Grace Among the Dead, Chapter 2: “Retreat to Hidden Farm” as Read by the Croaky-Voiced Author

After so long looking for the best height and angle
on my webcam, it occurred to me to use the mic
and stand I employ for simple audio.

I’ve been sitting on the audio for this since the beginning of February. That’s how much I hate dealing with MovieMaker software, even if I am working with a template I established with the first chapter. Frankly, I think I’m better off just reading into the webcam. Anyway....

For those new to THE SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER, this second chapter of my second book finds Derek Grace and his stowaway from town, Kim, arriving at Grace’s hideout on the far edge of the Colorado Springs metro area. Through flashback, we learn the respective fates of Grace’s wife and children as the living dead have established themselves as apex predators atop the food chain. 

“Darkness on the Edge of Town” was irresistible to me as a subtitle, because that’s exactly where Derek Grace is in this chapter: in darkness, on the edge of town. He finds no new purpose in life with the needy stowaway. He knows he has to move on. But where? Moreover, for what? Grace’s world has ended. Is a new life possible, even desirable, in this New Weird Order?

Grace Among the Dead is a novel “of Love and Redemption, the Living Dead and a Monster Truck” and we’re going to get a lot darker in the chapters to come before we completely lose the prefix on Derek Grace's anti-hero status. Meanwhile, if you haven’t heard the first chapter, you can click here for that. If you want to read the series from the beginning, the magic and wonder of Bleeding Kansas is available to you here.





THE SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER, GRACE AMONG THE DEAD,
Copyright © 2014, 2017 by L. Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.

FULL First Chapter of GRACE AMONG THE DEAD as Read Aloud by Yours Truly

Barely in time for the Twelfth Day of Christmas comes my first post of 2017. I’d had a New Year’s greeting recorded, but I wasn’t crazy about it. Today’s master plan was to record the first chapters of each book—Bleeding Kansas, Grace Among the Dead, and the as-yet unpublished The Wrong Kind of Dead—with the idea of adding to each until I had the complete set recorded. Instead, I pushed through and recorded the entirety of the first chapter of Grace Among the Dead, “Drugstore Cowpunching.”




There’s so much more I could do with this, especially in regards to the voice acting, but I don’t want the perfect to become the enemy of the good, as it so often does with my projects. I’ll simply keep adding chapters. Maybe I’ll do the first full chapter of another book tomorrow. 

I don’t know. Right now, I just want to drink some beer and figure out what I’m going to do from here. I’ve been meaning to do this YouTube thing for years now. Today was the first day in two years I’ve actually gotten meaningful work out of this microphone.

So, Merry Twelfth Night and Happy New Year 2017. Let this be the inauspicious beginning to something really auspicious. And don’t forget to buy the books, if you haven’t already.

Pastor Bryce's Sunday Message: The Moral Imperative of the Living in the Zombie Apocalypse

Yes, I know it’s not Sunday. I was laid out with a stomach virus yesterday. And all these days before, I’ve been adjusting to living in a small hotel room with my wife and four cats as we wait to close on our house. Yeah, I know. No reason to complain, and my lack of posting is all on my scatterbrained, easily flustered self. With that out of the way....

One of the things I’m most proud of regarding Grace Among the Dead is my refusal to play the Evil Preacher stereotype. I’m not at all religious, but I know a few good-hearted Christians, and I’m not throwing them under the bus for a cheap, easy trope that’s long since been done to un-death.

Besides, I remain convinced that a mega-church (or even a fairly large, but not stadium-sized church) with tight organization and well-run “smallgroups” is probably your best bet for surviving any kind of an apocalyptic crisis. Being a lone wolf works only so long as you haven’t broken an arm or a leg, or gotten sick. Whether it’s zombies or a high-altitude EMP taking out the power and utilities, you need people at your back, even if you share nothing else but a common interest in survival. A church shares a Belief, and that Belief will inspire unity and cooperation—a necessary leg up when all the others have been chewed off.

Pastor Isaac “Zack” Bryce is the classic trope of the Reluctant Hero elevated to his current station by the crisis at hand, who may be in a little over his head. If that trope never gets old, it’s because that’s every damn last one of us when the shit hits the fan. Pastor Zack understands the moral imperative of survivors of a zombie apocalypse better than most, though, and his mini-sermon to main protagonist Derek Grace is crucial to the book—or anyone who is paralyzed into inaction by guilt, etc.:

“There is one thing you, me, and everyone else privileged with breath and life needs to understand—that if you’re privileged with breath and life, you’re obligated to take arms against this mockery of nature, and do what you can to push it back.

“And pardon me if I sound like some sort of preacher or something, but I’ve got the Good News: It’s never been so easy. If you blame yourself for people losing their lives, then go out and save as many as you think you lost, and then some. Save so many the numbers of your lost become insignificant. There’s no excuse not to go out and get your redemption. It’s money on the table.

“It’s that, or you can turn into those lost souls who were going to kill you. Or their prey.” Pastor Bryce raises his eyebrow at that last one. As if he knows that’s the worst thing to be, we just don’t say so in polite company.

“If you’re worried about those children,” Bryce continues, “they weren’t yours to save. They were ours. And may God forgive me if this is wrong, but I’d rather have you here working with us than you dead, and Deputy Grayson and his sidekick still out there.”

“Did Wyoming tell you about them, too?”

“If Wyoming knew anything about that gang, it would have been awfully nice if they’d have warned us. We lost two men on our first and last trip into Falcon. Deacon Walsh was there for that one. One of the deputies approached and declared him and his party under arrest for looting and trespassing. Walsh got his gun off first and was just able to get out of there, but not before someone in a second-floor window dropped David Whitman and John Ross.”

“There were more than two deputies?”

“Walsh didn’t stick around to take the census. He knows he killed him, though. Hollow point rounds leave extra-large exit wounds, but they won’t do as much damage to anyone standing behind the target.” Pastor Zack Bryce sighs, and his face relaxes back into that of the guy I first shook hands with, only sadder. “I didn’t know stuff like that until after all this got started. I really wish I didn’t know now. It doesn’t help me do my job.”

“But that’s what I’m here for,” I say. “Because a doctor I talked to twice in Natalia and a colonel I’ve never met thought I’d be a good fit at this survivor’s outpost.”

“You have a lot of heavy hitters promoting you. It was the provisional governor of Kansas who spoke most glowingly of what you did in Natalia. It was her calling me about you that was the first we learned of what was going on in the outside world.”

“Kansas has a governor?”

“Governor Rebecca Donaldson was appointed the morning after you left. One of the first things she did was leave a text on my cell phone telling me to get to my desk phone and wait for her call.” Bryce looks at the landline phone on his desk. “Mr. Grace, can you imagine? After the busiest, most emotional week of your life, you get this text from a number you don’t know, with the caller ID announcing themselves as ‘Prov Gov of KS.’ I thought it was a sick prank at first, but she knew who I was. She knew I was at this number.”

“Rebecca?” A huge, painful throb of headache rattles my skull. “As in, ‘Special Agent Rebecca Anne Donaldson’?” I’ve got my hands on my temples, the pounding of blood palpable beneath my fingers.

“Well, I don’t know about the ‘special agent’ part any more than I do her middle name. Although I did make the mistake of calling her by her first name in the course of our very brief, rather one-sided conversation, and she nearly took my head off.” I open my eyes in time to see a sly smile crease his boyish face. “You don’t have that problem, I take it.”

“Oh, I probably do now.” Nearly took my head off. Dr. Hearn had called her the Mantis, and said I was blessed among men if I slept with her and got away alive. 

“Well, whatever’s going on between you, she credits you with single-handedly cleaning up the city.”

“Look, Zack, I didn’t ‘single-handedly’ do sh—”

“That’s exactly what she said you’d say. Yes, of course, you had people helping. Still, you’re a legend among the worker bees they had bunked at the high school. They’re the ones who gave you your name, if I’m not mistaken.”

“My name?”

“The Dead Silencer. Wherever the Unclean soil the air with their unnatural cries, you’re there to shut them up with carbon-coated steel, a hammer, and a gun.”

So this is what Rebecca, a.k.a. Rebecca, Queen of Hell had meant by cursing me with success. I’d thought she was just being cute. No, Dr. Hearn’s Mantis was simply outsourcing having my head chewed off. 

“You need some water?”

“Yes, please.” Although I’m convinced nothing short of a bullet to the head will take me out of my misery now.

Like most, Derek Grace is resistant to the message. To be fair, he’s somewhat stressed out, what with being hit with a tranquilizer dart to bring him in. Like every one of us, he has to learn the hard way, and why not? I’d have no book, otherwise. It’s a tale of Love and Redemption, the Living Dead and a Monster Truck. And just wait until you meet the lady driving that truck. Mind you, she’s no Manic Dream Pixie, just blood and guts with baggage all her own.

If this isn't a mess, it'll do til the mess gets here. What are you waiting for?

“True, I could do without all these funeral home rejects stumbling around looking to bite my ass off.”

I always chuckle at the heroes in other writers’ zombie apocalypses when they have their, “We will take it back” moment. It’s even more ridiculous than the boilerplate “We will rebuild” line you get at the end of most disaster porn stories, because...well, let Mr. Derek Grace, the Dead Silencer himself, explain this through first-person narration:

“You’re not much of a people person, are you?”

I laugh. “The only real ‘people persons’ left are the dead. They sure like people, don’t they? Mmm-mm. Yum-yum, eat ‘em up.”

“That’s just mean.”

“We brought it on ourselves, Kim. Finally, the human race is the next best thing to extinct and I can’t say I mind it.”

“You know you don’t mean that. If people come together, they could take it all back.”

“You’d think so. We could hunt the smelly yellow and green people-eaters to extinction, like we’ve done so much else. People need motivation, though. The woolly mammoth, sabre-tooth tiger, all those had value as either food or skins. All you get from killing walkers is a toxic pile of rot. People would rather scurry around like rodents from trash pile to trash pile than to….”

I shake my head clear of the “profundity” of these drunk-stoned thoughts. I might as well be speaking in tongues. I top off my glass, hoping the alcohol will dull my buzzing, stinging nerves.

“You’re really angry, aren’t you?”

“True, I could do without all these funeral home rejects stumbling around looking to bite my ass off.” I look at the woman across the table from me, and I’m almost startled sober by the realization. “You’re the first survivor I’ve seen since I got back to Colorado. My God, I suppose they’re all gone….”

There’s good news and bad news on that score. The bad news is they’re not all gone. The good news is...they’re not all gone. Grace Among the Dead is a story of Love, Redemption, and a Monster Truck. We meet some bad guys right out the gate. But we also meet some good people worth saving. (I know some of you bitched about that in regards to the denizens of Bleeding Kansas. Hey, what can I tell ya? I’m not exactly a people person, either. Most of us aren’t, which is why we apocalypse in the first place.)

Book 1 has ONE exploding head
on its cover.

Book 2 has TWO exploding heads.
See the pattern here?

They’re also available in Canada and the UK.

It’s One Goodbye After Another in the Post-Apocalypse

This scene from Chapter 2 of Grace Among the Dead is all the more poignant for me at this point in A.D. 2016, as I also find myself saying goodbye to a house of long years, and the memories of better times:

It was Sunday afternoon when I pulled up at my house on the north side of Colorado Springs. The streets were clear, but it was as hot as it was bright, which meant the dead haunted the doorways, or wherever they could find shade. I saw one getting to her feet from behind a hedge as I passed, another staggering out from behind a tree. I might as well have been the ice cream truck playing a merry tune, bringing all the half-rotted kiddies from their yards.

I parked in the driveway outside of the garage. I killed the engine and pulled out my house keys. “It’s me,” I said, as loudly as I dared as I opened the front door.

I pulled the screen door shut behind me and locked it before closing the front door. “It’s me,” I said again. I could feel the emptiness of the house. Not even a cat. I went into the kitchen. 

There was an odor coming from the door leading into the garage. I drew a deep breath and held it before throwing open the door. I should have known; this was the only place they could take the trash out. A good thing they weren’t here too long. 

The pantry stood empty. Even the plastic trash bags were gone. On the stove was a thin, battered, red spiral notebook with “DAD” written in bold Sharpie marker across the front. The pages in front were torn out so that only Sybil’s three-page note and some blank paper in back were left.

The date at the top of the first page was Thursday, May 15. That was my second day of more-or-less consciousness in Natalia, Kansas, still shaking off the painkillers given me after my plane crash the previous Saturday. While I was getting myself together, it was already too late for Sybil and Jack.

I left the kitchen to make my last tour through the rooms where we’d spent the last seven years of our lives. The last…it was all I could do to keep from being overcome by the very sound of this word in my head. 

I took a book from my son’s room (he had a good picture book on firearms we’d given him for Christmas), then some other books from my downstairs office. I found one of our overnight bags on the floor in the hall, as if someone had dropped it in their haste to get out. I put the books inside, along with some clothes from my bedroom. I spared a moment to look at the unmade bed, and the yellowy outline a heavily sweating body left on the fitted sheet. 

Standing in the light of the picture window looking over the backyard, I read as much as I could of Sybil’s note. Later, I would have it all but memorized.

The note goes on to detail Sybil and Jack’s ordeal holding down the house before they took the opportunity to leave their undead-infested neighborhood for rural Pueblo County. In reviewing this chapter for rewriting/remastering for the eventual omnibus edition of my series, I was struck by how heartbreakingly dark the story got, especially in regards to what happened with Claire Grace, and what the children were forced to do with their pets.

For all the choppy-chop, shoot-’em-up hijinks, the zombie apocalypse is a dark and sad place. Ultimately, THE SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER is about redemption through action. But there must be loss. So much loss.

More Roadside Attractions in the Zombie Apocalypse

Which can only mean more from Book 2 of The SAGA of the DEAD SILENCER, Grace Among the Dead. This is your final warning.

Derek Grace, our titular Dead Silencer, is fleeing what’s left of the invaders of his safe house and the things they drew towards them in the course of their noisy invasion. Just because it’s middle-of-nowhere Colorado ranch country doesn’t mean you’re at all safe. People did live out here, once.

The gunfire is loud enough to wake the dead. Here they come, pushing through the littered, overgrown fields, limping up the highway, homing in on the sounds of desperate, frightened food. 

Deputy Grayson’s best bet is to get everyone into the house. That is, assuming they really want to live for another hour in a situation that still ends with them being eaten alive. I can see the former deputy barking orders at his wife as she shrieks and weeps, his children freeze in terror, and Big Jim blissfully craps his diaper. They’re doomed, no two ways about it. 

I swerve among the dead crossing the road, their yellowy flesh scraped and torn by their progress though vast fields of nettles and barbed wire. I never knew so many people used to live out here, but judging by the numbers I see staggering through the overgrown pastures, it’s enough to make a good sized mob. A horde, even. 

I slow and duck left down one of the dirt side roads. I pass a gaunt woman of indeterminate age in a pale blue nightgown. I can’t see any wounds, so I wonder if starvation killed her. She might even be one of the Original Risen, a Final Flu fatality. The latter seems most likely, given how she’s dressed for bed. 

There’s something about her face. I ease my foot from the accelerator as I approach. 

She doesn’t have the blood-beard. She has yet to feed. 

She knows what the gunshots mean, though. She glances over her shoulder as I pass, but she’s shuffling forward as fast as her legs will carry her. I put my foot back down and tack towards the middle, lest anything stumbles out of the tall grasses to the road.

There’s love and redemption ahead for our wounded warrior of the post-apocalyptic wastes, but he’s still got a mess of living dead to take care of first, along with some ornery humans. Read all about it from the beginning while I finish the third book in the series, which will actually manage to top the Battle of Wal-Mart, the exploding fire truck, the weaponized undead behemoth, the writhing zombie parts in the trees, the monster truck, and all the other crazy stuff I’ve got going on in Bleeding Kansas and Grace Among the Dead. Seriously, I need to get back writing The Wrong Kind of Dead so I can see what totally insane shit is about to happen next.

Roadside Attractions in the Zombie Apocalypse

A particularly grim excerpt from Book 2 of The SAGA of the DEAD SILENCER, Grace Among the Dead

SETUP: Well, let’s just say it’s still early in the narrative and Derek Grace is leaving the scene of something he’s going to need serious (as opposed to ludicrous) redemption from, in this “Tale of Love and Redemption, of the Living Dead and a Monster Truck.”

I drive away. In my rear view mirror I see Deputy Grayson screaming at his wife as the dead cowboy and his companion close the distance. He’s opening the door to his cruiser and pulling the shotgun from its rack. His wife is trying to start the van, but it seems the slug that took out the tire damaged something else. 

Crossing the little bridge over the creek, I nearly hit three ghouls stumbling over to check out the commotion. One of them used to be a little girl, judging by what’s left of the dress hanging on her scabbed-over bones. 

You don’t often see undead children, but when you do, it’s a mess. Not having a lot of mass and meat to begin with, they’re usually thoroughly gnawed over, if not ripped apart.

The two used-to-be young men reach towards my open window high on the truck, moaning through their dried blood-beards in frustration. The little girl-thing, though, she’s all business. She’s zeroed in on the screams and small arms fire of the feast ahead.

I pass another group of five making their way to the house, then a group of three, and one lone walker as I make my way to US 24 and ride off into the sunset. I’d pop a few of them, but I need to find a place to get settled before dark.

...and there you have it. A little #FridayFeeling, as we know it in the zombie apocalypse. Everyone stock up and stay safe. Not from the zombies, but from the spell of weather we’ll have blowing in this weekend. The worst of the winter is just ahead of us—and it will be just as quickly behind us, so I’ll keep working. While you’re waiting around for me to finish my third book, you could pick up the first two. It’s going to be a great weekend for hot chocolate and zombie-slaying.

###

Zombie Love: “Between the Fever-Hot Legs of Her First Meal”

GRACE AMONG THE DEAD Gone Full Dark

The titular hero of my SAGA of the DEAD SILENCER series is in a very not-so-pleasant headspace as the second novel opens. After the dead have risen to feast on the flesh of the living, Derek Grace returns to Colorado Springs too late for his wife and children. He’s been passing the time at an abandoned farm house near Peyton, Colorado, popping painkillers, drinking scotch, reading, and watching the dead as they pass on the main road beyond.

Other survivors have caught wind of this healthy-looking specimen scavenging through a nearby town, and they arrange to locate his lair and take it over. What follows are Derek Grace’s observations of the aftermath of his first skirmish with these people. Roll clip:

I look over at Deputy Milner as I reach the living room. I leave my suitcase and bag by the front door and cross into the kitchen. I take the scotch from the pantry and pour a glass. I step back into the living room, facing at a discreet distance from the deputy and the remains of the woman between his legs.

“Adam Milner,” I say, swirling the scotch in my glass. “Be it known to all and sundry, you are where you are now because you made poor choices. All you had to do was let me go on my way and you could have had this house, the hot running water, all of it. Instead…well, never mind. For ruining my nap, I sentence you and everyone you know to be eaten alive. Salud.”

I down the glass. Right on cue, Kim’s corpse begins to stir. As she moans into un-life, the ruff-tuff creampuff who was tasing me mere minutes ago squeezes his eyes shut and begins to sob.

Kim awakens to undead heaven, between the fever-hot legs of her first living meal. I accidentally thump the tip of my boot into the foot of the oversized chair and she doesn’t turn around. In the course of pushing herself up from the floor, her cool, dead hand has closed around Deputy Adam Milner’s ankle.

The looks on both their faces—the eternal playground bully served his ultimate comeuppance, Kim’s mindless emotional hunger in full literal expression—yes, there’s the monster face. And suddenly I’m wondering what my own face must look like. Am I a monster, too, for arranging this ghoulish dinner theater? What would Claire think if she saw you now? Or Sybil? Or Jack?

Well, they aren’t here, are they?

Kim chomps into the back of deputy’s leg like it was the world’s largest state fair turkey drumstick. Big yellow dollops of mustard sauce plop into the pooling blood on the floor, but Kim does her mindless cadaver best to slobber up as much as she can with her tongue and lower lip.

Shit. 

No, I’m not enjoying this. That means I’m still okay, right?

Good Lord, what the blue screaming hell have I done?

As excruciating as it is to watch, Kim’s pleasured moaning, her smacking and slurping over Milner’s muffled shrieks take on an even more macabre timbre as I turn away. The timeless sound of an animal consuming live prey—something most of humanity hasn’t heard since the days of the sabre-tooth tigers, but you can’t miss it. Call it genetic memory.

I’m calling it Game Over. Nobody wins, said another great American poet. Ask Caesar.

This scene was the first in a series of epiphanies for Derek Grace, as befits “A Tale of Love and Redemption, of the Living Dead and a Monster Truck.” He does get better, but like the rest of us, he makes one hell of a mess on his way. Enjoy the vicarious thrills of bashing, shooting, and slashing the aggressive, entitled undead, while enjoying the progress of a man who goes from zero to hero in the course of finding his reason to live in the post-apocalypse.

Grace Among the Dead is available in Kindle and paperback from Severed Press.

###

The Art of GRACE AMONG THE DEAD: Face-Off with the Weaponized Dead!

This second in the series of pieces my wife Cynthia Aiken did for Grace Among the Dead describes a scene from Chapter 18, in which Derek Grace the Dead Silencer finds himself outdoors at the U.S. Air Force Academy’s solar array during a severe weather event. A horde of dead, including an explosive, deliberately crafted methane bomb named Bo Hemoth, are drawn by the evil Deacon Sparks up the hill to consume our hero and his crew.

But the storm is building. And something else is ripping away the chicken wire. Something huge. So huge they couldn’t keep clothes on it, God help us.

He has a gut flap like a huge flesh loincloth up front, which helps. The man was morbidly obese in his day, but much of his expansive bulk is owed to a shiny, tight, and unnaturally distended belly. A belly blocked by a chunk of bone or meat rotting in his already dead digestive tract, allowing the putrescent bacteria inside to inflate it with combustive methane.

The truck rocks as the creature shifts its weight from one leg to another. “You’re not the only one Dr. Hearn asked to find something like this,” says Sparks. “I told him, hey! Why wait to find one when you can make one! Ladies, I present to you—Bo Hemoth!”

“Bo what?” says Deacon Walsh.

“Oh, shit.” 

Art Copyright © 2015 Angry Chicken Studio.

Book 2 of The Saga of the Dead Silencer: Grace Among the Dead Copyright © 2014, 2015 by L. Roy Aiken.

As the old biker saying goes, “Fight, fuck, or dance”:

The dead from the trucks have zeroed in on my location and are staggering my way. Bo Hemoth notices the group coming towards me and lumbers around in a slow circle to face me, swatting at the flames flickering upon his belly.

This would be so much easier if it was only me about to die here. The lives of 25 young men and boys, including an old deacon, are depending on what I do next.

What happens next? We smash-cut to Chapter 19, where shit gets really messed up. Read the book, available in print or e-book format (cheap!) while I craft the epic finish to THE SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER. I'll be posting bloody gobbets from that as I go, so stay tuned. 

The Art of GRACE AMONG THE DEAD: Digital Drugstore Cowpunching

My wife, Cynthia Aiken, took it upon herself to illustrate scenes from my novel Grace Among the Dead by way of fulfilling an art school assignment, and maybe drawing attention to my work, while in turn drawing attention to her art. So let’s see if this works:

Art Copyright © 2015 Angry Chicken Studio.

Book 2 of The Saga of the Dead Silencer: Grace Among the Dead Copyright © 2014, 2015 by L. Roy Aiken.

Oxford shirts smeared brown and black, their ragged ties stiff with old blood, our first three office stooges get their numb, dead feet back under them. The two others behind them shuffle and growl for the delay. Now, all five are reaching for me over the counter, trying to work out how to get over it without falling face-forward and losing their footing again.

Their craving to chew into my warm, living flesh will soon overcome the matter of their undead dignity. Here, with their arms outstretched, their heads laid out across the counter, these ghouls are all but offering themselves to me.

I pull my panga from my belt. My beautiful panga, weapon of choice of the Rwandan genocide, and the most invaluable souvenir of my Kansas adventure. My left arm is hobbled from the woman’s crushing grip so it’s raw adrenaline driving its wide blade through the arms of the first two office stooges and the near hand of the third before sticking halfway through his other wrist.

The man in the picture didn’t look at all what I imagined Derek Grace to look like. The Dead Silencer is in his mid-40s. This character is dressed young. A duckbill and a wife-beater? Heck, put some ink on those arms while we’re at it.

To be fair, my wife had not read the previous novel, Bleeding Kansas, in which it’s established from the jump that he’s a middle-aged man struggling out of middle-aged professional irrelevance when the Final Flu crashes infrastructure, and the rise of the dead to feast on the flesh of the living separates him from his two nearly grown children. I may have to retcon Chapter 1 of Grace Among the Dead to fix this, as I like the idea of the books in my series standing independently of each other; i.e., you don’t have to read the book that came out before to make sense of the book you’re reading now.

Also, I subscribe to Elmore Leonard’s philosophy regarding character description. Unless there’s something about the character’s appearance that is integral to the story, let the reader cast and clothe the character in his mind. My wife read the above quoted passage, and that’s what she came up with.

I’m flattered to see these characters coming to life at all. And if you buy the book, and you like to think of Derek Grace as rocking full sleeves of sick ink, well, that’s how he rolls.

THE DEAD SILENCER Digital Remasters: Ultimate Editions in Production!

If you’re a movie buff, you’re aware of the Criterion Collection. You’ve likely seen the trailers on their discs, in which they show identical frames of film side by side. One side is fuzzy pre-Criterion restoration, and the other is pristine and clear. 

I had a cute idea to do something like that with my current “remastering” of Bleeding Kansas, but why bother reminding people that stuff still gets by me after so many readings? It’s painful enough for me without subjecting innocent people to this.

Bitter Dark:
Available only in paperback.

It took me a solid Sunday-through-Sunday week, but I finished my second full rewrite of Bleeding Kansas based on the original “Bitter Dark” first edition. I saved myself a lot of time and grief by abandoning my idea of making it a hybrid of the second “Plain Dark” edition. Ignoring the second edition fit better with my primary objective, which is to ensure that the tone and feel of the narrative is on a par with the writer of The Wrong Kind of Dead. The L. Roy Aiken of 2015 is several orders of magnitude removed from the early 2013 model who wrote that Bitter Dark first edition of Bleeding Kansas. Why not give my first published novel the benefit of that experience?

Although the Plain Dark second edition of Thanksgiving Week 2013 is smoother, I—and most readers, it seems—preferred Bitter Dark’s edge. My third book does a lot of reaching back to Bleeding Kansas, and The Wrong Kind of Dead is very Bitter Dark all by itself. As it should be. The zombie apocalypse is not a pretty place. It is not fair. It is not nice. It brings out the worst in people. It’s a Crapsack World crying out for a hero, but sometimes the best you can do is a survivor you’ve known for longer than most, and therefore more or less trust.

Poor bastards don’t stand a snowball’s chance.

From here, I’ll move on to the remaster of Grace Among the Dead, which I’ve always felt could have benefited from one more reading before it was published. This will be the last time for it, though. Which means The Wrong Kind of Dead needs to be done right the first time. As much as I love Derek Grace and his extended family, 2015 is the year my SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER series is put to bed, once and for all. My take on the zombie apocalypse will belong to the ages. It will be time to move on to the Next Thing, whatever they hell that may be (and I have a few ideas). 

That’s what I’ve been doing in lieu of Facebook and Twitter and blog posts. I’ll be mining old Facebook posts to use here, as I need something to entertain my new audience with. The summer is coming on fast. I’ve got to be there for it, with the very best I’ve got.

An Interview I’d Like to See with the Author of GRACE AMONG THE DEAD

In the spirit of “if you want something done right, do it yourself,” I came up with this. If Norman Mailer (remember him?) could write a book called Self Interviews, I can do a blog post in the same vein:

Do I have to wear pants for this?

I’ve yet to have anyone ask me to do an interview. I’m writing in a very popular genre, for a small, independent press out of Tasmania. My paperbacks are made to order; they don’t come out in “printings” or editions (although there are three decidedly different editions of Bleeding Kansas). 

On top of all that, I’m one writer among many. Even the fact that Bleeding Kansas was picked up for German translation only counts for so much with the kewl kids who write for the establishment blogs and papers. I have very little in common with such creatures, so it’s probably for the best.

Which brings us to today.

So why are we doing this?

Because while Bleeding Kansas has been chugging along for 19 months with steady, if unspectacular, sales, Grace Among the Dead is still sputtering after six months. It’s time the middle child got her due.

Middle child?

It’s the second book in the SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER series. I’m still writing the third and last book, The Wrong Kind of Dead.

There are a lot of zombie books out there. What makes Grace Among the Dead different? 

To begin with, my protagonist bruises and gets tired. Derek Grace is not former military, nor does he have an encyclopedic knowledge of firearms. What little he does know he gets from a book he took from his son’s room. Derek Grace was too absorbed in finding and keeping a job to concern himself with such things before civilization fell.

The Big Surprise for a lot of people reading Grace Among the Dead is my trashing of the popular cliché of the Evil Patriarchal Church and its Conniving Horndog Leadership. The post-zompocalypse settlement founded by the Abundant Life megachurch is essentially the Nice Pilgrim Frontier Settlement With Lots of Potential (once the railroad comes through) that’s been invaded by evil elements. Derek Grace, the titular Dead Silencer, is the reluctant outsider brought in to restore order.

So you traded a popular liberal trope for an old Hollywood Western trope?

A zombie apocalypse is essentially the Wild West with the living dead in place of the Comanches. By the time I bring the monster truck with the flame thrower into the picture Grace Among the Dead will already be one of the more twisted romantic comedies you’ve ever read.

Aw, hell, this isn’t another goddamned “Talking Dead” soap opera, is it?

If it is, it’s the first one to feature a flame-throwing monster truck. The characters do have relationships and misunderstandings to be resolved among one another, but at the end of the zombie-fighting day, Grace Among the Dead is a zombie novel. The novel starts with a zombie attack, and—spoiler alert!—ends with the promise of more to come.

It’s said a character should be in a completely different place by the end of a book. Believe me, Derek Grace is going to be in a seriously weird, never-saw-that-coming spot when I’m done. He should enjoy it while it lasts, because things really go to shit in Book 3, The Wrong Kind of Dead.

Available in Kindle and in paperback from Severed Press!

Read Chapter 1 here.

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Going to Ground in the Zombie Apocalypse

I actually have given a Safety in the Apocalypse lecture to my children, back when they were 11 and 8, respectively, in the car while on the way home from watching Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. While I enjoyed that film, it’s always irritated me that the plotlines of such films depend upon people doing the most counter-intuitive things in calamities that involve so much death and mayhem. 

Like, say, a zombie apocalypse. In this clip, our hero Derek Grace has just finished reading the note his daughter left for him. He took over a week to get home after civilization fell to the undead, and therefore missed connecting with his children. Still:

A big smiley face was drawn next to the “THEY’RE HERE!” on my daughter’s note, so she wasn’t talking about the dead. Still, it makes me sick to think they waited as long as they did. At least they got out. I hope.

As for my advice to get away from the people, that was from years ago, after we were all shaken up by that summer’s blockbuster hit about an alien invasion. I told my children on the way home from the theater, and reiterated the lesson with every disaster movie we saw afterwards: whether it’s aliens or plague or Godzilla, get away from the population centers. Don’t be like the idiots in these movies. If people are getting killed, you go to where the people aren’t. Under no circumstances are you to waste valuable energy and resources on futile quests to find anyone. Get to safety, and for God’s sake, stay there. 

So here’s hoping they made it to the farm outside of Pueblo. Me, I’m 20 miles from what used to be home. That place I’d feared we’d either be forced out of by foreclosure, or merely trapped forever. From where my wife couldn’t kiss me goodbye, because we couldn’t afford me getting sick and missing the interview. From where she died alone on a crowded emergency room apron because the police pulled their guns on our boy. 

Away from Colorado Springs and on the edge of high plains ranch country, where the people aren’t—for the most part, anyway. 

As we learn later, you may be safer in the country, but you’re never 100% safe in the zombie apocalypse. The story continues in GRACE AMONG THE DEAD, available in Kindle and paperback from Severed Press. 

This is more than a tale of mere survival, though. It’s about love and redemption, and a flame-throwing monster truck. Plus, some of the meanest, ugliest zombie kills I’ve ever written, at least until I finish the third book in the series. For connoisseurs of fine zombie dining, GRACE AMONG THE DEAD is what is known as “primo stuff.” If you only see three reviews on the Amazon page, it’s because I don’t beg for those things, and the haters are gonna hate. You’ve seen what I put up here on my blog. I write, you decide. Read the entire first chapter here.