And have I ever found some doozies for you!

The big surprise for me, so far, has been the thread of remarkable intelligence running through my top picks. In fact, most of them are so structurally cunning, so packed with mind-bending surprises and powerful ideas, that there’s no way to discuss them in depth without ruining them entirely. So I won’t.

The other item of note is that almost none of them are even remotely conventional horror films. In fact, some may argue that most if not all of them aren’t horror films at all. And in several cases, I’d be tempted to agree.

Except for this one thing.

When I gauge the horror quotient of a motion picture, I’m not just tallying up monsters and spooky mood music, the number of jump scares and gruesome kills. I’ve reached the point where paint-by-number formula thrillers are like yawn-inducing psychic wallpaper to me. Unless you’re bringing something new to the party – fresh ideas, startling energy, unique perspective, or staggering technique – my been-there-done-that gland kicks in, squirting boredom juice all over my brain.

To me, most of the best horror I’ve seen this year was NOT straight horror. It snuck in sideways – as psychological drama, as pitch-black comedy, as crime film or science fiction – and then delivered the genuine shocks, horrified laughs, and/or flesh-crawling insights that define true horror for me.

And here is my list, in alphabetical order:

The Cabin In The Woods

.

Chained

.

Cosmopolis

 .

Excision

.

God Bless America

.

Looper

.

Kill List

.

The Raid: Redemption

.

Savages

.

The Skin I Live In

.

We Need To Talk About Kevin

Let’s start with The Cabin In The Woods, Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon’s elaborate deconstruction of not just every monster movie trope known to man, but also of the deeper cosmic horror underlying the myth-making machineries behind them (a.k.a. Hollywood), including the best explanation ever posited for why characters always do all those incredibly stupid things that inevitably get them killed.

I know the world is divided on this one, but I’m squarely in the love camp. If there’s one thing that makes me happy, it’s watching clichés get torn open and squirt all over the place. It’s a Darwinian culling of the herd, an Emperor’s New Clothes moment, which all-but-begs future creative artists to find new ways to scare us. Please.

I laughed my ass off all the way through, and was excited by the skillful way it both lovingly embraced and thoroughly dissected the genre. In that sense, it did for horror fans what Galaxyquest did for Star Trek geeks. Color me crazy, but I think that’s a beautiful thing.

On the flip side is Ben Wheatley’s Kill List, a British domestic drama that turns into an alarmingly violent crime film before revealing itself as the twisted horror movie it always was. We just didn’t know it.

When it wrapped, I found myself thinking, “What the hell did I just watch?” But the more I thought about it, the more excited I got. Mike Leigh meets Roman Polanski at Takeshi Miike’s house. And holy shit.

Likewise for Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In, a profound gender-rupturing art-film meditation on rape, role-reversal, and psycho-sexual identity that takes Franju’s 1960 shocker Eyes Without A Face as the leaping-off point, then gets roughly three times as weird. This is masterful filmmaking, intimate and obsessive and almost unspeakably human. By far the classiest film on the list.

Lynne Ramsey’s We Need To Talk About Kevin is more straight-up in its depiction of a mother’s attempt to cope with her psychotic child, and the familial blowback from his inevitable misdeeds. It’s not fun, but it’s incredibly well done, and there’s no arguing its immense tragic power.

Even grimmer is Jennifer Lynch’s Chained, the almost-too-horrible-to-contemplate story of a little boy kidnapped at the age of 9 by a serial killer, who keeps him around to clean house and learn valuable life lessons about why all women are whores who need to die.

This is a movie so claustrophobic, so surreal in its unabated matter-of-factness, and so impeccably rendered that it falls more in Jack Ketchum than David Lynch territory, with echoes of both, but a voice all its own.

If you’d prefer some fun in your psychotic killing spree, let me point you directly to God Bless America, Bobcat Goldthwait’s incendiary vigilante assault on everything stupid and corruptive about contemporary culture. Like James Gunn’s Super, and Matthew Vaughn’s Kickass – only without the superhero conceit – it both exalts and indicts our desire to fight back against bullshit and evil, not to mention common rudeness and “just not being nice”. It’s sharply written, insanely funny, painfully honest, deeply fucked-up, and completely adorable. As such, I love it to pieces.

David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis is harder to love, but astonishingly rewarding for those who hang in. It’s a cerebral horror story about our economy-gone-mad; and the sociopathic billionaire at its core is every bit as batshit crazy as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, except that – unlike the global financial rape at the core of it – all the sex is consensual. (The occasional bursts of shattering violence, of course, are not.)

For Cronenberg fans, this is not a return to the body horror of old. But it’s his most challengingly weird, daring, and brilliant work since Existenz, and fits into the Videodrome/Naked Lunch end of his vast filmic spectrum (scrupulously based on the novel by Don DeLillo, which seems so timely you’d think it must have been written last week, but actually came out in 2003). All in all, a very welcome return. And possibly his funniest film to date.

Speaking of timely returns to form, I include Oliver Stone’s Savages largely because of a) its staggeringly frank and muscular bursts of ultra-violence, and b) its detailed analysis of how the War on Drugs has handed the most beneficent weed in God’s Creation over to the most psychotic motherfuckers on Planet Earth, and somehow thinks that that’s a good thing. GUESS AGAIN!

As a life-long stoner now in his 55^th year, delivering the marijuana biz to happily-decapitating Mexican drug lords is like forcibly handing Jesus a flame-thrower at gunpoint and saying, “Burn down that orphanage full of sleeping children, or we’ll do it for you, and then RE-crucify you for murdering all those kids.”

That’s institutionalized psychosis. And psychosis is horror. Whatever your politics – however you feel about pot – the fact that people are getting their heads chopped off because other people just like to get high is so insane, on so many levels, that I just gotta say: if that ain’t horror, I don’t know what is.

Plus, it’s a damn fine film. Skillful. Engaged. And entirely entertaining. The toughest Stone since Natural Born Killers. But sweeter. Whether you like it or not.

This brings me to Looper, the only bona fide hit on the list. And deservedly so. One of the best Hollywood films of the year.

Is it horror? Technically, no. It’s a science fiction crime story. Any moron could see that.

But does it have two of the most jaw-droppingly horrific scenes to hit the screen this year? Yes, it does. If you’ve seen it, you know what I mean. If you haven’t, you missed Rian Johnson delivering some of the best, most expertly shocking people-coming-apart sequences in out-of-genre horror history. CATCH UP!

Speaking of jaw-dropping: if you haven’t seen The Raid: Redemption, this astonishing Indonesian actioner by Gareth Huy Evans – about a team of cops fighting their way floor-by-floor up a highrise occupied entirely by violent criminals – is so stupidly, crazily, amazingly packed with non-stop hyper-kinetic mayhem that you won’t be able to stop for a second and go, “Is this horror?” OF COURSE IT IS! Did you see that shit?

Wrapping the list is Excision, the wildly-outside-of-the-norm feature film debut of one Richard Bates Jr., which has flown straight to the top of my “Omigod, omigod, you gotta SEE this!” cult film pantheon.

Equal parts early John Waters-style wrongness, Heathers-style teenage black comedy, Jodorowski-style mind-blowing art film, and Cronenbergian full-blown body horror, Excision drags us into the life of the most messed-up young female protagonist since Lucky McKee’s May. That he managed to not just juggle but fully integrate these elements into something far larger than the sum of its parts is a marvel that I am still marveling at, days later. It’s an extraordinary film, with by far the greatest gut-punch of an ending I’ve seen this year.

And that’s the thing. Every single one of these films has genuinely stuck to my ribs, pleasuring and provoking me ever since, in ways that most genre films unfortunately don’t.

Throw in TV’s American Horror Story and The Walking Dead, and you’ve pretty much got my fresh recommendations for the things you should catch up with this holiday season.

That said: what will I be watching this Halloween?

The Cabin In The Woods

Chillerama

Creepshow

Dead Alive

Evil Dead II

Re-Animator

Return Of The Living Dead

Trailer Park Of Terror

Cuz that sounds like a party to me.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN, EVERYBODY!!!

FLESH & BONE by New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Maberry

NOW AVAILABLE in hardcover and eBook from Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers

Grades: 7 and up / ISBN-10: 1442439890 / ISBN-13: 9781442439894

Reeling from the devastation of Dust & Decay, Benny Imura and his friends plunge deep into the zombie-infested wastelands of the great Rot & Ruin. Benny, Nix, Lilah, and Chong journey through a fierce wilderness that was once America, searching for the jet they saw in the skies months ago. If that jet exists then humanity itself must have survived…somewhere. Finding it is their best hope for having a future and a life worth living.

But the Ruin is far more dangerous than any of them can imagine. Fierce animals hunt them. They come face to face with a death cult. And then there’s the zombies—swarms of them coming from the east, devouring everything in their paths. And these zoms are different. Faster, smarter, and infinitely more dangerous. Has the zombie plague mutated, or is there something far more sinister behind this new invasion of the living dead?

One thing Benny and his companions can’t afford to forget: In the great Rot & Ruin, everything wants to kill you.

http://books.simonandschuster.com/Flesh-Bone/Jonathan-Maberry/Rot-Ruin/9781442439894

Also read:

ROT & RUIN –available now in paperback and audio

• Keystone to Reading Secondary High School Book Award (Pennsylvania)
• ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults list
• Pennsylvania Young Reader’s Choice Award nominee
• Finalist, Bram Stoker Awards ‘Novel of the Year’
• Cybils Award, YA Fantasy & Science Fiction
• Nominated for ALA/YALSA’s Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers
• Mail Order Zombie Dead Letter Award: Best Zombie Novel
• Connecticut Teen Nutmeg Book Award nominee
• Texas Lone Star Reading List
• Nominated for the Missouri Association of School Librarians Gateway Award.
• Arkansas Teen Book Award nominee
• Winner, Melinda Award for Best Plot
• Winner, Melinda Award for Best Character Development (Benny Imura)
• Winner, Melinda Award for Best First Kiss (Benny & Nix)
• Winner, Melinda Award for Best Literary Boyfriend (Tom Imura)
• Winner, Mail Order Zombie Dead Letter ‘Shambler Lifetime Achievement Award’
• Finalist, Missouri Association of School Librarians’ Gateway Reader Awards, grades 9-12.

DUST & DECAY –available in paperback and audio 9/11

• Winner of the BRAM STOKER AWARD for BEST YOUNG ADULT NOVEL)

DEAD & GONE –a Rot & Ruin story available exclusively for all eReaders

Welcome to the world of V-WARS, edited by yours truly, from IDW Publishing. (In hardcover at your favorite bookseller; in e-book for Kindle and Nook.  Coming soon on audio from Blackstone).

V-WARS is a shared-world anthology –all of the stories take place in the same troubled world, with some characters and themes that overlap. I gathered together the eight writers (including me!) to discuss how the book was written and to talk about the enduring mystique off the thirsty undead. Our answers are in the order that our stories appear in the book.

Click here for a free excerpt of V-WARS.

Click here to buy V-WARS, or pick up a copy at your local independent bookseller.

NOTE: Contributor Yvonne Navarro was not able to join us for this panel discussion.

QUESTION 1: Industry wags keep saying that vampires (as a viable genre) are dead, and yet they always seem to come back into popularity. What’s your take?

JONATHAN MABERRY: Vampires, as a cultural phenomenon, have been with us for thousands of years. There are vampire legends in Mesopotamia, ancient Rome and Greece, all through Asia. Everywhere. From a scientific standpoint, we can look back and see that many vampire stories were created as a way for people in less scientifically-advanced times to try and make sense of certain kinds of disease –like rabies, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), catalepsy, catatonia, and many others. Vampires have long been connected with the spread of diseases, plagues and mass deaths. If you translate the name most commonly associated with vampires –nosferatu—it means ‘plague carrier’ (not ‘undead’, as Bram Stoker suggested in his novel, Dracula). The vampire stands as an enduring symbol of some dark force that wants to take something vital from us –blood, breath, life force, or some other crucial element.  Fear, disgust and abhorrence of that is not something that’s ever going to go away. That’s why the vampire genre keeps coming back –it reflects something that we, in every culture and every generation, feel.

NANCY HOLDER: Industry wags have been saying vampires as a viable genre are dead ever since I started writing. For all the huge hits we have had (TWILIGHT, Anne Rice, SALEM’S LOT, and a whole host of excellent novels out now) there’s alway some rationalization for why that specific vampire novel is a success, while others surely can’t be, because vampires are over. As if these books are coincidentally about vampires, and are some kind of fluke. Last week i was the guest of a vampire book club in San Diego. That’s all they read. Vampire novels. I know I’m not tired of reading about vampires. And I’m not tired of writing about them, either.

JOHN EVERSON: There is really no other physical monster that combines the elements of sexuality and danger as the vampire. Except maybe the Siren… but for some reason, most people don’t write about those (well, I did, but… that’s another story)! Zombies may be dangerous, but they’re not alluring… and they don’t offer the promise of eternal life as one of the undead. And werewolves? I dunno, I’m just not into dogs! But the vampire… they’re like the leather-clad bad-boys of horror. The girls all swoon and want them, even though they know they shouldn’t. And the boys? Well… we’d like to live forever and party all night, right? So yeah, while the vampire frequently reaches the point of oversaturation, it will never go away. It’s the villain we all want the freedom to be.

SCOTT NICHOLSON: Vampires have a timeless appeal because they strike at the very heart of our biggest mysteries–life and death, and that cool netherworld where they overlap. Vampire legend offers us a relatively safe way to explore the cost of immortality, or at least an immortality bound to the flesh. Those myths were around long before commercial fiction and will be around long after commercial fiction.

JAMES A. MOORE: I think the vampire sub-genre is probably never going to go away. It’s like the tide, It will ebb and it will rise but I don’t think it’s going anywhere, because there is simply too much interest in the Undead in all of their forms. Let’s be honest here, Twilight, Interview With the Vampire (and Anne Rice’s entire vampire series), Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula alone would probably keep the sales high enough to make publishers look at the sub genre and consider it at least moderately viable. Add in Hollywood’s influence, the occasional Role Playing Game and the simple culture of people who are fascinated by the legends of vampires and there’s no real reason to believe that the vampire (in genre) will be going anywhere anytime soon. More than one writer has made a career on vampire stories alone.

KEITH R.A. DeCANDIDO: Subgenres never die, they just go comatose for a while. And

vampires have never really not been popular since the 19th century — not just DRACULA, but CARMILLA and VARNEY THE VAMPIRE. Just thinking of the last 30 years — it was “dead” in the 1970s, but then INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE came out. It was dead in the 1980s, but then LOST BOYS came out. It was dead in the 1990s, but then BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER came out. It was dead in the 2000s, but then the TWILIGHT books came out. Every time it’s declared dead, someone — Anne Rice, Christopher Golden, Laurel K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, Stephenie Meyer — pulls the stake out of its heart.

GREGORY FROST: Well, of course, vampires are UNdead, so clearly the industry wags have not thought any of this through very well. My take is, they should shut up and stop trying to predict something as ingrained in the western psyche as the vampire. Why, just this afternoon I stopped by a comic store and, as I browsed, found Mike Mignola’s Baltimore series and dozens more examples of the vampiric glorifying the shelves. They aren’t going away soon.

QUESTION 2: Talk about V-Wars and your story.

JONATHAN MABERRY: I had the pleasure of creating the world in which V-Wars is set. It’s really our world –if things went horribly wrong.  I used my story, “Junk” to set the stage. We learn that a virus (I1V1) was released from ancient arctic ice by global warming, and as it spreads around the world it causes flu-like symptoms that don’t appear to be very serious.  However that virus triggers dormant genes (Junk DNA).  These are the genes that once created the human genetic anomaly that came to be known as vampirism.  Just as DNA changed with the movements of populations as many evolved, the vampire gene changed to, and so there are hundreds of different variations on it.  This accounts for the differences in vampire descriptions in various world cultures.  The vampires of France, for example, are very different than the vampires from Scandinavia, Poland, Peru, China, Senegal, and so on.

Over the centuries, people with the active gene were hunted down and killed –that’s the basis of vampire hunter legends.
Now we roll to modern times and the gene becomes very active –fiercely active—and people all over the world start changing into whatever kind of  vampire is closest to their ethnic/genetic roots.

In “Junk”, we meet Michael Fayne, a Starbucks barista who was the first person to become infected and the first to manifest as a vampire. He has no idea what’s happening to him. He’s terrified, and he’s very dangerous…but he’s largely unaware of the awful things he’s doing.

We meet Fayne through flashbacks and through interviews with Luther Swann, the world’s leading expert in vampire folklore.  Swann is brought into the case as a consultant for the NYPD. Things go very bad from there…

Like most of the stories in V-WARS, “Junk” is told in sections, intercutting it with the tales by the other seven authors.

This was done to give the book a sense of immediacy –all of these things are happening at once. It’s breaking news, and the eight writers are reporting from the trenches of the first vampire war.

NANCY HOLDER: “Roadkill” came out of reading so much about what’s been going on along the US-Mexican border. I also started a novel about a former San Diego Border Patrol agent who is recruited to guard the Pale from the Erl King (as in Goethe’s poem.) Being a Border Agent is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. I live 40 minutes from the Mexican border and my God, I wish things were better in Mexico so that people didn’t risk their lives getting to El Norte. In my story, a biker club (“gang,” if you prefer) is trying to police a section of the desert because the Minutemen have left. I just came home from a road trip through the very area I wrote about–desolate, hot, thirsty.

I loved getting a chance to work in the V-Wars universe. I hold Jonathan Maberry in the highest regard and I was so proud to have a chance to contribute to this book, along with stellar writers who had done remarkable work. Jonathan’s “what-if” is proving to be accurate in that while Antarctic ice is melting, long-dormant viruses are being released into our world. Can fangs be far behind? I was also thrilled to be published by IDW, which has been a life’s goal. I used to go down to the Wildstorm offices, first in Scripps Ranch and then across from the Hard Rock Cafe in La Jolla. It was so cool there. I wanted to get published by them. IDW is a dream come true.

JOHN EVERSON: When Jonathan came to me with the idea for V-Wars and the concept that vampirism is a genetic, not a supernatural, mutation, I absolutely loved it. But then I had to find the right mutation for me to work with. I started doing some research, and in all honesty, I never had a clue before this book that there were so many different cultural variants of the vampire. I was raised on Bram and Anne… who knew there were vampires who had “stingers” in their tongues rather than teeth? Or vampires that could only hop (probably thanks to rigor mortis). But when I found that the Russians had a Wurdulac vampire that could only eat those that it loved… now that interested me. It’s the ultimate in self-defeating, emotionally horrific mutations, but it also could pose one of the most interesting challenges to overcome for a self-obsessed modern career-oriented type. And who better to be ego-absorbed and have very few family / friends to rely (feed) on than someone obsessed with the camera… like a tabloid style anchorwoman? I had a blast working with Danika (my anchorwoman), who is the ultimate example of a “girl you just can’t keep down.”

SCOTT NICHOLSON: I enjoyed the opportunity to explore a different side of vampire legend, one that plays on scientific possibility, as well as to work with other noted writers of the fantastic. I was able to take the big, worldwide crisis of outbreak and bring it to the Appalachian region, in a quiet, rural corner away from the larger chaos.

JAMES A. MOORE: When Jonathan Maberry invited me into the V-Wars anthology I was delighted. Not only because Jonathan is a fine writer and a nice guy, but because the concept was brilliant. We were allowed to play around with vampire legends from around the world and that was exactly what I wanted to do. In this case I chose to focus on a couple of the vampire legends from Asia, because they are so very different from what everyone got used to in Hollywood’s adaptations of classic vampire tales and because the legends are just plain fun.

KEITH R.A. DeCANDIDO: “The Ballad of Big Charlie” comes out of my love for my home town of New York City in general and the borough of the Bronx in particular. It also comes out of my interest in politics. When Jonathan came to me with the premise of the anthology, my first thought was, “Well, okay, what happens if someone running for office gets the virus?” The specifics of how the story plays out was at least partly inspired by the 2010 midterm elections, where a lot of candidates who you know would never last two seconds on the national stage are able to get elected because they’re loved in their small community. And also generally, I wanted to show someone trying to represent the vampires in government.

GREGORY FROST: My story, “Vulpes,” isn’t even a story about a vampire as such. It would be a spoiler to tell you what it’s about instead, but suffice it to say that, as in the premise there were such predators as vampires in prehistory, there were as well enemies of those predators, also fallen into supernatural lore. As it happened I’d read a non-fiction book about vampires that gave me the idea for “Vulpes.” Plus, I’d always wanted to place a story in the catacombs of Paris, and this was my opportunity.

QUESTION 3: What’s your favorite vampire book? (Why?)

JONATHAN MABERRY: Hands down it’s I AM LEGEND by Richard Matheson.  He gave me a signed copy of the original 1954 edition when I was a teenager back in the early 1970s, and I’ve probably bought and read forty copies of it.  It was the first major crossover of horror and science fiction, and V-WARS owes quite a lot to Matheson and that amazing book.

NANCY HOLDER: My favorite vampire authors are Anne Rice, Kim Newman and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. I can’t pick a single book from among their works. They are geniuses. When I met Chelsea Quinn Yarbro for the first time, I didn’t know what to call her. I knew her intimates called her “Quinn” but I wasn’t one of her friends at that time (happily, I am now.) So I called her :::mumble mumble mumble::: nothing for a long time.

JOHN EVERSON: The Vampire Lestat stole my eyes like no other vampire novel has before or since. I loved Interview with a Vampire, but Anne Rice’s second novel? That’s where she really came into her own. Her interweaving of history, gothic fantasy, seductive evil… it’s a tour de force that modern vampire authors have been trying to repeat ever since.

Lestat’s wrestle with his loss of humanity, and his search for both his kind’s origins and his own place in the world are seductive and riveting not because he is a monster, but because his search is universal. On the opposite extreme, I have to mention P.D. Cacek’s Night Prayers, a fun, frolic of a debut novel that takes place in a cathouse. No deep philosophical, historical dives here, just a lot of fast-talking fun.

SCOTT NICHOLSON: Salem’s Lot by Stephen King remains my favorite because I love small-town horror and the idea of the “evil next door.” That makes vampires seem so much more plausible and scary, away from the Transylvania castles or big-city anonymity. After that, I would go with classics like Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

JAMES A. MOORE: That changes from week to week. I’m rather exceedingly well-read on vampires as a result of the books I did on the subject. I tend to believe that research makes all the difference. Not because I want to follow the rules established by legends and other writers, but because I want to make sure I’m doing something that is different. Currently I’m reading IN THE SHADOW OF DRACULA, Edited by Leslie S. Klinger and published by IDW, which is a collection of stories that preceded Bram Stoker’s Dracula and often very obviously influenced the same. It’s a delightful book. Also, frankly, Salem’s Lot is always going to be a favorite, simply because it’s Stephen King doing some of his best writing in my honest opinion.

KEITH R.A. DeCANDIDO:  I’m going to go with a graphic novel, published back in 1985: GREENBERG THE VAMPIRE by J.M. DeMatteis & Mark Badger. It’s a hilarious, delightful, ridiculous, entertaining piece of work about a horror writer who’s turned into a vampire, and it plays merry hell with his muse.

GREGORY FROST: I believe it remains Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. In over half a century I don’t think anybody’s come up with a more clever use for the vampire as social commentary, or a more compelling story for that matter. The genius of Matheson’s story is how he rolls the story over on you–which, by the way, not one of the film versions has ever managed to do. The book, effectively, remains to be filmed.

QUESTION 4: What’s your favorite vampire movie? (Why?)

JONATHAN MABERRY: That question gets a different answer all the time from me, because my tastes shift with the wind. But there are three vampire flicks that I guess are evergreens for me, ones that I always come back to. THE HORROR OF DRACULA, with Peter Cushing as Van Helsing and Christopher Lee as Dracula. Brilliant and powerful.  That was the first Hammer Horror film I ever saw.  And the 1977 Louis Jourdan BBC production of COUNT DRACULA was superb. Of the non-Dracula flicks, the clear front-runner is NEAR DARK, written by my buddy Eric Red (with director Kathryn Bigelow). Fierce, fresh and dynamic.

NANCY HOLDER: My favorite vampire movie is NEAR DARK. I frickin’ love that move. When I saw Adrian Pasdar in HEROES my jaw dropped. My second favorite is LOST BOYS, and my third is INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE. I thought Tom Cruise did a great job. People malign him as an actor but I think he’s wonderful. That movie stirred me. I write to the soundtrack often. I was very disappointed with Coppola’s DRACULA but it’s grown on me. I write to that soundtrack, too. I was just in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Parts of JOHN CARPENTER’S VAMPIRES were shot around there and it was a thrill to be there. Bring on the vampire movies!

JOHN EVERSON: My favorite vampire movies come from low budget French director Jean Rollin. As a filmmaker (at his most popular in the ‘70s-‘80s), he was obsessed with the themes of vampires and female twins (and frequently, female vampire twins!). Two of his best films, Living Dead Girl and Fascination both deal with vampiric acts, but aren’t strictly vampire films (the “Living Dead Girl’s nature is never explicitly tagged, but she is probably more ghoul than vampire; nevertheless, she’s a seductively tragic figure). Of his overt vampire films, I probably would have to pick Lips of Blood (Levres de sang) as my favorite. I just watched it again a month or so ago, since it’s just gotten a Blu Ray release, and the story is a beautifully dark fairy tale of a film – a grown man sees a picture that brings back forgotten memories of his youth, when he got lost and spent the night in the castle of a mysterious woman. But now, his curiosity awakened, the more he tries to find his way back to that place, to rediscover his lost memories, the more barriers are thrown in his way. And then he begins seeing the woman from his youth again, and she doesn’t appear to have aged at all. The film is certainly dated, and suffers from its low budget exploitation cinema trappings, but it ends with one of the most poetically stirring, melancholic moments in the oeuvre of fantastic film.

SCOTT NICHOLSON: Let The Right One in, the Swedish original, because it exquisitely combines horror with poignancy. I think horror has a lot of potential for poignancy but those opportunities are usually lost in a gout of gore and violence. The best horror tales do more than shock or entertain–they tackle the bigger mysteries of life that horror is perhaps best equipped to face.

JAMES A. MOORE: Either NEAR DARK or THE LOST BOYS. NEAR DARK is different and fun and moody with some really great sequences of all out violence. LOST BOYS is just plain fun. A solid story, good acting and a refreshing take on the vampire tale. For an exciting change of pace the woe is me I am eternal and beautiful aspect got thrown to the side for some nasty critters. I rather like when that happens.

KEITH R.A. DeCANDIDO: Okay, it’s a terrible, terrible, =terrible= movie, but I love the world-building behind it: DAYBREAKERS. While the movie itself is a steaming pile of excrement, I adore the premise. Vampires have become the dominant species, to the point where the world now functions at night, with lunchtime being midnight and clandestine meetings happening at noon. The vampires are also in danger of dying out because they’re running out of food as more and more humans become vamps. It’s a brilliant premise — too bad it’s behind a truly awful film.

GREGORY FROST: That’s maybe a little tougher. I remain extremely fond of Near Dark. Lance Henriksen’s gang of itinerant blood-drinkers is unsurpassed for embodying the insanity of creatures living such a life. But I also adore the Swedish film Let the Right One In and Guillermo Del Toro’s Cronos, both of them startling and original takes on the vampire theme.

Click here for a free excerpt of V-WARS.

Click here to buy V-WARS, or pick up a copy at your local independent bookseller.

MEET THE V-WARS CONTRIBUTORS

JONATHAN MABERRY is a New York Times bestselling author, multiple Bram Stoker Award winner, and Marvel Comics writer. His novels include horror, adult thrillers, youg adult post-apocalyptic adventures; and his nonfiction explores subjects ranging from vampire folklore to martial arts.  Since 1978 he’s sold more than 1200 magazine feature articles, 3000 columns, two plays, greeting cards, song lyrics, and poetry. He teaches the Experimental Writing for Teens class, is the founder of the Writers Coffeehouse, and co-founder of The Liars Club. Jonathan lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania with his wife, Sara and their dog, Rosie. www.jonathanmaberry.com.

NANCY HOLDER is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of over 80 novels, including tie-in material for Buffy, Teen Wolf, Angel, Smallville, Saving Grace, and many other ‘verses.  She also edits and writes comic books and pulp fiction. Visit her at www.nancyholder.com, @nancyholder, and https://www.facebook.com/holder.nancy

JOHN EVERSON is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Covenant, as well as the novels Sacrifice, The 13th, Siren and The Pumpkin Man, all in paperback from Dorchester/Leisure Books. His sixth novel, NightWhere, an erotic horror descent into dark desire was released by Samhain in June 2012.  John shares a deep purple den in Naperville, Illinois with a cockatoo and cockatiel, a disparate collection of fake skulls, twisted skeletal fairies, Alan Clark illustrations and a large stuffed Eeyore. For more information on his fiction, art and music, visit www.johneverson.com.

YVONNE NAVARRO is the award-winning author of twenty-two novels and
hundreds more that she plans to write.  She lives in the desert southwest,
where she also paints and supervises a husband, three Great Danes, and a
parakeet.  Visit her at www.yvonnenavarro.com or look her up on FaceBook.

SCOTT NICHOLSON is the international bestselling author of more than 30 books, including The Red Church, Liquid Fear, and Disintegration. His website hauntedcomputer.com features articles, fiction, and comics art. He’s also a partner in eBookSwag.com. http://www.hauntedcomputer.com

JAMES A. MOORE is the award winning author of over twenty novels, thrillers, dark fantasy and horror alike, including the critically acclaimed Fireworks, Under The Overtree, Blood Red, the Serenity Falls trilogy (featuring his recurring anti-hero, Jonathan Crowley) and his most recent novels, Smile No More and Blind Shadows (With co-author Charles R. Rutledge). He has also recently ventured into the realm of Young Adult novels, with his new series Subject Seven. In addition to writing multiple short stories, he has also edited, with Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon, The British Invasion anthology for Cemetery Dance Publications. www.Jamesamoorebooks.com

KEITH R. A. DeCANDIDO is the award-winning, internationally best-selling author of almost 50 novels, tons of short fiction, a mess of comic books, and lots of blog entries, ranging from tie-in fiction (Star Trek, Farscape, Kung Fu Panda, Leverage, World of Warcraft, Doctor Who, and tons more) to his own universes (the high-fantasy police procedural novel Dragon Precinct and its two sequels, the Super City Police Department series about cops in a city filled with superheroes). www.decandido.net.

GREGORY FROST is a writer of best-selling fantasy, supernatural thrillers, and science fiction.  He has been a finalist for every major fantasy, sf, and horror fiction award. His most recent work includes the YA-crossover duology, Shadowbridge & Lord Tophet, voted “one of the four best fantasy novels of the year” by the American Library Association. Find him at www.gregoryfrost.com or on Twitter at @Gregory_Frost

Click here for a free excerpt of V-WARS.

Click here to buy V-WARS, or pick up a copy at your local independent bookseller.

What’s going on?  Well, for Harper Jennings and other characters of BEHIND THE WALLS, what’s going on appears to be a Nahual, or a shape-shifter.  You might have heard of these, but I hadn’t, not until I did research for this second Harper Jennings book, in which she encounters this eerie and possibly supernaturally powered character while working on a university archeology project.

Nahuals, it seems, had the power to change forms.  They embodied shamanic powers of enlightenment and transformation, appearing as deer (symbolizing the hunt), jaguars (symbolizing power), owls (omens and messengers from the dead), dogs (guides to the underworld), and so on.

The job of a Nahual was, among other things, to protect his village, his people and their possessions against anyone who threatened them.  Which might mean anyone who took their property even a few thousand years later, in the form of artifacts.

In doing research for BEHIND THE WALLS, I learned a lot about early beliefs in spiritual protectors.  They weren’t limited to the Americas.  All the way in Australia, Uluru (Ayers Rock) is believed to have invisible guardians; taking away pieces of rock will lead to disaster.

In Utah, arrowheads and other relics of the Ojibwe tribe are said to be cursed, leading those who plunder them to sickness, alcoholism, even suicide. (See The Guardian.co.uk)

There are dozens, maybe hundreds of such stories.  Among my favorites is one about Montezuma’s gold and Peek-a-boo Canyon, Utah.  In 1914, a guy named Freddy Crystal got a map from a medicine man in Mexico, leading him to the treasure, supposedly buried in caves in Johnson canyon.

Crystal dug for years, eventually realizing that the gold was in nearby underwater caves.  But it wasn’t until 1989 that sonar detected an underwater tunnel and a chamber with high concentrations of metal.  Divers successfully entered the tunnel, but each one claimed to have been chased by ghostly figures, and some experienced choking sensations.  (One reportedly had had hand marks on his neck.)  Every diver who entered the tunnel swore never to dive in the lake again, and residents of the area still report seeing ghosts patrolling the lake, canoeing in moonlight, etc.

So.  Nahuals?  Protective curses?  Ghostly guardians?  Do they exist?  Are they merely mythical or are actual spirits timelessly protecting the treasures of their people?

Tell you what: This writer isn’t going to find out. I’m not digging or diving, not taking any old arrowheads for souvenirs.  And my research is staying strictly–and safely on the Internet.

Click here to pick up your copy of BEHIND THE WALLS!

Merry Jones is the author of the Harper Jennings thrillers BEHIND THE WALLS, SUMMER SESSION.  She has also written the Zoe Hayes mysteries (THE NANNY MURDERS, THE RIVER KILLINGS, THE DEADLY NEIGHBORS, THE BORROWED AND BLUE MURDERS), humor (including I LOVE HIM, BUT…) and non-fiction (including BIRTHMOTHERS).  She’s a member of the Philadelphia Liars Club, Mystery Writers of America, and The Authors Guild. Visit her at MerryJones.com

Friday May 25, 7pm
Jonathan Maberry author of
Assassin’s Code ($14.99 Griffin)

Jonathan Maberry is a NY Times bestseller and multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Patient Zero, the Pine Deep Trilogy, The Wolfman, Zombie CSU and They Bite. His work for Marvel Comics includes the Punisher, Wolverine, DoomWar, Marvel Zombie Return and Black Panther. His Joe Ledger series has been optioned for TV by Sony Pictures

In ASSASSIN’S CODE, the fourth book in New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Maberry’s Joe Ledger series, Joe Ledger and the DMS go on a relentless chase to stop an ancient order of killers from plunging the entire world into Holy War

When Joe Ledger and Echo Team rescue a group of American college kids held hostage in Iran, the Iranian government then asks them to help find six nuclear bombs planted in the Mideast oil fields. These stolen WMDs will lead Joe and Echo Team into hidden vaults of forbidden knowledge, mass-murder, betrayal, and a brotherhood of genetically-engineered killers with a thirst for blood. Accompanied by the beautiful assassin called Violin, Joe follows a series of clues to find the Book of Shadows, which contains a horrifying truth that threatens to shatter his entire worldview. They say the truth will set you free – not this time. The secrets of the Assassin’s Code will set the world ablaze.

Click here to add to your Google calender.

Joe Ledger and Echo Team return in

ASSASSIN’S CODE

(St. Martin’s Griffin – ISBN-10: 0312552203)

In Trade Paperback, E-book, and Audio)

Click Here to Pre-Order

ABOUT THE BOOK:

When Joe Ledger and Echo Team rescue a group of American college kids held hostage in Iran, the Iranian government then asks them to help find six nuclear bombs planted in the Mideast oil fields. These stolen WMDs will lead Joe and Echo Team into hidden vaults of forbidden knowledge, mass-murder, betrayal, and a brotherhood of genetically-engineered killers with a thirst for blood. Accompanied by the beautiful assassin called Violin, Joe follows a series of clues to find the Book of Shadows, which contains a horrifying truth that threatens to shatter his entire worldview. They say the truth will set you free. Not this time. The secrets of the Assassin’s Code will set the world ablaze.

“A fast-paced, brilliantly written novel. The hottest thriller of the New Year!” Brad Thor, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Athena Project

“Joe Ledger and the DMS are back in their most brutal tale yet. Be prepared to lose some sleep.” Jeremy Robinson, author of THRESHOLD and INSTINCT

“Readers can look forward to one more volume in this humorous, over-the-top cross-genre trilogy.” -Publishers Weekly

“[A] memorable book.” — Peter Straub , New York Times Bestselling author

“Brilliant! Puts the terror back in terrorist.” — James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author

Click Here to Pre-Order ASSASSIN’S CODE

FOLLOW THE WHOLE JOE LEDGER SERIES

THE JOE LEDGER NOVELS

PATIENT ZERO

When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week there’s either something wrong with your world or something wrong with your skills… and there’s nothing wrong with Joe Ledger’s skills. And that’s both a good, and a bad thing. It’s good because he’s a Baltimore detective that has just been secretly recruited by the government to lead a new taskforce created to deal with the problems that Homeland Security can’t handle. This rapid response group is called the Department of Military Sciences or the DMS for short. It’s bad because his first mission is to help stop a group of terrorists from releasing a dreadful bio-weapon that can turn ordinary people into zombies. The fate of the world hangs in the balance…. Available in trade paperback from St. Martin’s Griffin and on audio from Blackstone

ISBN-10: 0312382855 / ISBN-13: 978-0312382858

THE DRAGON FACTORY

Joe and the DMS go up against two competing groups of geneticists. One side is creating exotic transgenic monsters and genetically enhanced mercenary armies; the other is using 21st century technology to continue the Nazi Master Race program begun by Josef Mengele. Both sides want to see the DMS destroyed, and they’ve drawn first blood. Neither side is prepared for Joe Ledger as he leads Echo Team to war under a black flag.

Available in trade paperback from St. Martin’s Griffin and on audio from Blackstone

ISBN-10: 0312382499 / ISBN-13: 978-0312382490

THE KING OF PLAGUES

Saturday 09:11 Hours: A blast rocks a London hospital and thousands are dead or injured: 10:09 Hours: Joe Ledger arrives on scene to investigate. The horror is unlike anything he has ever seen. Compelled by grief and rage, Joe rejoins the DMS and within hours is attacked by a hit-team of assassins and sent on a suicide mission into a viral hot zone during an Ebola outbreak. Soon Joe Ledger and the Department of Military Sciences begin tearing down the veils of deception to uncover a vast and powerful secret society using weaponized versions of the Ten Plagues of Egypt to destabilize world economies and profit from the resulting chaos. Millions will die unless Joe Ledger meets the this powerful new enemy on their own terms as he fights terror with terror.

Available in trade paperback from St. Martin’s Griffin and on audio from Blackstone

ISBN-10: 0312382502 / ISBN-13: 978-0312382506

ASSASSIN’S CODE

When Joe Ledger and Echo Team rescue a group of American college kids held hostage in Iran, the Iranian government then asks them to help find six nuclear bombs planted in the Mideast oil fields. These stolen WMDs will lead Joe and Echo Team into hidden vaults of forbidden knowledge, mass-murder, betrayal, and a brotherhood of genetically-engineered killers with a thirst for blood. Accompanied by the beautiful assassin called Violin, Joe follows a series of clues to find the Book of Shadows, which contains a horrifying truth that threatens to shatter his entire worldview. They say the truth will set you free. Not this time. The secrets of the Assassin’s Code will set the world ablaze.

Available in trade paperback from St. Martin’s Griffin and on audio from Macmillan

ISBN-10: 0312552203 / ISBN-13: 978-0312552206

EXTINCTION MACHINE

The President of the United States vanishes from the White House for five hours. Next morning he is found, apparently safe and sound. Except that he claims that during the night he was abducted by aliens. A top-secret prototype stealth fighter is destroyed during a test flight. Witnesses on the ground say that it was shot down by a craft that immediately vanished at impossible speeds. North Korea’s ultra top-secret weapons research lab is destroyed by a volcano in an area where there has not been an eruption for forty millions years. All over the world reports of UFOs are increasing at an alarming rate. Key military personnel, politicians and scientists begin disappearing. And in a remote fossil dig in China dinosaur hunters have found something that is definitely not of this earth. Joe Ledger and the Department of Military Sciences rush headlong into the heat of the world’s strangest and deadliest arms race, because the global race to recover and retro-engineer alien technologies has just hit a snag. Someone or something–wants that technology back.

Coming April 2013

THE JOE LEDGER SHORT STORIES

COUNTDOWN

(FREE short story prequel to PATIENT ZERO)

“I didn’t plan to kill anyone. I wasn’t totally against the idea, either. Sometimes things just fall that way, and either you roll with it or it rolls over you. Letting the bad guys win isn’t how I roll.”  Meet Joe Ledger, Baltimore PD, attached to a Homeland task force, who’s about to get a serious promotion.

Available for all e-readers (Kindle, Nook, etc)

Available on audio by Blackstone, read by Ray Porter

ZERO TOLERANCE

This sequel to PATIENT ZERO brings Joe Ledger back into action, hunting for zombies in the deadly mountains of Afghanistan.

Available in print in THE LIVING DEAD 2 edited by John Joseph Adams

Coming soon as an e-story

Available on audio by Blackstone, read by Ray Porter http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Tolerance/dp/B005CMKIOE/ref=sr_1_11?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331503270&sr=1-11

DEEP, DARK

This chilling short story is the prequel to The Dragon Factory, the second installment in Maberry’s action-packed Joe Ledger novels. Before Baltimore cop Joe Ledger goes up against two competing groups of geneticists looking to continue the master-race program in The Dragon Factory, he must battle another foe using human test subjects for his sinister plans.

Available for all e-readers (Kindle, Nook, etc)

Available on audio by Blackstone, read by Ray Porter http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Tolerance/dp/B005CMKIOE/ref=tmm_aud_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1331503485&sr=1-2

MATERIAL WITNESS

A stand-alone short story that takes place in the early days of Joe Ledger’s service in the Department of Military Sciences, a top secret division of Homeland Security. Joe Ledger and the DMS must protect a Pine Deep resident spook and author who is in over his head with the wrong people and may know more than he is letting on.

Available for all e-readers (Kindle, Nook, etc)

Available on audio by Blackstone, read by Ray Porter http://www.amazon.com/Material-Witness-Ledger-Bonus-Story/dp/B005CMKILM/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331503733&sr=1-2

DOG DAYS

Joe Ledger returns in this tale that follows the tragic conclusion of THE DRAGON FACTORY. In the wake of a devastating personal loss, Joe Ledger and his new canine partner, Ghost, go hunting for the world’s deadliest assassin.

An audio exclusive story available from Blackstone, read by Ray Porter http://www.amazon.com/Dog-Days-Joe-Ledger-Adventure/dp/B005CU3QKY/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1331503594&sr=1-1-catcorr

JOE LEDGER: THE MISSING FILES

A collection of all five JOE LEDGER short stories: COUNTDOWN, ZERO TOLERANCE, DEEP DARK, MATERIAL WITNESS and the audio exclusive DOG DAYS.

http://www.amazon.com/Joe-Ledger-The-Missing-Files/dp/1455116483/ref=sr_1_22?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331504774&sr=1-22

Welcome to the DEAD OF NIGHT Shambling Zombie Blog Tour! Over the next month in a half I will be dropping by some of my favorite sites to take part in interviews, contribute guest blog posts and just shoot the breeze. Below is the current official blog tour schedule, though several dates may be changed so keep updated by checking my website. Thanks to the good people/contributors who made this tour possible! Hold on to your braaains…this is going to get good!

February 1^st- Zombie-Popcorn- http://zombie-popcorn.com/

February 2^nd- Anything Horror- http://anythinghorror.com/

February 3^rd- Walking Dead TV Podcast- http://thewalkingdeadpodcast.com/

February 4^th- Dawn of the Lead- http://dawnofthelead.com/

February 5^th- Bite My Books- http://www.bitemybooks.com/

February 6^th- Open Book Society- http://openbooksociety.com/

February 7^th- Moon Books Entertainment- http://moonbooks.net/

February 8^th- Book Den- http://bookden.com/

February 10^th- Movies and Books- http://booksandmovies.colvilleblogger.com/

February 11^th- Buy Zombie- http://www.buyzombie.com/

February 12^th- One Metal- http://www.onemetal.com/category/books_and_comics/

February 13^th- Castle Macabre- http://castlemacabre.blogspot.com/

February 14^th- Ginger Nuts of Horror- http://thegingernutcase.blogspot.com/

February 15^th- Criminal Pages- http://criminalpages.blogspot.com/

February 16^th- Fantasy and Sci-Fi Lovin’ News and Reviews- http://sqt-fantasy-sci-fi-girl.blogspot.com/

February 17^th- On The Night Stand- http://booksonthenightstand.com/

February 18^th- The Zombie Feed- http://thezombiefeed.biz/

February 19^th- Horrorshow Radio- http://www.horrorshowradio.com/

February 20^th- Hell Notes- http://hellnotes.com/

February 21^st- Rex Robot Reviews- http://www.rexrobotreviews.com/

February 22^nd- Horror World- http://www.horrorworld.org/

Febraury 23^rd- We Zombie- http://wezombie.com/

February 24^th- Drunken Severed Head- http://drunkenseveredhead.blogspot.com/

The Black Glove- http://the-black-glove.blogspot.com/

February 25^th- FNORDincorporated- http://www.fnordinc.com/

February 26^th- C.V. Hunt’s Website- http://www.authorcvhunt.com/

February 27^th- My Bookish Ways- http://www.mybookishways.com/

February 28^th- The Diary of a Bookworm- http://www.thediaryofabookworm.com/

February 29^th- Killer Aphrodite- http://www.killeraphrodite.com/

March 1^st – The Book Smugglers- http://thebooksmugglers.com/

March 2^nd- The Word Zombie- http://thewordzombie.com/

March 3^rd- Zombie and Toys- http://zombiesandtoys.blogspot.com/

March 4^th- RA for All- http://raforall.blogspot.com/

March 5^th- Monster Librarian- http://www.monsterlibrarian.com/

March 6^th- Undead Backbrain- http://www.roberthood.net/blog/

March 7- Grasping for the Wind- http://www.graspingforthewind.com/

March 8^th- Totally Jinxed- http://jinx-totallyjinxed.blogspot.com/

A special thanks to all those who involved in the tour who have already posted:

Books and Other Creative Adventures- http://coreenamcburnie.blogspot.com/
J.C. Hutchins: Thriller Novelist- http://jchutchins.net/
Zed Word- http://www.zedwordblog.com/
Confessions of a Bookholic- http://www.totalbookaholic.com/

…my eyes again stray to the drawing of that guy. In the sketch I can now see the very edge of his cheek. It’s as if he’s just turned ever so slightly toward me.

But that’s crazy.

(excerpt from Drawn by Marie Lamba)

In my new paranormal YA novel Drawn, teen artist Michelle De Freccio moves with her dad to England hoping for a more normal life. In England, no one will know that back in New Jersey everyone calls her family the De Freakos. They won’t know about her supposedly psychic mother (A.K.A. Madame Florabunda) or her mentally ill brother.  But when Michelle starts drawing a medieval ghost, and then she meets him and falls for him, well clearly nothing is going to be normal again.

The thing is, while Michelle is looking so hard for normal, I find I’m actually doing the opposite.  I can’t say I’m a believer in ghosts or the paranormal, but I’d really REALLY like to be. Show me, I think. Prove it.

Like Michelle in my novel, I’m an artist too. Maybe that’s why a particular guest speaker I heard way back in high school made such an impression on me.  It was a woman who created colorful oil paintings of the Hermitage, a Colonial-era mansion in Hohokus, NJ.  She pointed to the shadows in one painting, the stairway in another, the roof tiles in still another.  “See?” she’d said.  “See the figures?”

I drew in my breath. I did see. In one painting dappled shadows revealed a Colonial soldier in military regalia. In another, a bride seemed to materialize on the stairway, her image woven into the wall texture.  In an exterior painting, a few roof tiles were shaped into a face, the expression leering, malevolent.  The artist claimed she never intended to paint any of this, that she didn’t see these figures until the painting was completed. That she was clearly channeling spirits through her art.

My first thought was: Cool!  I want to do that.  I want to go there and pull out my charcoal and find these spirits materializing in the shadows of my own sketches. But of course my next instinct was to narrow my eyes and scrutinize the painter. She seemed sweet, grandmotherly, but was she nutty?  Well of course she was, I thought.

Hey, even Elijah Rosencrantz, a resident of the Hermitage in the early 1800s, thought ghosts were a lot of phooey. According to the website thehermitage.org, he wrote a statement titled “If the Hangings Flutter,” saying supernatural beliefs were “absurdities,” something to only be believed by “persons of the lower classes and from poor early education. “  Hm, then again, what if Elijah became a ghost himself?  I bet he’d be beyond pissed.  Maybe that explains that angry spirit leering from the roof tile…

I guess the question I want to ask everyone is: Is it normal to hope, yet disbelieve?

Is it normal to travel the world exploring graveyards? Because I’ve done that. I’ve sketched tombs throughout England and visited crypts in Italy and wandered through ancient cenotaphs in India, fascinated by the culture of death, the promise of the supernatural. The cold breeze on my neck could have been a ghostly breath, right? The orbs in photos might have been dust, but what if they weren’t?  Just last year my daughter visited Greece and sent me this picture.  Click on the photo and take a good close look. You see the orbs, right?  And the FACES IN THE ORBS?  I pointed this out to my daughter who wrote back freaked out saying, “THIS IS A TOMB!”

But is this proof? I’m still not completely convinced myself.

Wouldn’t you give anything to have some undeniable proof? Do you dream of going on a ghost tour in a castle? Do you watch ghost-hunting on cable hoping that it won’t be silly? Do you get lost in novels laced with the supernatural?  The Woman in White, Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, even The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman?

Well, I do. But of course artists are a little out there, anyway.  Writers too.  Especially writers. We spend all day hearing voices that aren’t there. Writing things that haven’t happened as if they did.

So, yeah, maybe that’s partly why I wrote Drawn.  Why I have my main character meet a ghost and step into his world. Why the final scenes are in a castle dungeon during a ghost tour.  Because I’m a little out there.  And because, unlike my main character Michelle, I’m not looking for normal. I’m hoping for the weird, the strange, the haunting.

Aren’t you?

– Marie

Click here to get your copy of DRAWN.

Marie Lamba (marielamba.com) is author of acclaimed young adult novels including What I Meant (Random House), Over My Head, and Drawn. When she isn’t writing or wandering around graveyards, she working as an Associate Literary Agent at The Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency in NYC.

About DRAWN:

Teen artist Michelle De Freccio moves to England in search of a normal life…instead she finds a hot medieval ghost with a sketchy past.

It all begins when a strange guy appears in Michelle’s drawings. When she actually meets him at the town’s castle, she’s unmistakably drawn to him. But something is definitely not right. For starters, he wears medieval garb, talks of ancient murders and tends to disappear each time they kiss.

Could he possibly be a ghost? Could Michelle be losing her mind? Or has she simply uncovered a love so timeless it’s spanned the centuries…

Praise for Drawn:

“A lushly romantic ghost story…captivating and haunting. I didn’t want it to end.” –Cyn Balog, author of paranormal YA novels Fairy Tale, Sleepless, and Starstruck

“…a wonderfully spooky tale of romance and discovery. It’s a magical exploration of the unconquerable power of love.  Highly recommended!” —Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Rot & Ruin and Dust & Decay

“In DRAWN, Marie Lamba deftly entwines romance and mystery, past and present, into a page-turning adventure. Buy it today and I promise you’ll be finished reading far too quickly!” —Joy Nash USA Today bestselling paranormal romance author of The Immortals series, The Grail King and The Unforgiven

Click here to get your copy of DRAWN.

If your letter is picked, you’ll receive a signed copy of one my books.

To send a question, you can email me at jonathan_maberry@yahoo.com or use snail mail at P.O. Box 84, Southampton PA 18966. PLEASE NOTE: if you send an email, put READER QUESTION in the subject line! (We don’t want the spam zombies to eat it)

Here’s the first batch of questions:

QUESTION: TAMARA F. from Atlanta: When will we see a sequel to DEAD OF NIGHT?

JONATHAN: DEAD OF NIGHT was written as a standalone, however there’s a chance I’ll pick up the story somewhere down the line. In the meantime, there’s another story coming out that takes place at the same time but with different characters.  That story is Jack and Jill and it will be in the anthology, 21ST CENTURY DEAD, edited by Christopher Golden.  The anthology also includes new zombie stories by an A-list of writers including Orson Scott Card, China Mieville, Simon R. Green, Daniel H. Wilson, Elizabeth Hand, Dan Chaon, Duane Swierczynski, Caitlin Kittredge, Brian Keene, Amber Benson, S.G. Browne, Thomas E. Sniegoski, and with his first published prose Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter.  The anthology debuts in July.

If you’ve enjoyed DEAD OF NIGHT, I posted a link to seven free Bonus Scenes: http://jonathanmaberry.com/happy-holidays-from-jonathan

QUESTION: Sereta H. from Tucson: Are you going to write for THE WALKING DEAD show?

JONATHAN: I’m not currently part of that creative team. I am, however, a huge fan of the show and the comic, and the creator, Robert Kirkman, has been on this blog and in several of my nonfiction books several times.  Bob’s a great guy and I couldn’t be happier that the show is a success.  He deserves it he’s done a lot to bring zombies to the cultural mainstream.

However I did write an essay on Rick Grimes, lead character of THE WALKING DEAD. That essay is in the recent nonfiction book: TRIUMPH OF THE WALKING DEAD, edited by James Lowder. The line-up of writers in that book is pretty amazing:

• Jay Bonansinga (author; The Black Mariah, co-author with Robert Kirkman of upcoming Walking Dead novels). Jonathan Maberry (New York Times bestselling author; Patient Zero, Zombie CSU, Marvel Zombies Return)
• Kim Paffenroth (professor of Religious Studies and zombie scholar; Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth)
• Lisa Morton (author and screenwriter; The Lucid Dreaming, A Hallowe’en Anthology: Literary and Historical Writings Over the Centuries)

• Kyle William Bishop (English professor at Southern Utah University; American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead)
• Craig Fischer (professor at Appalachian State, comic scholar; The Comics Journal, The International Journal of Comic Art)
• Kenneth Hite (game designer and writer; Zombies 101, Trail of Cthulhu)
• Kay Steiger (editor of Campus Progress and author; The Atlantic, Bitch Magazine, In These Times)
• Ned Vizzini (young adult author; It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Be More Chill)
• Scott Kenemore (author; The Zen of Zombie: Better Living Through the Undead, Z.E.O., The Art of Zombie Warfare)
• Brendan Riley (professor at Columbia College Chicago, author; Journal of Popular Culture, The Amazing Transforming Superhero)
• Arnold T. Blumberg (instructor at University of Baltimore, author; Zombiemania, The Big BIG LITTLE BOOK Book)
• Vince Liaguno (author, anthologist, and editor; Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet, The Literary Six, Butcher Knives & Body Counts)

QUESTION: GEORGE C. from Winnipeg: Which of your books is your favorite?

JONATHAN: That’s going to be a different answer every time I’m asked. I’m fickle. I love whichever book or story I’m currently writing. Right now I’m working on EXTINCTION MACHINE, the fifth Joe Ledger novel (due out from St. Martin’s Griffin in 2013) and I’m totally absorbed. It has UFOs and conspiracy theories and even Men in Black.  However, I’m listening to DEAD OF NIGHT on audio, and William Dufris performance is making that story entirely new for me, so I’m digging that, too.  Yeah, this may be narcissistic, but I’m having fun.

To read my interview with Bill Dufris and listen to an audio sample: http://jonathanmaberry.com/dead-of-night-a-zombie-novel-a-conversation-with-audio-book-reader-william-dufris

QUESTION: HARRISON P. from Sioux City: Does what you write ever creep you out?

JONATHAN: All the time. Usually the real-world science scares the bejeezus out of me. I talked about why I write scary science stuff in an interview I did on J.C. Hutchin’s blog: http://jchutchins.net/site/2012/01/11/creator-spotlight-novelist-jonathan-maberry-dead-of-night/

QUESTION: Caitlyn G. from Austin: I notice that a lot of the same names come up in different stories, and some of the same characters, too.  Do all of your stories take place in the same world?

JONATHAN: More or less, yes. There are two types of guest stars I like using: real people and my own characters.  I started doing that with my first novels, the Pine Deep Trilogy (GHOST ROAD BLUES, DEAD MAN’S SON and BAD MOON RISING). Since that story dealt with a big Halloween festival, it seemed appropriate that celebrities from the horror world would be there as guests.  So I reached out to several folks I know in the horror industry and asked if I could write them into the book.  They all agreed, so in that series you can expect to encounter make-up effects wizard and director Tom Savini; James Gunn, the screenwriter for the Zack Snyder remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD; screenwriter Stephen Susco (THE GRUDGE), Ken Foree (star of the original DAWN OF THE DEAD), scream queens Brinke Stevens and Debbie Rochon; drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs; and a few others.  Even bluesman Mem Shannon does a walk-on.

However peppered through that book and others are friends of mine. Captain Keith Strunk from ROT & RUIN is a real guy and a fellow member of the Liars Club. As is Don Lafferty, owner of Lafferty’s General Store in the same novel.

DEAD OF NIGHT is filled with real people, many of them winners of the “I Want to be a Zombie in DEAD OF NIGHT contest, including Shane Gericke, Sheldon Higdon, Nick Pulsipher, Wrenn Simms, Kealan Patrick Burke, Michael McGrath, Andy Diviny, Jillian Weiner, Byron Rempel, Elizabeth Donald, Peggy Sullivan and Paul Scott.

My webmaster, Jeff Strauss, has been killed more times than I can count in my novels.

As for cross-overs of my own characters I’ve been slowly creating links between the books. Malcolm Crow and Mike Sweeney from the Pine Deep Trilogy are mentioned in the Rot & Ruin books, and they both make cameos in the Joe Ledger novelette, Material Witness.  Joe Ledger shows up in FLESH & BONE, the 3rd book in the Rot & Ruin series.  Pine Deep is mentioned in DEAD OF NIGHT.  And Sam Imura, the uncle of Tom Imura, joins Joe Ledger’s Echo Team in EXTINCTION MACHINE.  There are more crossovers, too.  You never know who will show up.

QUESTION: Penelope W. from Akron: I heard that you do Skype visits to classes.  How can I get one of those for my class?  I’m in ninth grade.

JONATHAN: I always have a lot of fun with Skype visits, and I do a bunch of them.  Have your teacher or librarian send me an email at jonathan_maberry@yahoo.com and we’ll see if we can set something up!

Okay that’s it for now!  We have tons of terrific guest stars coming up soon!

Happy reading!
Jonathan Maberry