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Shaun Mason is a shell of his former self. He doesn’t find joy in poking at zombies or blogging anymore. His life feels empty because his sister Georgia was killed. He doesn’t feel completely alone because George speaks to him in his head. Although well aware that the voice isn’t really George, he still speaks to her and makes his co-workers uneasy coupled with his penchant for rages and bursts of violence. Everything turns around when a CDC scientist fakes her own death and comes to him for help. Her work researching KA reservoir conditions is being repressed by someone killing everyone else on her team. Her research could lead to the real people that killed Georgia. So, after avoiding a messy murder attempt disguised as a zombie outbreak, Shaun and his news team need to stay one step ahead of their enemies and figure out why this research is being suppressed and how it relates to his sister’s death. Shaun needs to keep enough sanity to not completely alienate his friends and stay vigilant because the slightest mistake could mean the death of everyone he cares about.
I loved Deadline. As with the first book, I was completely glued to the page within the first chapter. If I had my way, I would have sat and read this book for as long as it took me to finish it. But in real life, pesky things like eating and sleeping forced me to reluctantly put the book down. The aspect that struck me the most was the detail in describing the Kellis-Amberlee virus and how it works. I’m always interested in the science aspect of zombies because I like the zombie mechanics to actually make sense within the world. This virus is the most unique I’ve ever read because a dormant version of it is in each and every person. I really couldn’t have asked for more scientific detail, which made the world incredibly realistic. When I read the book, I felt fully immersed in this wonderful and terrible world that seemed so much like our own.
In Feed, I noticed Shaun, but he didn’t honestly make a huge impact with me. Georgia’s character outshined him, mostly due to the fact the she narrated that book. He really shines in Deadline and has many more facets than I previously thought. Fiercely loyal and quick to anger, Shaun is an emotional character who feels crazy and broken since his sister died. The only one who really understands him is her voice in his head. He knows she’s dead and not really speaking to him, but the inner voice still provides insight and guidance. Shaun grew as a character from being shallow and adventure seeking to someone more fragile and serious. Through all of his pain, he never once gives up on finding answers. I enjoyed getting to know Shaun. I really want to reread Feed now and pay more attention to his character to better see the changes he’s gone through.
Deadline is a relentless adventure. The plot doesn’t stop and alternates between heart-stopping adventure and slow burning mystery solving. I like that this book is half action movie and half cerebral mystery. The ending is completely shocking, but sets up the next book. I’m glad Deadline isn’t a typical second book, where it’s typically just filler for the finale. I can’t wait for the next book and I would recommend this to all zombie fans.
My rating: 5/5 fishmuffins
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Giveaway alert!! I'm giving away one copy of Feed and Deadline by Mira Grant to one lucky reader. Comment below with a way I can contact you. +2 entries for following and +1 for spreading the word (up to 5 times).
Open internationally. Ends 10/27/ Good luck!!
Bearing this history in mind, it’s only realistic to expect to find out that our Kindles, Nooks, and other ebook readers are also vulnerable to being haunted. When we consider the rich variety of characters, emotions, and imaginary worlds that pass through such a small device, it’s only natural that a supernatural spirit will, sooner or later, attempt to take up residence in your ebook device.
Some of these ghosts are simply nuisance hauntings, and will do little more than put typos into your ebooks. Others, however, are more dangerous.
Here are a few signs that you may have a haunted e-reader:
1. Loads stories you didn’t buy. They may be gruesome tales of death and deception, or that new book by Snooki. Either way, this could be a sign that a malevolent intelligence has moved into your Kindle.
2. Speaks to you personally. If the text-to-speech feature on your Kindle starts making conversation with you, whether pleasant or threatening, you should be aware that is not a normal function of the Kindle and could indicate a ghost.
3. Displays frightening and non-book-related images. If screaming faces appear at random on the screen of your reader, this could be a haunting. Note: These faces are especially terrifying on the Nook Color.
4. Displays stories about you. Your e-reader may begin to tell you stories about yourself, involving terrible things happening to you. If so, this is very likely a haunting.
What can you do about the risk of your Kindle, Nook or Sony reader being haunted?
1. Prevention. Some people claim that affixing a dreamcatcher to your reader’s carrying case will help block out evil spirits. Also, avoid the temptation to download The Haunted E-book to your device, despite its spookily low price of just $2.99. This book has been known to cause supernatural problems for readers.
2. Contact tech support. If your e-reader is under warranty, they may simply switch out your haunted reader for a new one. Then the ghost becomes somebody else’s problem instead of yours!
3. Download a variety of religious texts. I’m not sure which ones would work best, but certainly if you download enough sacred material, something might shake that ghost loose.
4. Exorcism. Have your Kindle or Nook professionally exorcised, if you can find a professional exorcist willing to do so. This service is offered at more progressive voodoo shops.
5. Cope. Determine whether you can just live with the amount of trouble your ghost is giving you.
We hope these tips have helped you today. In the comments below, you might let us know some more signs that your e-readers may be haunted, or your thoughts on how to deal with such a problem.
The Giveaways:
Commenting on this post within seven days enters you for The Haunted E-book Tour Grand Prizes, including The Haunted Library and a Kindle (or two!).
Your comment also enters you to win a pair of ebooks from Titania (The Haunted E-book and Dark Tomorrows) according to her usual giveaway rules: Please leave a comment with your email address before the contest closes on 3/18!
Thanks for following the tour! And thanks to Titania for hosting The Haunted E-book Tour today.
J.L. Bryan studied English literature at the University of Georgia and at Oxford, with a focus on the English Renaissance and the Romantic period. He also studied screenwriting at UCLA. He is the author of five novels and one short-story collection. He enjoys remixing elements of paranormal, supernatural, fantasy, horror and science fiction into new kinds of stories. His new novel is The Haunted E-book. The sequel to his novel Jenny Pox will be available by summer 2011.
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Curtains
By Scott Nicholson
http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/
When I started releasing my story collections as e-books, Neil Jackson of Ghostwriter Publications did a wonderful cover for my collection Ashes that had a red velvet curtain on one side.
We already had a “monster eye” cover for The First, and I thought it would look cool to use the curtain for the monster eye as well. That led to the “curtains” motif we used in Flowers as well, to create a linked set. I had stories left over for at least two collections, so when it came time to come up with a name for my mystery collection, it was obvious: Curtains.
In slang, one of the meanings is to “drop the curtain,” as in the closing of a show or to conceal an object. I like to picture a gangster pointing his Tommy gun and saying to the victim, “It’s curtains fer ya.”
A good bit of my early stories were in the mystery genre, back when my goal was to be published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. I have eight or 10 rejection slips from there but I never hit the right tone for the magazine, which was a lot different from the old Alfred Hitchcock Presents anthologies I used to read—those were darker and had as much horror as crime, and the mystery field has always struggled between its two extremes of serial-killer noir and tea-room cozies.
That’s fine with me. I have always liked extremes. In the world of Scott Nicholson, I can write a light-hearted mystery veiling a romance (“Kill Your Darlings”) and I can literally kill some darlings, as in “The Weight of Silence,” where family is only worth what the insurance policy claims it is.
The collection features one of my best stories, “Dog Person,” which arose from a real-life story about one of my friends making the decision to put his beloved dog to sleep rather than spend thousands of dollars on surgery and treatments. My friend then spun a story idea out of it, and we challenged each other to add an extra twist to make the decision less voluntary.
In the late 1990’s, there was a mystery e-zine called Blue Murder Magazine that managed to put out about five issues as PDF downloads. It was a little ahead of its time, because nobody wanted to read PDFs on their computer screens back then, and nobody wanted to advertise in magazines they thought nobody wanted to read. I managed to place stories in three of the issues, and I still have one of the last surviving T-shirts. I’ve also been fortunate to publish in some of the other top crime magazines like Cemetery Dance and Crimewave. Cemetery Dance is, of course, the top horror destination as well, while Crimewave constantly features some of the best writers in the
The collection also contains a couple of bonus contributions from J.A. Konrath, the e-book Pied Piper and author of the Jack Daniels series, and Simon Wood, who is one of the best hard-edged crime writers working today.
I’ve since spun my interests into the crime novels The Skull Ring and the forthcoming Disintegration, and my forthcoming collaboration with J.R. Rain will overlap into mystery as well. I’ve read a wide range of mystery novels, from M.C. Beaton and Carl Hiassen to Patricia Highsmith, Dennis Lehane, and Donald Westlake. Those I enjoy the most tend to be those that border on psychological horror, like Silence of the Lambs, or more literary novels that play on mystery convention such as Richard Brautigan’s Dreaming of Babylon and Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn.
Maybe I shouldn’t even investigate the origins of my influences. I think the only answer I’d be able to come up with is, “It’s a mystery to me.”
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Scott Nicholson is author of 12 novels, including the thrillers Speed Dating with the Dead, Drummer Boy, Forever Never Ends, The Skull Ring, As I Die Lying, Burial to Follow ,and They Hunger. His revised novels for the U.K. Kindle are Creative Spirit, Troubled, and Solom. He’s also written four comic series, six screenplays, and more than 60 short stories. His story collections include Ashes, The First, Murdermouth: Zombie Bits, and Flowers.
To be eligible for the Kindle DX, simply post a comment below with contact info. Feel free to debate and discuss the topic, but you will only be entered once per blog. Visit all the blogs on the tour and increase your odds. I’m also giving away a Kindle 3 through the tour newsletter and a Pandora’s Box of free e-books to a follower of “hauntedcomputer” on Twitter. Thanks for playing. Complete details at http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/blogtour.htm
In the summer, there are strange happenings in Sweden that are hard to ignore. First, people have headaches and electrical items refuse to turn off. They can’t even be unplugged and if this is attempted, the person gets an electric shock. When things suddenly return to normal, the unthinkable happens: the dead rise. These zombies seem to just walk around with no capacity to understand or speak or even harm the living. This is only happening in Stockholm which leads the world to ask: what caused this? Why such a small area? While the rest of the world is trying to make sense of the event, the inhabitants of Stockholm are dealing with their dead loved ones with interesting results. David’s wife had died minutes before the uprising, making his wife the only zombie that can speak. Elvy and her granddaughter Flora are both psychic and don’t know what to make of Elvy’s dead husband showing up at their door. Journalist Gustav Mahler and his daughter have been in a stasis since his grandson died and now see new hope in the dead rising. They just have to dig him out of his grave.
This is an entirely unexpected zombie novel. John Ajvide Lindqvist has done for zombies what he did for vampires in his previous novel Let the Right One In; he practically reinvented the genre. The novel is like a slow burn. It moves slowly, but succeeds in being extremely suspenseful and an altogether different kind of horror than is common in the genre. The focus of the novel isn’t the gore or the zombies or the reasons for these strange happenings, but the living people that have close family members returning as zombies. The people focused on are about as different as can be, but they all share in this bizarre experience. Each character is described eloquently, complete with histories that directly influence how they deal with the zombies. Their reactions are realistic and believable, ranging from religious fanaticism to hysteria to anger to disgust to delusions of normalcy. Each chapter focuses on a different group of characters. Lindqvist is skilled at capturing different individuals’ voices, getting into the hearts and minds of each character, and making it all ring true. The most chilling situation is with Gustav Mahler, his daughter, and her young, undead son.
One thing that I really enjoyed is the presence of the rest of the world in the novel. Many other zombie books and movies are just focused on one country with no reactions or events from other countries. Newspaper articles, television interviews, and radio broadcasts from all over the world are placed in between chapters through most of the book. It lets the reader know that this is an isolated incident and what other countries think about it, as well as giving the story a sense of realism.
There are only a few things in the novel that are flawed. The cause of the uprising is never revealed. I don’t find this a flaw, but I think other fans of the genre would. This isn’t the focus of the story, so it essentially doesn’t really matter what caused it. The ending of the novel is pretty much unresolved. I feel like it could have been tied together a little better. I wouldn’t be surprised if he wrote a follow up novel to continue the story.
Although it has a few flaws, Handling the Undead really blew me away with its originality and eloquence. I can’t wait to see what John Ajvide Lindqvist will do next.
My rating: 4.5/5 fishmuffins
I have one ARC copy to give away! Just leave a comment with your e-mail address and you're entered to win! If you'd like 5 additional entries, you can post your very own pro-Team Zombie post and enter Velvet's super awesome Zombies vs. Unicorns Challenge. Show your Team Zombie pride! Open internationally. Contest ends 10/15.
**This post is for Velvet's September Zombies.**
