sure this was a nudie place. There are no windows, but there were two skylight thingies. We had to scrape black paint off ‘em, but I’ll get to that later.

I finally read all the stuff that guy Sam wrote. It was kinda sad, but I guess it’s that way for everybody. I sure didn’t know about all that bad stuff that happened to Meredith either. The part I think is totally stupid is that they had that place, Irony. Why would they just leave? And that place Sam was at…it sounded okay, too. The closest I’ve had to anything like that was the movie theater; and now this place.

It is early in the morning and Dom is still asleep. When she gets up, we’ll do what we’ve done every day since the day we left Snoe and Meredith behind. We’ll sneak up onto the roof and keep watch. We have gone through half of the pack of food, and I’m not moving until we have to. Those creepy zombies are all over. So far, we haven’t seen a single living person…but sometimes we hear guns.

Dom’s up!