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Day 130- My New Read, or, Zombie Attack!!

Image by Jinx!
My new book is an oral history of the zombie war. What? You don’t remember it? Come on. I love books like this, because as an English teacher, I can see this being part of a literature class in 25 years or so. It’s one of those books that will work its way into the culture, and people will be reading it for years to come. Everyone loves fantasy and supernatural tales…except for my girl, who will probably have nightmares just seeing the cover
Really- she just might.

Keene Book Signing

Image by Greyhawk68
Brian was signing his books, The Rising, City of the Dead and Terminal. The Rising and City of the Dead are zombie horror. Excellent Stuff…

Book Review Of Scaring The Crows:21 Tales For Noon Or Midnight By Gregory Miller

Scaring The Crows:21 Tales For Noon or Midnight 
By Gregory Miller 
StoneGarden.Net Publishing 
.95

This small book accorded me one of the most pleasant reading experiences of the last year or so. And don’t think I’m damning it with faint praise using the word “pleasant.” I’m not; I really liked this book. All parts of it, from its delightful front cover to the blurbs on the back. I’ve enjoyed it from the moment I took it out of the shipping envelope. I own an e-reader and I’d forgotten how pleasing the sight and feel of a real book can be!

I don’t know if it is a tribute to Mr. Miller’s skills or those of his publisher, but it was doubly pleasant to come across a book with so few (I couldn’t find any) misspellings or typographical errors. Good proofreaders do still exist.

After babbling about the books foundation I want to quickly allay any angst the author may be suffering while awaiting my opinion. Although, after receiving favorable notice from so giant a figure as Ray Bradbury: “Gregory Miller is a fresh new talent with a great future.” (the quotation is found on the front cover directly above the title), I can’t imagine author  Miller is on pins and needles waiting for this pigmy’s appraisal. All I can do is agree with the great man: Gregory Miller does indeed have talent!

The title of the book leads us to believe it is all ghost and horror stories; one look at the whimsical but controlled cover illustrations, however, immediately informs us that it contains elements bound to be more complicated than that. Dark yes, but varied enough to keep us interested; some stories are indeed ghostly, others poignant; yet others almost comedic. But dark; dark is still the operative word here.

For instance, in “Scaring The Crows,” the first short story as well as the title of the book, the tortured heroine’s self perpetuated problems would be downright amusing if they weren’t so obviously painful and likely to be fatal. About half-way though the book another story, “Lorna Gould’s Roses” has some funny lines too, but the protagonist’s situation is deadly serious. My favorite story, found near the end of the book, “A Sense of Duty,” is perhaps the darkest of the lot and yet somehow manages to be life-affirming. If you’ve ever tried to write fiction you’re aware of the difficulty inherent in expressing such dichotomies in print, but Miller does a masterful job.

All Miller’s well-drawn characters are ordinary people caught in situations where the rules don’t fit the game they thought they were playing; there’s nary a Hannibal Lecter in the bunch. We can all relate. (Well, Ok, there’s at least one flesh eater and three or four zombies; but the flesh eater wasn’t looking for trouble and the zombies are ordinary guys in a zombie sort of way.) Miller has an excellent ear for dialogue; there’s just a trace of dialect here and there for the sake of back-country verisimilitude, nothing to jar us out of Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief.”

Miller specializes in abrupt endings. For the most part he’s quite good at it. My one criticism (and I suspect he’s heard this before) is that occasionally the ending is all too abrupt. In “Goodbye Friend” for instance, one of the more poignant stories (Hey! We’re talking a boy and his dog here!), I don’t know how it ends. I mean, was it the lady or the tiger? Life or death?

Did I mention that I liked this book? I found it well written, well bound, well illustrated and yes, well proofread. One of the best new books for under ten bucks I’ve read in a long time. Find this book at Stonegarden.net publishers.

A few nice Zombie Book Reviews images I found:

Interesting Things In My Library #8

Image by aussierupe
Mental Illness, Possession, Exorcism and Life After Death (1977) – Dr. Francis Harber

This is a truly extraordinary book. By way of explanation, I can do no better than the tongue in cheek review that I once gave the book on Amazon:

"Harber’s comments and insights into the nature of possession and the afterlife are ground breaking. Using a conversational, question and answer format, he attempts to answer major spiritual and philosophical questions for the reader. Towards the end of the text, he provides the reader with a comprehensive guide to recognising the 217 most common symptoms of possession in humans, dogs, and plant life. A plant, named ‘Begonia’, is used as an example. He provides a detailed discussion of the nature of demonic possession, exorcism, and the soul from the perspective of a spiritualist. Constructive solutions and advice are provided to resolve most garden variety possessions by demons and spirits. Well worth the read!"

Jesus, zombies, syphilis, possessed house plants and succubi all make appearances in the book.

Prior to writing this book, Harber authored "Schizophrenia, Obsession, Exorcism, Reincarnation, and Mediums"

Inset: a photo of the good Doctor, taken from the book’s back cover.

No digital copy available.

2009 in music

Image by erin m
On last year’s music post, Scott wrote "if i posted about music i’d have left out so many other things that are so important to me."

Music is so much more than a list. It’s a mood, it’s nostalgia, it’s being transported to somewhere other than where you are.

In the scramble to get out the door in the morning, I sometimes weigh the merits of what I’ve left upstairs against how late I am. I won’t turn back for a mislaid hat or my lunch or a book I’m just about to finish. But I cannot get through a single day without music.

People complain that we’re a city of zombies, tuning out the world with our earbuds and shuffling from metro to office and back again. But when the music is good, it makes me want to smile at strangers, to spread the soundtrack of my day.

Top 5 musical happenings of 2009

Avett Brothers, "I And Love And You"
Oh. My. God. It’s just…I’m in awe.

Alejandro Escovedo, everything.
When I got into Chicago late one night last fall, I went for a short walk in Grant Park, intending to get straight back to the hotel and crash. The city instead offered up a free Escovedo show, and I watched a girl in a bridesmaid’s dress dance in her own private world.

Soundtrack, "(500) Days of Summer."
It almost collapses under the weight of twee hipsterdom, but then it doesn’t.

Elvis Costello, "Secret, Profane & Sugarcane."
Yep. When I saw him at Wolftrap this summer, a banjo sat to the side of the stage for the entire show. No one touched it. It just taunted us. Also the man is just charming.

Film, "It Might Get Loud."
See what I did there? I called this musical happenings so i could get away with this. It’s just one 90-minute musical experience anyway. But good god is it wonderful. The storytelling, the journeys home, bizarro mini-Jack White, the inability of White and the Edge to smother the childlike glee when Jimmy Page picks up a guitar in front of them … (go on, look at ‘em smile). This is a movie made for music-lovers.

World War Z: an oral history of the zombie war

Image by duncan
Photo used for a Book review.

I have not posted in the longest time, but have read a few zombie books in that time at least. Going to be updating the whole site shortly, a new look (mostly) and going to make the book list alot more friendly. Plus I have a few to add to it from authors who have emailed me. So do come back often.

Been a bit busy lately with other zombie related things, in addition to fix’s and updates on the site I have currently been reading The Book of More Flesh, so I can review it later on this site. I don’t want to leave anyone hanging though so I thought of something to post.

You know you’ve read too many zombie books when you start forgetting them…. I read Plague Zone about a year ago. I just remembered when looking through StumbleUpon for sites tagged zombie books. Plague Zone is another online serialized novel by David Wellington, and you can read it here.

This story was much different than the stories in the Monster series. The zombies were your standard slow lumbering stupid gonna eat you type. Just how I like them . It was hard to stop reading this story, as there were many parts packed with suspense. It doesn’t take long for events to start unfolding the first zombie experience is pretty early in the story.

The story goes as most zombie stories do. A plague begins, and crawls its way through the United States. However this one isn’t covering someone looking for a cure, or the person who will bring an end to all the humans left. The story focuses on one man, who wants to permanently kill one zombie. Being a husband and a father it was pretty easy for me to relate, it was also very hard for me to think of what I would do and think if I were put in a similar situation. Overall the story was good. It wasn’t as good as the Monster Island trilogy but its still definitely worth a read. I really was not satisfied with the end, it almost felt like things needed to be wrapped up pretty fast, as if the number 60 had to be the last chapter.

The main thing that makes it hard to judge harshly is the fact its free for anyone to read. Again you can check the story out here.

Rating 3/5

This book is the second in the Morningstar Strain series by Z.A. Reicht. I read the first one two or three years ago online (while working on the help desk shh..) So I was a bit rusty on the story. Jumped onto http://www.themorningstarsaga.com to get a quick refresher before I started reading.

If you remember both groups were on their way to Omaha to get to the facility in order to start working on some sort of vaccine. The book starts off pretty much where the last one left off, with Stiles evading the infected in the first chapter. You are then taken between each group from chapter to chapter following their progress.

First Ill go into what I didn’t like about the book. It felt almost too comfortable to me as I read I felt like I pretty much knew who the author wouldn’t kill off so when they were in tough situations I didn’t worry. The ending while I wont spoil it for you, it just didn’t seem realistic to me. It was one of those “Of Course!” moments. Overall I felt the book didn’t have the same suspense as the first story did (imagining thousands upon thousands of infected coming at you in a desert is hard to top), but that’s not to say that it didn’t have of its own moments.

I did like the feel that the country was utterly destroyed. It really helps with the overall atmosphere of the story. There is also a sense of trepidation when the survivors do happen to wander into a city. I really like the climatic part of the story when the survivors (or whats left of them) do reach Omaha. That kept me pretty entertained, plus the fact that I live in Omaha made it pretty interesting.

Overall it was a good book, helped to stave off the boredom during the trip. Also I received the book as a gift for attending Omaha’s zombie walk, which was awesome considering I have been wanting to read this book for a while now.

Overall Id have to give the book a 3.5/5

I am going to kick off the reviews section with a review of Monster Island by David Wellington one of my favorite zombie novels.  I read this story years ago while at work. Its the first of a trilogy by David Wellington.

The story starts off with Dekalb floating into Manhattan one month after New York has fallen to the zombie hordes. Why would anyone travel to New York during a zombie epidemic you ask? Well currently Delkab lives with his daughter Sarah in Somalia. He needs to get medication for AIDS for the warlords who run Somalia in order to earn his place in their society.

There’s many things that set this book apart from other zombie books in the genre. One very interesting thing is the way some zombies are able to hold on to their true consciousness. If you have oxygen flowing to your brain as you are “dying” you will return fully aware, theres more to it than that but I wont spoil the story.  Also why is the main character currently living in Somalia? Well think about it, there are a lot of weapons, people are trained through everyday life on how to live in poor conditions with danger looming. This is also another thing I liked about the story. Something I dont think most people would think, in most stories the epidemic seems to start in Africa. These are some of the things which make this book so interesting.

There’s really not anything I can think of to say bad about it. If you like zombie novels you NEED to read this one, of course then you will need to read the other two. Originally you could read this for free on the site (chapters were released every Mon, Wed, and Fri), but now you can also buy the print copy which I recommend in order to support free serialized novels.

Rating: 5/5

Buy the book now

Visit the website http://www.brokentype.com/monster/