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Post by dem bones on Sept 18, 2010 8:31:50 GMT
Stephen Jones ("creator") - Zombie Apocalypse (Robinson, 2010) Cover design and illustration, JoeRoberts.co.uk Micheal Marshall Smith - Things Past Mandy Slater - Internal Communication #1 Christopher Fowler - Dead Ground Zero Mandy Slater - Internal Communication #2 Paul Finch - Special Powers Mandy Slater - Internal Communication #3 Sarah Pinborough - Diary Entry #1 Mandy Slater - Internal Communication #4 Jo Fletcher - Dead Di And The Zombie King Mandy Slater - Internal Communication #5 John Llewellyn Probert - Rings Around The Roses Mandy Slater - Internal Communication #6 Jay Russell - Tweets Of The Dead Mandy Slater - Automated Reply Sarah Pinborough - Diary Entry #2 Mandy Slater - Emergency Service #1 Kim Newman - Minutes Of Meeting Lisa Morton - They're Coming To Get You Mandy Slater - Emergency Service #2 Tanith Lee - Letters From A Tower Mandy Slater - News Front Page #1 Paul McAuley - The Treatment Mandy Slater - News Front Page #2 Sarah Pinborough - Diary Entry #3 Mandy Slater - Dead Link Kim Newman - Pastor Pat At The 700 Club Tim Lebbon - Zmbs Peter Crowther - Newsflash Robert Hood - Wasting Matilda Peter Crowther - Webcam Exchange Pat Cadigan - We'll Take Manhattan Peter Crowther - 'The Longest Distance Between Two Places' by Will Halloway Mark Samuels - The Reign Of Santa Muerte Pete Atkins - The Show Must Go On Kim Newman - Zombie Novelty Tracks Scott Edelman - We Are Not A New People Kim Newman - Epilogue: The Queen's Christmas SpeechBlurb: THE END OF THE WORLD - WITH FLESH-EATING ZOMBIES!
In the near future, a desperate and ever-more controlling UK government attempts to restore a sense of national pride with a New Festival of Britain. But construction work on the site of an old church in south London releases a centuries‑old plague that turns its victims into flesh-hungry ghouls whose bite or scratch passes the contagion – a supernatural virus which has the power to revive the dead – on to others.
`The Death' soon sweeps across London and the whole country descends into chaos. When a drastic attempt to eradicate the outbreak at source fails, the plague spreads quickly to mainland Europe and then across the rest of the world.
Told through a series of interconnected eyewitness narratives – text messages, e-mails, blogs, letters, diaries and transcripts – this is an epic story of a world plunged into chaos as the dead battle the living for total domination.
Will humanity triumph over the worldwide zombie plague, or will the walking dead inherit the Earth?Man, but this is a strange looking beast! At first glance part horror anthology, part graphic novel (minus, for the most part, the graphics). There are a variety of type faces, official looking documents, even some "handwritten" pages to give it that authentic frenzied touch. If Zombie Apocalypse reads as interesting as it looks then small wonder i've been hearing excited whispers about it these past weeks. What a lovely surprise! Thanks to my friends at Robinsons for sending this!
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Post by dem bones on Sept 18, 2010 18:15:06 GMT
Spoiler alert
Proper horror! Even if the rest of Zombie Apocalypse turns out to be rubbish (which i doubt), i'd still want it for Micheal Marshall Smith's angry, modern-life-is-rubbish opener, retrieved, we're told via an impersonal note, from the hard-drive of a fire-damaged computer.
Micheal Marshall Smith - Things Past: In a suicide email to his two years dead mother, a lawyer reveals how he finally became furious enough to protest the excavation of a Greenwich Churchyard when he realised the recession-hit coalition government "truly were prepared to stomp all over London's history for their fifteen days of New Festival Fun". The Great Festival (the 2012 Olympics?) is force-fed us via every media outlet to remind us how vibrant, equal and significant a world super-power is this lotto Britain of ours. Middle England buys into it. There is even an X-Factor-style talent show to select the non-entity who gets to sing the National Anthem at the opening ceremony. But still this sense that somethings wrong.
Construction work begins on site of the All Hallows graveyard, all but a few genuinely concerned protesters having overlooked the fact that it once served as a plague pit, and, when a red dust cloud escapes into the atmosphere, the moronic rent-a-crowd are infected even as they gormlessly cheer excitedly like they were on the sidelines of a Big Brother eviction.
The dead rise from their graves. They go forth and multiply and destroy the city. It really is as quick as all that.
And now our lawyer is holed up in his house, zombified wife Zoe locked in the cellar and the undead encroaching. Nothing to do but finish his message, set fire to the place and join Zoe so they can be incinerated together.
My favourite MMS short since More Tomorrow.
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Post by andydecker on Sept 19, 2010 10:25:48 GMT
You know, I kind of got bored with the Zombie deluge
(Isn´t it funny how the perception changed? Romero´s Dawn still isn´t avaiable uncut in Germany and I remember that there was a loud outcry against those movies; today you even get a fu***ing tv-series, comics and funny takes like the Austen book, when did this happen? In 5 years both the Zombie and the Vampire will be buried so deep under unsold books that even they can´t crawl into the spotlight again)
But this one seems to be one of those must-buys like the Skipp/Spector was all those years ago.
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Post by dem bones on Sept 19, 2010 10:50:05 GMT
Mandy Slater - Internal Communication #1/ #2/ #3: i've a hunch that Mandy's contribution may have been submitted as a stand-alone story but broken up to give the book a sense of continuity. The internal communications to date comprise three increasingly urgent emails from the British Media Corporation to its employees advising them to avoid Blackheath and All Hallows, because ... Christopher Fowler - Dead Ground Zero: It's all getting very complex now with more than a hint of Black Magic thrown into the mix! M.M.S. alludes to Nicholas Hawksmoor's paganism in the opener, but Chris Fowler - very on his own turf - takes it further by slowly unraveling the unorthodox beliefs of the architect's disciple, Thomas Morely, the man responsible for building All Hallows Church, who is reputedly buried in a vault far beneath it. Morely, it seems held forthright views concerning the resurrection of the dead .... Anyway, Dead Ground Zero is told in a series of documents relating to University College Hospital Professor Margaret Winn' and her persistent attempts to discover whether any consultation whatsoever took place before the Home Office, ignoring a long standing Government order and excavated the East Side of Greenwich Park, gave the go ahead to erect the new Festival site. Prof. Winn is deeply concerned that should any plague pits be disturbed they may still present a small risk to public health unless the corpses are professionally disposed of. When Prof. Winn visits the site and interviews Schwarinski, one of the excavation team about his nightmare find at Quadrant 3, she is warned by her superior to stop stirring up these foolish concerns as "it is of primary importance to the survival of the Government and to the spirit of the nation" that the Festival go ahead. Furious, Prof. Winn leaks the story to crusading hack Janet Ramsey of Hard News online newspaper who realises at once she has a story that could bring down the coalition. Meanwhile Prof. Winn discovers that Morely's vault has not only been located but used to dump the corpses from the plague pit! Schwarinski leads her to the vault and .... nobody sees Prof. Winn on the outside world after that. Well, not any Prof. Winn they'd recognise ... The plucky Janet Ramsey, unable to contact her source, approaches Schwarinski who agrees to admit her to the vault after dark. In a sequence that may remind of H. R. Wakefield's delightful Ghost Hunt, we learn of Janet's horrific experiences via a transcript of her on-the-spot report which, sadly, never made it as far as Hard News .... Looks like this could turn into a marathon as i've now finished Paul Finch's Special Powers and that is every bit as good as what has gone before ... You know, I kind of got bored with the Zombie deluge .... But this one seems to be one of those must-buys like the Skipp/Spector was all those years ago. if Zombie Apocalypse can keep it up for the duration (480 pages), i'd agree that this is the best i've read since Mammoth Book Of Zombies and may well be the EQUAL of Skipp & Spector's Book Of The Dead! Robinson certainly seem very hopeful for Zombie Apocalypse, and have even put thought into a more striking than usual press release.
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Post by dem bones on Sept 19, 2010 20:32:26 GMT
Weirdly enough shared world things are something I've never really encountered before! This was I suppose a little like a TV series - Steve created the overall arc and episode plotlines and then as writers we had to get from A to B, or P to Q. My brief was (surprise) to do a story detailing the medical course of someone being bitten and succumbing to the zombie plague. I'd never written a zombie story before & the idea of zombies had never really inspired me (there's only so much you can do with the dead walking around), but I used that to basically have a zombie plague going completely mental in an NHS hospital and I had loads of fun writing something very action packed. It stands on its own (and it's bound to turn up in a future collection) but I'll very interested to see how it integrates into the book as a whole Paul Finch - Special Powers: New Festival of Britain excavation site at All Hallows. The interim and full shift reports of Police Sergeant Liam Calvin on the night of May Day Eve as his five-strong Blackheath Road Mobile Command Unit endure a night-shift like no other. MacKintosh, a young constable with a reputation for incompetence goes missing, only to be found "asleep" on a public bench - but what's happened to his neck? Glamorous PC Charlotte Gatewood, who locates her comatose colleague after a search lasting hours, is bitten on the thumb by a seemingly insane naked woman of prodigious strength who also impales a police dog on a fence. On her way to hospital, Gatewood attacks and kills the three strong ambulance crew, runs down a bag lady in New Cross and, pursued by Calvin who has orders to kill her, eventually jack-knifes off the road. Even then she emerges from the wreckage not the least concerned that she's a human torch .... All through the report, Sergeant Calvin rages against the interference from all sides that makes modern policing virtually impossible, reserving particular disdain for his fast-tracked, self-serving superior officer, Inspector Makewaite with whom he has something of a frosty relationship. No wonder. "Haven't you realised yet that there's no longer any room for morality in police work?" sneers Makewaite. "I'd have thought the Police Special Powers Act has made that clear. We haven't been there to serve the public for several years now. We're here to serve the state." Paul Finch, it is no surprise to discover, is a former cop. His, Fowler and Smith's stories form an extraordinarily angry horror of the NOW. I am very impressed! Sarah Pinborough - Diary Entry #1: OMG! April 28th and it's Maddy Wood's 13th birthday. Mum has bought her her first proper bra and her best friend George (who she's known since Woodland's Primary) got her this notebook which she is using for her first ever diary! What will she find to write about (apart from Alex, George's fit seventeen year old brother *sigh*)? Not much, as, since the curfew, nobody under 18 is allowed on the street after 6. p.m. Also, the school hardly ever opens due to the strikes, and everyone is really miserable. Uncle Jack, normally a laugh riot, hasn't been the same since his friend was among those shot dead in Trafalgar Square when police opened fire on demonstrators, and she gathers from his chats with Dad that the public mood is ugly. With mass unemployment and food shortages, this time people won't be placated by the Government lighting a few fireworks and telling them it's time to celebrate "Great!" Britain. Last night something so bad happened at All Hallows that the curfew has been extended to 24 hours! OMG! If she doesn't see Alex, like, soon she'll DIE!
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Post by dem bones on Sept 20, 2010 11:29:56 GMT
Jo Fletcher - Dead Di And The Zombie King: A Hard News report by Janet Ramsey written, I guess, before she was murdered and came back as a zombie at climax of Chris Fowler's story. According to Ms. Ramsey's sobering revelations, a crack team of "crazed mourners" who call themselves the Royal Revivalists, have disinterred Princess Diana's corpse and reburied her in the vault of Thomas 'The Zombie King' Morely. In related non-sensationalist news, the body of Canon Terrence Abercrombie, rector of All Souls, has been found mutilated, believed chewed, by his housekeeper.
Elsewhere the British Media Corporation are commendably reassuring their staff that there is no such thing "Beltane Plague" or "The Death". It's all just a very mild strain of HRV, no more than a minor flu bug, really ....
.... and the staff at University Hospital in Lewisham are about to come face to face with a young woman afflicted by the disease that doesn't exist.
John Llewellyn Probert - Rings Around The Roses: May 1st and Anna Carstairs, 26, is brought into A & E by her concerned boyfriend. Anna has cleared out the medicine cabinet, drank every last drop of alcohol in the flat, and has become aggressive to the point of derangement. Also the cat has disappeared. Miss Carstairs dies foaming, but not before she's sank her teeth into the arm of staff nurse Susan Jenkins. The bite mark is one for the text books: aggressive necrosis and gangrene set in almost instantaneously and there is nothing for it but to amputate the limb! Despite having been shot through with enough sedatives to tranquilise a whale, nurse Jenkin's comes to mid-operation and goes berserk, causing more mayhem than even her nemesis, patient Carstairs. Arguably her most high profile victim is Dr. James Lancaster who, diligent to the last (and beyond), records all he can of his experience as he submits to, and comes out the other side of, "The Death".
Jay Russell - Tweets Of The Dead: Why was flight VS0001 from Heathrow to New York shot from the sky by the USAF over Long Island? Fortunately, passenger BooBooBoy was a compulsive Tweeter, that 'was' being very much the operative word.
Due to staff sickness, there is no longer anyone available at the BMC to advise staff of what to do should they believe themselves stricken by the harmless virus .....
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Thana Niveau
Devils Coach Horse
We who walk here walk alone.
Posts: 109
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Post by Thana Niveau on Sept 21, 2010 9:58:32 GMT
Great synopses, Dem! I sneak-read JLP's proof copy off my screen last month and literally couldn't stop. Truly compulsive reading - especially coming from someone who hates reading off computer screens! I was feeling a bit tired of zombies too, but the "mosaic" format gives it a wonderfully fresh approach.
JLP's and Paul Finch's authoritative entries really take you there and give the zombie threat an authenticity and an immediacy that's extremely effective. And scary! Tanith Lee's entry is my favourite of the personal stories. Very poignant.
I look forward to the rest of your review!
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Post by dem bones on Sept 21, 2010 15:44:16 GMT
Thank you, your ladyship. Being a curmudgeonly git, i must admit my first thought on seeing Zombie Apocalypse was "well, this will be a disaster!", but it drew me in from the off. Just past p.200 and can honestly say i've enjoyed it immensely up 'til now (just finished the second entry from Sarah Pinborough/ 'Maddy Wood's cripplingly sad diary).
i'm glad you enjoyed fantasycon. have seen several photo's taken at the event and i'm sure Lord P. will be pleased to know i had to urgently adjust my screen settings as the glare from his immaculate striped blazer was murder on my poor eyeballs.
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Post by mandyslater on Sept 25, 2010 16:40:09 GMT
Mandy Slater - Internal Communication #1/ #2/ #3: i've a hunch that Mandy's contribution may have been submitted as a stand-alone story but broken up to give the book a sense of continuity. The internal communications to date comprise three increasingly urgent emails from the British Media Corporation to its employees advising them to avoid Blackheath and All Hallows, because ...
****
Mandy here. Sorry chaps, but my contributions were not broken up -- that is how I was asked to write them! You have to understand, that this antho was planned out in advance -- to great detail. It was great fun writing for it.
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Post by marksamuels on Sept 25, 2010 23:36:00 GMT
Mandy, I won't ask you to sign ALL of your excerpts when I see you & Steve at the Prince Charles Cinema next week... you can just squiggle on the title page if you like I had great fun writing my bit too. Mark S.
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Thana Niveau
Devils Coach Horse
We who walk here walk alone.
Posts: 109
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Post by Thana Niveau on Sept 26, 2010 6:26:47 GMT
I loved your "bit", Mark. I had more than a few stand-out favourites. Yours was definitely one of the scariest pieces.
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oatcakeredux
Crab On The Rampage
I STILL know where the yellow went.
Posts: 41
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Post by oatcakeredux on Oct 4, 2010 13:47:07 GMT
I say - is this currently available in all good bookstores, most crap ones, and major branches of Twilightstones? 'Cause I gots to get me a copy!
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Post by Johnlprobert on Oct 4, 2010 14:01:27 GMT
Apparently it's out on Oct 14th. The reason a few of us have read it already is because there were advance copies available at FantasyCon (or alternatively because we wrote bits of it )
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Post by dem bones on Oct 5, 2010 7:52:47 GMT
... or because we're the dishy, delectable finger on the pulse dem! once i've dredged up the notes for the remaining 7th Black Book of Horror stories i'm well looking forward to getting stuck back into this. hi and thank you to Mandy Slater for setting us straight about her splendid linking contributions!
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Post by David A. Riley on Oct 5, 2010 7:58:21 GMT
Must pick up a copy of this. Everything I've read about it so far has indicated it's one of the most interesting so far this year.
Can't understand why I failed to get one at FantasyCon.
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