Fallout is the third volume in the Vampire Apocalypse series written by Derek Gunn. This story picks up almost immediately after the previous book, Descent into Chaos, wraps up. Now, the free humans are still recovering from the events of the previous novel, and have new challenges to face. Burdened by a huge influx of rescued people to their hidden community, the main characters have a lot of challenges weaning them off a deadly serum and integrating them into their new lives as survivors and freedom fighters.

I’ll say from the start that this review will be difficult to write without spoiling something in the story. There is a lot of action in this volume and plenty of twists and turns to the ongoing narrative. So, I’ll attempt to spoil as little as possible in the review, but a few minor bits might slip through in the process…

I’ve only been a reviewer on da’ flames for about a scant 6 months now (my, how time does fly), but I’ve already read and reviewed some good books within that time. In one particular case however, I decided to read and review a book (Personal Effects- Dark Art) after reading a featured preview. As it turned out, this was a good book and was worth taking the leap and I told myself I would review more featured books in the future. And now I’ve recently read the featured preview of This is My Blood. This preview also grabbed me by the attention and I took another leap of faith. Was my faith rewarded?

For a long time, Joe Pitt has been on the receiving end of the whip-as stick, and you might be wondering if he gets to turn it around in this, the final book of the Joe Pitt Casebooks series. I can tell you definitively and without a doubt that everyone gets what’s coming to them. And I do mean everyone.

Let’s be honest. Joe Pitt isn’t exactly what you’d call a hero; hasn’t been for the last several books. The darkness has been closing around him for a long time. The thing about darkness, though, is that it’s not always bad. Oppressors can be fled. Justice can be served.

Folks, I’m pleased to announce that I have a guest post over at Crackle.com. Every month, Crackle.com offers free movies and webisodes for you to enjoy on the web. As part of their Halloween celebration, they’re offering a ton of free horror movies for fans to watch.

I’m attending International Camarilla Convention 2009 and for the first time, ICC is taking place in Atlanta…White Wolf’s stomping ground.

This year’s ICC has a ton of great looking events going on. Ranging from Requiem, Forsaken, Awakening and Lost LARP games that are part of the current global storyline, to a oWoD Sabbat LARP that is also a charity event raising funds for Get Well Gamers. In addition to the various LARP events there are some interesting panel discussions on the schedule that include several White Wolf staffers and other guests.

FALLOUT is Derek Gunn’s latest book in is his Vampire Apocalypse series and it’s now available from Black Death Books in a trade paperback edition. In this military/post-apocalyptic series the Vampires rule. Humanity is enslaved in a nightmare world where those who are still alive are bred as food for the vampires and the entertainment for the vicious thralls who guard them.

According to the author this installment sees vampires pitted against vampires and the thralls use this war to their advantage. But the small band of human survivors hold a secret of immeasurable power – a coating for bullets that can kill the vampires. The thralls want it and the vampires must destroy it. But first they have to find them. Across the country another power struggle threatens them all and the doomsday clock continues to tick relentlessly towards Armageddon.

Published in 1879, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was one of the reasons why I was drawn to the horror genre. Even though it was published in 1879, I felt it was brilliant the way Stoker wove letters and newspaper clippings together to show the now-infamous characters of Jonathan and Mina Harker, Dr. Steward, Arthur Holmwood, Lucy Westerna and (of course) Dracula.

Needless to say, I am not the only one who has enjoyed the book. Reprinted several times in multiple languages, Dracula has been heralded as a literary classic that’s been discussed, dissected and enjoyed. Its story has been made into comics and graphic novels, movies and animated features; its characters have been reused and reinvented so many times that they’ve become iconic.

Publisher New Baby Productions announces that a graphic novel adaptation of Derek Gunn’s acclaimed Vampire Apocalypse novel series is in the works. “I’m really thrilled with this new direction as I always felt that (Vampire Apocalypse) really lends itself to this format,” stated Gunn. Vampire Apocalypse was published in September 2006, and has been optioned by producer/screenwriter Richard Finney to be a feature film. A script has already been penned by Finney and Franklin Guerrero Jr. Fallout, the third book in the series, will be released this October from Black Death Books.

If there is a single grouping of monsters that are a favorite, undead would probably be at or near the top of everyone’s list. From ghosts to zombies and from vampires to mummies, undead are the critters we love to hate. In Open Grave: Secrets of the Undead, Wizards of the Coast offers up a tasty book filled with intriguing information for GMs wishing to get the most out of their players’ encounters with those who refuse to stay dead.

It’s important to note that this volume isn’t a simple monster manual for the Undead. It doesn’t bother to cover the basic types; skeletons, zombies, and even straight-up vampire types are totally ignored, being covered in some depth elsewhere. What it does offer are variations on the standard creature, with strategy tips and useful tricks for effective deployment.

Think you know all about vampires? Think again. Did you know that vampires can hibernate for decades, have stomachs the size of walnuts, and have a predisposition for jobs in real estate? Can you say, “I must feed?” in vampire language? A Practical Guide to Vampires (Mirrorstone) provides the in-depth information we all need to know about these dangerous creatures of the night. This comprehensive book follows the New York Times best-sellers A Practical Guide to Dragons and A Practical Guide to Monsters. All are lavishly-illustrated and fun for all ages.

A Practical Guide to Vampires is packed with thrilling, chilling and blood-spilling facts about these compelling monsters. Kids can read about vampire anatomy, intelligence, clothing, habits and habitats, as well as dangerous powers like shapeshifting, hypnotic persuasion, and superhuman strength.

Life-hating Goth girl Lara Baxter just turned 16. Her birthday party mojo never materializes after her more popular sister, Helen, steals her thunder. Shunned by her secret crush and neglected by her own mother, Lara retreats to the sanctuary of her altar to Ann Rice where she casts a spell on Helen. The next day Helen wakes up bleeding profusely from her nose and dies a short time later.

Just as the family begins to mourn, Helen comes back from the morgue delirious and with an insatiable thirst for blood. Older brother Raymond, a cross between Re-Animator’s Dr. Herbert West and Milwaukee’s own Jeff Dahmer, performs some tests on Helen’s blood in his bedroom/laboratory and determines that she’s a vampire.

The latest book in the ongoing saga of vampire hunter Laura Caxton, 23 Hours details the most harrowing and dangerous battle yet. Laura has to not only deal with savage vampires and the violent “half-deads” that serve them…she has to do it with almost no weapons, no back-up and an ever dwindling time-line.

While this book does change in scene from the previous books, Laura still gets to hunt vampires while outgunned and lost in the dark. This time she is confined to a maximum security prison that has been overrun by the monsters. She hardly has any weapons and no communication with the outside world. To make things more interesting, she made “friends” with some very nasty inmates early on the story…naturally, they are on the loose as well during the battle and they don’t want to make things any easier for Laura or her allies.

Why did I read this book? Because (1) I was fortunate enough to acquire an advanced copy, (2) it’s about vampires, and (3) one of the authors is Guillermo. Del Toro! That’s right, the acclaimed and quixotic director of movies like Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy 2, The Orphanage…and in a few years the much-anticipated The Hobbit.

Here’s the thing. The Strain is a vampire book, and with that comes certain assumptions; I was initially dismayed by this fact, because while I love vampires I’m not always happy with the way they’re portrayed. In fact, I wish the back cover copy of this book didn’t come right out and mention vampires precisely because it doesn’t feel like a vampire story most of the time and it would have been a nice surprise once I’d realized it. But I wasn’t disappointed. Del Toro and Hogan have changed the rules. This isn’t some lovey-dovey Twilight-like story with brooding, romantic vampires. And it’s nothing like Anne Rice’s Chronicles, either, which feature beautiful immortals with pearlescent skin and eternal youth. No way. I don’t want to give too much away, but the creatures introduced in this book are an inventive mixture of some of the more horrifying aspects of the genre.

Vampire Zero is the third volume in David Wellington’s vampire hunting series featuring Laura Caxton. I was hooked from 13 Bullets, enjoyed 99 Coffins on and couldn’t wait to get this book started.

Laura Caxton and her partner (one of the survivors from the battle of Gettysburg) are on the hunt for the last two vampires. The previous battle had been costly, but they had somehow managed to dispose of a huge group of vampires before they wiped out the town. Several police and national guard had died during the fight, but the heroic actions of the group had saved the day (night?) and managed to get Caxton a small budget to form a permanent vampire hunting division. It only had enough funding for her and her new partner, but they had access to other officers when they needed them.

Flames Rising has been offered the chance to bring you a preview of Alex Bledsoe’s new vampire novel Blood Groove.

When centuries-old vampire Baron Rudolfo Zginski was staked in Wales in 1915, the last thing he expected was to reawaken in Memphis, Tennessee, sixty years later. Reborn into a new world of simmering racial tensions, the cunning nosferatu realizes he must adapt quickly if he is to survive.

Forming an uneasy alliance with the young vampires, Zginski begins to teach them the truth about their powers. They must learn quickly, for there’s a new drug on the street—a drug created to specifically target and destroy vampires. As Zginski and his allies track the drug to its source, they may unwittingly be stepping into a fifty-year-old trap that can destroy them all . . .

Cat and Bones take their romance in a whole new direction (read: planning a wedding) in the third novel in Frost’s series. But nothing comes easily for the pair: Cat, a half-vampire, has some serious soul searching to do over the course of the novel, only partially because her vampire father has torture on the brain. Is she a vampire? Is she human? What does it mean to be either?

Not, of course, that there’s a lot of time to just stand and think. That Cat’s father has found her means that her identity is no longer secure, which endangers her whole unit. Add a very old, very powerful vampire calling on Bones to share power and ally together (which almost certainly means that a vampire turf war is on the horizon) and Bones turning Cat’s unit member Tate into a vampire by request, and things get very, very complicate. Tate’s love for Cat is only the tip of the iceberg.

The concept behind this book is that, just like the rest of us, vampires tell stories. This is a collection of some of the myths and legends told throughout time in vampire communities. Interestingly, none are presented as being ‘true’ – this is left to the Storyteller to decide for himself – and so players can read the book freely without compromising their knowledge of their particular game world’s alternate reality… they will, instead, absorb the tales told amongst the vampires that they play with as little knowledge as their characters have about which are real and which pure fiction.

The book opens with a story about a mirror, and then there’s an Introduction which explains what it is all about. Following chapters look at several myths about the origin of vampires, modern legends (or urban myths) told amongst vampires tonight and finally some of the things that really scare even the bravest vampire.

After killing her former mentor-turned-vampire, U.S. Marshal Jameson Arkeley, Caxton was nearly left for dead. Taken to prison for assaulting a convict, she now faces her most harrowing hours yet. Locked up in a Pennsylvania correctional facility that holds the state’s death-row inmates, not to mention countless murderers and drug dealers whom Caxton herself has put away, she is an easy target.

But it gets worse. The oldest living vampire, Justinia Malvern is still on the loose and manages to infiltrate the prison. There she uses the inmates as livestock—taking daily donations of blood at will and slaughtering any who don’t cooperate. But it’s Caxton’s blood she’s most hungry for, and when Caxton’s girlfriend, Clara, comes to visit but ends up trapped there, Justinia will use her as a pawn to get to her most sought-after prey. . . .

Pre-Order 23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale at Amazon.com.

Night Horrors: Immortal Sinners

Sins of the Ages

So many people wish for fame and renown during their lives — or even for just a little bit of notoriety. But among our Kindred, that’s very nearly a fate worse than death. Don’t take my word for it, though. Go and ask some questions. Find out about who they talk to in the Necropoli of the Nosferatu, and in the perfumed salons of Elysium. Listen to what they say about them, and listen even more carefully to what they don’t say. Then maybe you’ll understand that the worst thing you can do is to stand out in a society of blood-starved murderers, my boy.

Night Horrors: Immortal Sinners is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.