In this round-up, we have an excerpt from Scott Shoyer's zombie novel Outbreak: The Mutation. Also: a Q&A with Simon Green, the writer of Judas Ghost, Seraphim Song release details, the short film Samhain, and the third trailer for At Granny's House.
Outbreak: The Mutation: Press Release: "Austin, Texas – While nobody will deny zombie fiction’s huge surge in popularity, both readers and critics alike are currently crying out for wholly unique, mould-breaking narratives that don’t succumb to the recycling of the same old ideas. Thankfully, Scott Shoyer has stepped up to the plate with gusto.
Volume One of Shoyer’s Outbreak trilogy has already injected literally new blood into the market. In The Hunger, readers were captivated as a seemingly innocent day at the zoo led to a violent and world-threatening zombie apocalypse. In volume two, The Mutation, Shoyer further explores the world that he created in volume one and details how two groups of survivors are coping with their fight for survival. In true Shoyer style, he now explores new territory by taking the reader on a horrifying trip inside the minds of the deadly zombies themselves.
Synopsis: Zombies have overrun the world making human beings an endangered species. The zombies are getting stronger, smarter, and deadlier. The remaining human survivors are finding it more and more difficult to fight them off. Amidst this apocalyptic war, two separate groups of survivors are drawn to the small, seemingly dead town of Spicewood, Texas—but for very different reasons. There is Walt and his group of ex-addicts, and Wilder and Butsko, two of the only characters who made it out of The Hunger alive. Each group believes that what lies in Spicewood, Texas could alter the course of the war with the dead. But what they couldn't know is that what also lies in Spicewood, Texas might be the source of the outbreak itself and the very end to all life on earth.
“The Mutation continues to explore the world I created in The Hunger,” explains the author, founder of the popular AnythingHorror.com website and community. “In the first volume I traced the origin of the outbreak back to those lovable creatures that live all around us—animals. Readers loved the source of the outbreak. But now the virus has mutated, and The Mutation will take readers into the same world, but with seemingly unstoppable zombies who have gotten stronger, smarter, and deadlier.”
Continuing, “The Outbreak trilogy was designed from the ground up to give the zombie genre something new. As strange as it sounds, zombie fiction can often have a distinct lack of zombies, with the human drama taking center stage and dragging readers away from what they really want—zombie action. I promise my readers that the violence, gore, and horror will keep coming at them hard and fast, while also having interesting, strong characters that drive the narrative forward.”
Outbreak: The Hunger and Outbreak: The Mutation are both published by Severed Press. Outbreak: The Mutation is available on amazon.com in both eBook and paperback.
For more information about the author and his other published works, visit his Author Page on Amazon."
Teaser
Outbreak: The Mutation
1
Arboretum Area, Austin, TX
Two Years AgoHer lifeless corpse lay splayed on the bed. The coppery smell of dried blood filled the air, and the buzz of flies on and around the corpse was deafening. Her intestines cascaded down the side of the bed like some macabre waterfall. There were bite marks and deep gashes littered all over her tiny body, but these weren’t the marks of scavenger animals. Her body was ravaged by human teeth that had been altered as a result of the virus—a virus which affected, and altered, many aspects of whomever it infected. The virus was alive and wanted only one thing: to survive. It created an insatiable need in its host to infect other people. It may have started in lesser life forms like animals and insects, but it now craved to occupy the top of the food chain.
That was what compelled John to do this to his little girl. The virus didn’t care about age, didn’t recognize family, and didn’t discriminate. Survival was its only goal.
John was now in the kitchen huddled over the corpse of his wife, Sarah. When Sarah had seen John attack their little girl, she’d been at first frozen in fear, but the screams coming from their daughter Fi had slapped her back to reality. Sarah had tried jumping on John, hitting him on the back and head, anything to get him to stop clawing and biting their daughter. Her strength, though, had been no match for his, and he’d effortlessly thrown her across the room with one arm.
The blood from Sarah’s head wound had flowed into her eyes, and she’d only heard the wet sounds coming from John’s mouth as he’d chewed on their young daughter. As dizzy as she’d been, Sarah cursed John as he’d pulled out Fi’s intestines and tore off bits in his mouth. She’d been glad that Fi no longer screamed. Her nightmare was over.
Sarah lay broken against the wall and had gently wept. Once John was through with their daughter, he’d turned his rabid, feral gaze toward Sarah.
No, John! Sarah had uselessly pleaded. What the hell are you doing? she’d screamed. Look what you did to your daughter… our little girl.
John had stopped and turned to look at the lifeless, desecrated body of his daughter. Something inside had recognized the tiny body on the bed. His tongue had danced across his bloody lips as he’d tried to remember.
Images of animals and a zoo and a pretty girl with a knife sticking out of her belly had flashed through his mind, but they’d drifted away like steam from a boiling kettle.
My baby! Sarah cried out. Look what you did to my baby!
This had brought John back, and he’d turned violently toward the person on the floor. He’d been so hungry that it hurt. There’d been a searing pain in his stomach that had emanated out to the rest of his body. He’d felt he was on fire, and it had all been because of the hunger. He’d known the only thing that would satiate the pain was to
feed.His eyes had narrowed as he’d leaped onto the screaming woman. Sarah had no longer been his wife, no longer the woman he loved. The virus had no need for love. Sarah had been nothing but a pile of meat on the ground, and with an animalistic scream, he’d jumped on top of her and heard her thigh bone snap at the force of his landing. He’d grabbed her hair and pulled backward. The last thing Sarah had felt or saw was his bloodstained teeth closing around her throat. John had thrashed his head and tore her throat out.
He’d spit the bloody mass out and started ripping into her chest. He’d snapped her sternum in half as he went for her heart. The blood had made it impossible to tell where his body ended and hers began.
Sarah’s body had slid to the ground. John had then straddled her corpse and began to feed the hunger inside. It’d felt good to eat, and the pain went away for a while, but in the back of his mind he’d known the hunger would return. It always returned, and he always obeyed it.
2
Fi’s eyes opened, and she was confused. She looked around and vaguely recognized where she was, but wasn’t concerned about that so much as what she felt. She felt nothing. It was as though there was nothing below her neck. She tried to lean forward, but her arms wouldn’t obey her.
From across the room, she heard strange, wet noises with the occasional grunt. Her curiosity got the best of her and she willed her arms to move. Her left arm flopped onto her chest and she felt the large hole in her abdomen.
Her hand followed the trail out of the hole and realized what she felt were her own insides. Fi thought it was weird that she wasn’t panicking, but a warm sense of serenity washed over her body.
Finding her balance, she tried to focus on the noise across the room. She could see someone huddled down on the floor doing something, but details escaped her unfocused eyes. She gently grabbed the longest piece of her intestines hanging out of her and tucked it back in the hole. After it popped out twice, she tucked it under one of the bones she felt inside the hole.
She again focused her attention to the thing on the floor. Her feet shuffled as she made her way across the room, as she didn’t trust her balance to pick her feet off the floor and walk. As she got closer, she could see a man covered in blood eating something. In the back of her mind she thought she recognized him, but couldn’t form a concrete enough memory to finish the thought.
A dull pain started to grow in what was left of her belly. Fi could feel the pain as it urged her on to fulfill some kind of task. Instinct took over, and she began to walk normally as she got closer to the person on the ground. The man was focused on his meal and didn’t hear or even notice the person standing behind him.
Then she remembered. “Daddy?” the question hissed out of her mouth. “What are you doing, Daddy?”
The thing in front of her didn’t acknowledge her, and anger began to rise from where the pain in her belly was. She didn’t know why she was angry, but she clenched her fists and asked once more: “Daddy?”
The anger welled up in her and her arm shot out and landed on her father’s head, pulling it back in a deadly angle. She heard the snap as the head went limp in her hand. When she looked past the dad-thing on the floor, she could see that he’d been eating her mom.
Fi’s head tilted to the side and she tried to understand what was going on. Before she realized what she was doing, she bent down and tore into her father. She loved the sensation of the flesh ripping underneath her fingers as blood poured from the wounds she created. She brought a crimson finger up to her lips and sucked on it. It was tepid and salty, but she didn’t really like the flavor. Fi wiped the bloody finger on her already-blood-splattered shirt and returned to tearing up the body. To an onlooker, Fi would’ve looked like a child who just discovered the fun of playing with Legos or Play-Doh. There was innocence in her play as she shredded her father to pieces.
As she sifted through the remains of her father’s body, she played with the organs and bones. She drew patterns in the blood as it pooled on the ground beside her. Tearing the body apart lessened her anger. It felt like water slowly running down a drain. Fi couldn’t even remember what had made her so angry just a few moments ago as she played in the gore.
Nothing seemed to matter as she played. Fi didn’t like that feeling of anger. She didn’t like the pain it caused her. One thing was for sure: she’d do anything to alleviate the pain.
Fi stood up and brushed the unrecognizable remains of her father aside with her toes and smiled gruesomely at the squeaky noise her foot made in the blood. From the corner of her eye, she saw her mother’s body begin to stir.
I must keep the anger away, Fi thought. Anger brings the pain.
Just before her mother rose, Fi jumped on her and began tearing at the newly reanimated body.
Her giggles became laughs as she played with her mommy.
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Judas Ghost: "Author Simon R.Green talks to us about Judas Ghost, the first in what he hopes to be a long line of films based on his best-selling Ghost Finders series of books. Judas Ghost, which Green also adapted for the screen, releases December 1st via Uncork’d Entertainment.
I believe you spearheaded the charge to get the books made into a movie? Can you tell us how that came about?
Simon R.Green: I’d had a number of my books optioned, but nothing ever came of it, so I decided to start the ball rolling myself. Hollywood is very good at offering you the world and all that’s in it, and then never actually doing anything. So I wrote my own original screenplay and went looking for a director.
Why was Simon Pearce the best guy for the job?
Simon R.Green: I met Simon Pearce through a mutual friend, and we both hit it off immediately. He was looking for a film script worth doing, and what I’d seen of his other work impressed me. It helped to discover that we were both on the same frequency, and understood not just what made a good film, but also a good horror film.
Was it difficult to condense the books into a feature length screenplay? How did you decide what to keep and what to lose?
Simon R.Green: I used as a basis a series of books I’d written; the Ghost Finders books. These were traditional ghost stories but in modern settings. I was always a big fan of M R James, particularly the BBC adaptations, but they were very much of their period, set in old manor houses and deserted churches. I wanted to plant the ghost story in the here and now. So GHOST OF A CHANCE featured a haunting in the London Underground, and VOICES FROM BEYOND featured a haunted local radio station, with ghosts phoning into the chat shows. For the film Judas Ghost, I used the background of the books, but new characters; so I could kill off as many as I felt like. The idea came from the judas goat, a trained animal that would lead other animals into the slaughterhouse so they wouldn’t panic. My idea was that professional ghost investigators would be brought in to deal with what they thought was a regular haunting, and then find something much worse lying in wait for them.
Will fans of the book be pleased with the film adaptation, do you think?
Simon R.Green: Fans of the books will definitely love the film. It’s the same background, the same mix of horror and humor, with some really disturbing ideas.
How different are they – if at all – the books and the film?
Simon R.Green: In the books, I don’t need to worry about a budget. So if I want to write a scene in SPIRITS FROM BEYOND, where a fifty-foot tall wicker man is fighting with an old Celtic god in a pub car park, I can do it. In the film, I had to go for smaller effects, the telling moment, the realization that chills. It’s always about mood and atmosphere, and worrying what’s going to happen to the characters.
Do you envision more films happening?
Simon R.Green: I’d certainly like to write more films. I have a finished script ready to go, that Simon Peace is interested in, and of course, I have an idea for a sequel to Judas Ghost."
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Seraphim Song: Press Release: "New Zealand-born writer/actress/ filmmaker Pandie James (Massacre) recently rediscovered a treasure trove of old works she'd written as a teenager and in her early 20's on an old hard drive. One of these treasures was 'Vampire Summer', a short vampire story set in her hometown of Wellington, New Zealand.
Deciding to release the short story on Amazon.com for 99c U.S. on November 19th, James was astounded by the response. By the next day the short story has skyrocketed up the charts to #26 on the sci-fi and fantasy short reads bestsellers and #80 on the horror short story bestsellers list, keeping company with the likes of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, and all with zero promotion of any kind.
Seeing that people might actually be interested in reading a scary story about vampires that takes place mostly on Wellington's Abel Smith Street and Cuba Quarter, James made the further decision to make Vampire Summer free to download for a day. Multitudes of downloads poured in, in part this time James thinks to the fact that this time she took to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and the new Periscope app to actively promote it, earning her the #2 spot and number #8 spot in two Amazon Bestseller categories by the end of the day.
Written in 2006 or 2007, James isn't quite sure, the tale follows one Wellington girl's descent into the terrifying and lovely world of a creature with obsidian for eyes and porcelain for flesh. Currently living in Los Angeles where she works as a writer, actress and filmmaker, Pandie James recently completed a stint of festivals with her award-winning horror short film 'Massacre' and released this past week her debut novel 'Seraphim Song' an urban fantasy/ paranormal romance story written when she was a teenager."
To learn more about Seraphim Song, visit:
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Samhain: "October 31st, Halloween. A young woman is about to keep his little brother while their parents are out. The boy and his sister will go hunt for candies, but throughout the Halloween day the girl will not at all excited about this special day. The girl will not respect the Halloween rules, and there will be a chain of events to instill the respect and terror into her."
Directed by Romain Konieczny and Raphaël Mundt and written by Damien Madcaser, Raphaël Mundt, and Romain Konieczny, Samhain stars Catherine Buriez as the sister and Lucas Konieczny as the little brother. The film is presented by CGR Cinemas and Zone-Radio.
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At Granny's House: Press Release: "The award-winning new thriller by Vagabond Entertainment, “At Granny’s House” is out in limited release after it’s theatrical run in Hollywood, and is available for pre-screening and reviews.
This title is about a mysterious caregiver whose dark secret makes Granny’s house a macabre place of death—and love. Shot entirely in a rural town in Colorado, “At Granny’s House” is a dark Hitchcockian thriller that will make audiences wonder what is going on behind closed doors in small-town America.
This feature stars the “king of indie horror” Bill Oberst Jr. (of the Emmy-winning takethislollipop.com and Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies), Rachel Alig (Bikini Spring Break and Ghostline), and Glenda Morgan Brown (The West Wing) as “Granny”.
Release Date: December 2015.
Director: Les Mahoney (Available, Asian Treasure)
Cast: Bill Oberst Jr., Rachel Alig, Glenda Morgan Brown, Les Mahoney, and Laura Lee."
More information can be found at the film’s homepage at: http://www.grannyshousemovie.com/ and on the film's Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/Grannyshousemovie
Tamika hails from North Beach, Maryland, a tiny town inches from the Chesapeake Bay.She knew she wanted to be an actor after reciting a soliloquy by Sojourner Truth in front of her entire fifth grade class. Since then, she's appeared in over 20 film and television projects. In addition to acting, Tamika is the Indie Spotlight manager for Daily Dead, where she brings readers news on independent horror projects every weekend.
The first horror film Tamika watched was Child's Play. Being eight years old at the time, she remembers being so scared when Chucky came to life that she projectile vomited. It's tough for her to choose only one movie as her favorite horror film, so she picked two: Nosferatu and The Stepford Wives (1975).
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