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Fiction: New Zombie Story from Max Brooks!

Max Brooks author of The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z has penned a new zombie short story.  Here’s the opening paragraph:

We called them subdead, and to us, they were little more than a joke. They are so slow, and clumsy, and stupid. So stupid. We never considered them a threat. And why would we? They had existed beside us, beneath us rather, flaring up like brushfire since the first humanoids left the trees. Fanum Cocidi, Fiskurhofn, we had all heard the stories. One of us had even claimed to be present at Castra Regina, although we mainly considered him a braggart. Through the ages we had witnessed their bumbling eruptions and humanities’ equally bumbling response. They had never been a serious threat, either to us or the solbreeders they devoured. They had always been a joke. And so I laughed again when I heard of a small outbreak in Kampong Raja. Laila had told me about it, on that warm, still night ten years ago.

You can read the rest of the story here.

Do Girls Like Zombies?

The Next Dead Thing

by Donna Freitas, Publishers Weekly, 11/17/2008

Ever since Stephenie Meyer’s vampire romances became a smash success among teen readers, particularly girls, all things dead have been given a new life—at least in the minds of children’s editors hoping to take advantage of the trend. But that’s not to say that every project with a supernatural cast is being green-lighted. Far from it. As every editor knows, oversaturation can be a stake in the heart of any trend.

“The hunger for these novels is still unsatisfied,” argues Elise Howard, senior v-p and associate publisher for fiction at HarperCollins, “but the market is becoming more discerning, and you can’t just publish any old thing,” Howard, editor of Claudia Gray’s Evernight (May 2008) and the forthcoming Stargazer (March 2009), is looking far beyond vampires these days. “I’ve been interested in zombies ever since I saw Max Brooks’s books [The Zombie Survival Guide, Three Rivers Press] explode a year and a half ago.”

Howard thinks that the typical female Meyer fan isn’t necessarily going to go for books about zombies. “Zombies are basically a straight-ahead, masculine proposition,” she explained. “With all the exploding body parts, it feels very masculine, so I don’t think we should be trying to do zombies with a girl twist. We are still looking for that perfect zombie property.

Read the rest of the article here.

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