Stoker, The Road, new projects

Gospel of the Living Dead is continuing to get recommendations for the Stoker Award. Thanks again to those of you who recommended it, and again, anyone out there who is an active HWA member, or anyone who has a blog or zine and might review it, you're entitled to a free copy. Just get me your snail mail address. And I'm not giving away just a PDF file, either, but a real, sick, night-vision-green-covered copy that you'd actually pay for on Amazon or Ebay.

I just finished reading the apocalyptic, semi-zombie novel The Road. (The first scene where you see how far people go to survive, you'll see that "semi-zombie" is in some ways worse than full-blown corpse reanimation. This ain't Mad Max.) I guess I felt a little let down by the end. No spoilers here, but let's just say it's more of a whimper than a bang. And after some of the stuff he'd shown us in the previous pages, it seemed incongruous. But, as I tried to indicate in the previous post, I can't imagine better, colder, sharper prose for what he was talking about. And you know what he was talking about? It wasn't about war or violence or nukes: it's just about human nature and love and God. And for such a clear and searing vision, any reader or aspiring writer should be grateful.

I wrote two short stories in the last couple weeks and am waiting to hear back about them. The first was a very gentle ghost story (the most that happens is some broken glasses), but I think it had some nice points about closure and responsibility and the nature of love. The second is a zombie story of father and son, under the influence of The Road. Except for the road part. It's just about a father and son fighting zombies. But as I wrote it, I felt a real urge to hold back on the violence and expand the exposition and conversation, to kind of keep it more suggestive and thoughtful, and I really started getting excited that maybe it could be expanded into a YA novel. A YA zombie novel? Wow. I'm excited.