A World on Fire - A Zombie Blog

If you are looking to get you hands on a good zombie movie, but you don’t know what to see, do yourself a favor and pick yourself up a copy of Glenn Kay’s excellent book, Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide. In it, Glenn covers the wide expanse of zombie movies starting with the genre’s roots back with White Zombie and continues to review zombie movies until the book’s publication (2008).

Glenn pretty much covers everything even remotely zombie related such as movies that aren’t even technically “zombie movies” but might contain walking dead people. Well, thumbing through the book, I pulled up a review of a classic that I missed while in highschool. Had I known about this tour-de-force, I imagine I would be quoting this movie today.

Here’s what Glenn has to say:

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Thumbing through Glenn Kay’s awesome book, Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide I found a relatively obscure zombie film starring none other than Joe Piscopo with Vincent Price being noted as a supporting actor. My god … did I find the white whale of cheese movies? Titled, Dead Heat, this movie sounds about as good as you can imagine it to be.

Reading the blurb on it, Kay mentions how the MPAA forced the creators of the film to trim back some of the more obnoxious special effects else the movie would earn itself an X rating. Having recently watched Angels & Demons – a PG-13 film which features an assassin cutting open an investigators throat, a hanging priest being burned alive, and several officers being shot in the head – it seems rather quaint that a Joe Piscopo move could be slapped with such a warning,

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In our current age when films seem to be solely composed of reboots, remakes, and re-imaginings, it really should come to no surprise that the film Conan the Barbarian is being remade and set for release next year. Some might curse to the high heavens because the original Conan was a pretty good fantasy film. While the film didn’t so much capture the Conan’s character, it did manage to show the spirit of Robert Howard’s stories. The film was the break-out role for Arnold Schwarzenegger. In it, he did a good job playing the wandering barbarian through several adventures as he attempts to avenge the death of his people.

The follow-up film, Conan the Destroyer, became more of a comic book adventure. Instead of the brooding melancholy of the first story, we were subjected to bumbling wisecracks of his thief companion and his merry gang of thieves. The tale of the savage Cimmerian was lost under a drunken plot whereby actors spent more time posing with their weapons as opposed to telling a convincing story. The most ironic thing about that movie is that the closest character resembling Howard’s Conan was played by Grace Jones.

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There’s certainly something funny about zombies. It can’t be denied. Watching a zombie film on its own without any sound, you might first start laughing before you realize that you were supposed to feel horrified. So, it’s no surprise that zombie movies often devolve into pretty good comedies.

That said, I’m not a big fan of zombie comedies. It feels like an easy laugh for me like putting a guy in a dress so when a new zombie comedy surfaces, it’s gotta do a lot to sell me on it. Alas, this project does not.

Titled Paul is Undead, this book follows the Beatles as if the band started a zombie apocalypse. I really can’t explain it any further but here’s a little blurb from the article:

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With the first draft of A World on Fire complete, I thought I’d put it away for a little bit so I could clear my head. The very next day, feeling a little disorientated about not having the draft in front of me, I opened it up and checked out the first chapter. Three hours later, I realized I had started on draft number two.

It will still be some time before the final version of the book is out. I’ll pretty much keep rewriting until I don’t feel the need to vomit when reading it. My original goal was to complete it by June of 2010 but that’s pure fantasy at this point. If I finish the second draft by then, I’d consider myself blessed.

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Tiffany, over at Quirk Books, just sent me an email, letting me know that Quirk has just released a trailer from the upcoming book, Dawn of the Dreadfuls. Mind you, it’s really called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls, but I feel like it’s sort of like saying Star Wars: The Empires Strikes Back.

About the trailer … it looks fabulous. If this were a real movie instead of book trailer, I would be reserving my ticket right now. As it stands, this two minute clip gives you a brief glimpse of horrors of lurking beneath the surface in this prequel.

Which is my problem with it.

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Our friends and neighbors over at Quirk books are at it again with an upcoming zombie book that attempts to fuse the Star Trek universe with our flesh eating undead friends. Aptly titled, Night of the Living Trekkies, the book follows a group of Star Trek fans who happen to get caught in a zombie apocalypse created by mad alien scientists.

The story is pitched as a Galaxy Quest meets Dawn of the Dead mashup with plenty of Star Trek references to make your head spin.

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If you happen to live near eastern Pennsylvania and feel like meeting a multiple Bram Stoker winner, zombie writer, and International Hall of Fame inductee for excellence in Shinowara-ryu Jujutsu, then swing on over to The Doylestown Bookshop where Jonathan Mayberry is releasing his latest book, The Dragon Factory. Hot on the heels of The Wolfman’s novelization, Jonathan looks to be a very busy writer.

As for The The Dragon Factory itself, here’s the inside scoop:

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If you were a fan of the breakout novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith, you should be happy to know that this week marks a new release for the author. That being, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Unlike his past work which was the literary equivalent of the movie Kung Pow: Enter the Fist, this work is entirely original.

I gotta say, Grahame-Smith is a rather astute marketer and part of me wonders if it will show in his work. Check out how he came to conceive of this book:

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Shaun Jefferey, author of the upcoming zombie book titled Deadfall, wrote to me today to let everyone know that the book is now available for preorder over at Amazon. Hopefully I’ll be able to get my mitts on a copy for a review, but until then, Shaun has provided three sample chapters to whet the appetite. Check it out!

What’s the book about? Here’s the description:

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Some days I think I should reserve a permanent space on my site for the zombie reporters over at the Gawker network. It’s not that they are better than other bloggers out there, it’s just that they tend to be first in line to get some major undead skinny. And the skinny is never skinny. It’s always fat, smeared in mashed brain and congealed blood. In a word … tasty!

Well, if you like your dead pressed between the pages of a good book, you might want to check out the new anthology, The New Dead. Here’s what the futuristic minded folks over at io9 have to say about it:

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Some awesome news hit the twittersphere today. Zombie author J.P. Moore just landed a publishing deal with Dragon Moon Press for his book Toothless. Toothless is unique insomuch that after it was completed, he produced a podcast version of it for free download. Evidently, someone from Dragon Moon Press discovered the book and next thing you know, the deal was done.

I gotta say as a writer and soon to be podcaster, I find this hugely inspirational. It’s great to see that the internet provides a ladder over the walled garden of the publishing industry. Ten years ago, most publishers wouldn’t look at your work without an agent. These days, with the distance between an author and his or her audience being only a mouse click away, it’s nice to see the publisher/writer relationship adapting to the role of technology.

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This past Christmas, my brother in law (who sometimes plays the hunter punter role in Left 4 Dead) gave me this awesome book called Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide by Glenn Kay. This is a complete comprehensive guide for all the different kinds of zombie films that have managed to grace the screen in the past hundred years. It details the biggies like Night of the Living Dead and Return of the Living Dead, but it’s the small lesser known “I can’t believe anyone took the time make this” kind of zombie movie that gets my attention.

Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, a zombie film made in the seventies, is one such picture. Here’s what author Glenn Kay has to say about it:

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The capsule twisted to the side with a sudden jerk. Reilly dangled off the side of his chair. The shoulder straps chaffed his shoulders and as he tried to right himself, he was jerked in the opposite direction. The floor bucked and for just a second, Reilly thought the capsule’s chute had snapped.

“It’s the winds,” Chapel shouted. “We’re falling into a storm.”

“Is there anything you can do?” Reilly yelled as the capsule jerked again.

“We need power to stabilize and fire the retros,” Chapel yelled back. “If we make it through the winds and the retros don’t fire before we land-”

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I’ve received a lot of emails the other day about the upcoming Zombie Combat Manual, so I thought I’d do another post to share my findings.

The book is based on the existing website, Zombie Combat Club and it is a fun read. There are a ton a instructional how-to articles on how to evade, and ultimately, take down the dead. Each example is well written with some great artwork drawn alongside of it. The website also goes into detailed weapon descriptions, including some videos, But hey, don’t take it, check it out. I’m guess the book will match the overall tone of the book. Here’s a cook snippet from the site:

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