Zombies!

[NOTE: This is a bit of a commercial, so feel free to skip it. I'm not affiliated with the author in question in any way other than as an avid member of his audience, and we've exchanged some email communication.]

A couple of years ago, I discovered David Wellington in a random Google search. Being a monster, I, bored, looked for "Monster Nation" and found among the results a novel entitled, Monster Nation, which the sequel to Monster Island, about a zombie plague in New York. Both novels were serialized online, blog-style.

I was leary as I started reading Monster Island online -- zombie fiction is a notoriously hard subgenre in which to find fresh angles, and I was not really a particular fan of it. But I gave it a try and was impressed, especially when I realized he was writing it pretty much as he went along. It was gory, and grim, and dark, everything zombie fiction should be, but he managed to find an interesting new angle that I will not go into here. I didn't get a lot of work done the next couple of days as I kept sneaking back to read another chapter.

That didn't get any better when I finished, because I then started devouring Monster Nation, set several months earlier than Island, on the other side of the country. The writing was much better. He'd learned a lot from Island, in terms of plotting and characterization; he outlined the story far more thoroughly before he started posting it, and so there were fewer of the plot holes that naturally came of writing something in what was basically a long first draft.

Then I was done, and started the third in the trilogy, Monster Planet (Island-Nation-Planet. Progression, see?), but that was not yet complete, so several chapters in I had to sit in anticipation with his other readers as it was doles out a chapter every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It was great.

Several months after wrapping up the trilogy, he began a new serialization -- a vampire novel, Thirteen Bullets. The improvement in his style was very noticeable. Leaner, starker, with the best characterization yet. The take on vampires I found very refresh, free of the angst and glam of recent decades. He also around this time announced he'd been given a publishing contract for the Monster trilogy, based upon the strength of his online audience.

At the end of last year, he released a new serialization, the werewolf novel Frostbite. Again, the werewolves were like nothing I'd seen done before, ad the writing style was both very different from what he'd done before, and very involving.

Anwyay, yesterday I received notice that a new serialization had begun: Plague Zone, a zombie novel not connected with the Monster series. I wasn't blogging her back when I read the others, so this made me think maybe some of the horror fans I've noted here on MD might want to take a look.

And that's my blog. Thanks.