You should, by now, already know about Amanda Feral.(1) The celebutante zombie star of Happy Hour of the Damned and Road Trip of the Living Dead is back in action, returning to Seattle’s night-life scene, albeit with far less cash than she started with. Like the rest of the world, Amanda’s finances are on the rocks, and the only thing that looks like it will save her(2) from the bone-breaking threats of the reapers, to whom she’s indebted, is taking a role on a reality show. Amanda’s no actress, but playing herself to the camera is something she’s perfected.

The world ends with the flip of a switch. The thundering storms strike across the world, searing the earth, leaving destruction in their wake. Few will survive. For the folks living in Temperance, Illinois the nightmare is just beginning. When the sky roils in luminous colors, the people of the small town begin to die, and Randall Clay decides to escape. What he didn’t expect was the dead to come back to life or the nightmare that came after that.

Pallid Light: The Waking Dead is available at Amazon.com.

The Dead Reign RPG from Palladium Books presents a story that details a lot of familiar territory where zombie survival games are concerned, yet added lots of interesting twists, zombie variants, survival tips & guides, weapons & equipment, great adventure ideas, several quick roll tables, and a partridge in a pear tree! I personally LOVE (not like, LOVE) the bleak tone and style of the setting and the theme of the “survival of humanity” while maintaining your humanity (and sanity) the core book delivered. As an added bonus, fans of Palladium’s “Megaversal role playing system” are in good shape here as it’s just as loudly and proudly displayed as ever!

Where the core book detailed the setting, themes and tones of the DR world, the first sourcebook “Civilization Gone” went into a lot more detail and information concerning what the average person will face daily in a world that’s suddenly without civilization to protect and nurture them.

It’s not the end of the world-it’s just zombies.

With the help of a morning show shock-jock who has recently turned into a zombie and the burnt-out walking remains of a businessman, Chris becomes the backbone of a fight for undead rights among the fear, prejudice, and uncertainty dividing the living and the not quite dead.

Apex Book Company has offered a small excerpt from this new zombie tale for Flames Rising readers to enjoy. The Changed is available now at DriveThruHorror.com.

In an era when comic books have the same relationship with zombies as ESPN has with football, it’s difficult to find something fresh about the living dead, no pun intended. However, Grim Crew’s Dead Future Issue 1 is an anthology comprised of three zombie apocalypse stories all of which offer an element of originality in this otherwise predictable comic book niche.

The first story, Real Monsters, written by Martin Brandt II and Illustrated by Paul Petyo is a tale of day-to-day urban survival in a world overrun by zombies. This segment has all the trappings of the archetypal zombie paradigm as well as a few unique wrinkles. One of these is that the living can go about their business among the living dead provided they don’t upset the zombies’ routines and that these excursions take place during the day time.

Horror and dark fantasy fans love getting (and giving) gifts just as much as anyone else. However, we certainly can be hard to shop for sometimes.

In this edition of the FlamesRising.com’s Winter Holidays 2009 Gift Guide, we hear from FlamesRising reviewer and horror aficionado Steven Dawes. Steve talks about games, movies and books perfect to give as a gift for the horror fan in your life.

The other day in my email there was a new
Offering of an eBook novel for me to review.
“What’s this? A new tale of the great Robin Hood
As a zombie killer?!” Now this should be good!
Tis a different style of novel, for better or for worse
For this Canterbury tale is told entirely in verse.

I ask you to follow along with me if you would
About this unique take on Friar Tuck and Robin Hood
As they deal with a hoard of zombies and their maw’s
Their horrible stench, their appetite and also their claws.

Halloween isn’t until tomorrow night, but Barry and his best buddy Shawn are dealing with a monster. Mitch, the school bully has had Shawn marked for sometime now, and he takes it on the chin. Barry encourages Shawn to stand up to Mitch and defend himself, but so far he’s lacked the courage. Ahh, the joys of school.

Later that day the two are looking for a book for a class, but instead they find a very different and much more intriguing book in a secret compartment. Shawn is fascinated by this seemingly “ancient spell book” and studies it throughout that night into the following morning. Shawn even takes it with him when he and Barry go a Halloween party a class mate invited them to. But Mitch is also attending the party and after a confrontation gone bad, he ruins their night and gets them kicked out.

Review by Steven Dawes

It’s only eighteen pages. There is no artwork beyond some font variances. There are no graphs and no sidebars. You get no character sheet. There are some bullets, but that just seems sensible in a game about zombie survival (or is it Zombie survival?). Despite the utter lack of bells and whistles, it still costs five bucks (except mine was a free reviewer’s copy from Wicked Dead Brewing Company). You know what else?

It’s totally worth skipping out on a combo meal to snatch up this booklet.

Shotgun Diaries apparently started out as a birthday gift. As most things zombie-related, it got a bit out of hand.

This week, to celebrate Crackle.com’s Zombiefest, I decided to check out a few zombie-licious movies. One of the movies is called “FLESH EATER.” Now normally, I don’t really like a lot of cheese with my zombies, but this was just…too horrifying to watch without cracking up.

When I got my mitts on a copy of “The Kill Crew”, I wasn’t sure what to expect from it. I’d never heard of author Joseph D’Lacey before and had no idea what to expect from him. The book itself is only a slim eighty pages and most of my experiences with novella’s of this size haven’t been exactly stellar. However, it was as good of a time as any to dig in and see what Mr. D’Lacey had to say, so I did.

At first my expectations began to dwindle in the first few chapters. The Kill Crew tells a tale about a group of survivors dealing with the aftermath of a zombie like plague. All the zombie fanatics out there will find familiar territory in these first few chapters, especially fans of the comic series The Walking Dead. The zombie’s types here are referred to as “Commuters” due to the fact that they only come out at night and because the majority of these things in life were the commuting white-collared desk jockeys and similar professionals still garbed in their professional attire.

Director Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland is not a horror movie. It’s not even a horror-comedy. It’s really a fairly straight forward comedy-comedy, the back drop of which involves zombies. And as such it works pretty well, just not as well as its components suggest it should.

The world has been overrun by zombies and a most unlikely survivor nicknamed Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) is heading east across the country toward home hoping to find others, his family in particular. As fate would have it, he crosses paths with Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), another survivor heading east and Columbus’ polar opposite in just about every way. Soon the two of them run into a bad girl nicknamed Wichita (Emma Stone) and her twelve year old sister Little Rock (Abigail Breslin). These girls were conning men out of their money before zombies became an issue and have since parlayed their game into a post apocalyptic art of survival as they head west.

Calling all zombie lovers! Crackle.com is getting into the spirit of Halloween by offering free films, previews of ZOMBIELAND and an original comedy series entitled WOKE UP DEAD starring Jon Heder (NAPOLEON DYNAMITE).

The folks over at Crackle.com are really excited to show their love for the shambling, brain-eating undead. In the first half of October, they’ll be offering zombie films for fans to legally watch on the web for free.

The end of the world has come and gone. The dead have risen, and they’ve won. No more rallying of the troops. No miracle cure or weapon. Just lots of dead people walking around. If the living dead won, what would the world be like? This collection of eighteen tales-including entries from David Wellington, Jack Ketchum, and Gary A. Braunbeck-take up the call to answer that question. People go to work. Have sex. Get drunk. Fall in love. Take revenge. Raise families. Watch TV. Laugh. Mourn. Murder. Pray. The world is dead, but life goes on.

The World Is Dead is available now at Amazon.com.

With the runaway popularity of Zombies these days, it isn’t surprising that we’re seeing the shambling undead teamed with nearly every other concept imaginable, from video games to Jane Austen. Even lighthearted zombie treatments are gaining a strong foothold, like Shaun of the Dead, the upcoming film Zombieland starring Woody Harrelson, and, of course, Zombie Mosh from Bucephalus Games.

Zombie Mosh is exactly that, a game about zombies bashing each other apart in a mosh pit. Players select one of six different character cards, then shuffle the Zombie cards and deal four to each player. The dealer then draws two cards and randomly places them in the “damage” row of each player, including himself. Each card has two different results, facing the top and bottom of the card, so orientation of each card matters.

DriveThruHorror.com has all kinds of spooky stories, terrible tales and features some of the best horror authors available today. One of our favorite genres is the pulse pounding survival horror of the undead…zombies!

Here are just a few of the awesome zombie tales available now at DriveThruHorror.com:

Dead Science – Coscom Entertainment
Book of All Flesh – Eden Studios
Down the Road – Permuted Press
Reign of the Dead – iUniverse
The Lifeless – Coscom Entertainment

All these and many more available now at DriveThruHorror.com!

All Things Zombie comes from Two Hour Wargames. Wargaming is a very different hobby than role-playing, which I take part in most often. I’ve tried a few games over the years with minis. Some were true wargames like WarZone while others were toned-down versions like Savage Worlds or HeroClix. The deciding factor for these games to win me over was speed of play. I don’t want to check charts constantly when I’m playing a game. A character sheet and perhaps a index card-sized grouping of key rules is more than sufficient. I’ll allow for each player to work with their own screen because some games dictate that.

At the end of the day though, a game system better have something backing it up if it plans on being convoluted. I realize that some people want as much realism as possible in their miniature combat. I’m not writing this review for those people. I’m writing from the other side, the side where realism takes a backseat after a spell. I’ll elaborate more as I continue.

Tired of your rights as a member of the living dead being violated? Sick of people putting you down or worse, screaming and trying to smash your head with a cricket bat? We don’t deserve to be treated like this! We will no longer stand for being viewed as lesser citizens. We need to fight for our rights and demand equal treatment.

The Coalition Of the Living Dead (COLD) will gather on Saturday October 24th at 2:00 pm at the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, and lurch for our rights as zombies. COLD encourages zombies and zombie supporters to come equipped with signs and slogans to make our point. We will raise our voices and we will not be ignored. We will lurch from the capitol down State Street to the Memorial Union.

The Flash Fire Mini-Reviews series has crawled out of its grave and returned as a regular feature on the Flames Rising website.

To celebrate we’re going to be taking a look at several kinds of undead this week. We’ve got a mix of games, books and more. This particular edition of Flash Fire Mini-Reviews is going to feature a few different reviewers.

We’re going to take a look at Zombie Haiku, Vampire: the Eternal Struggle, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Geist: The Sin-Eaters and The Estuary.

A school full of kids.

A mysterious yellow rain.

High school will never be the same.

They are outcasts and misfits, teenagers lost on the path to adulthood, living day-to-day inside a high school culture of taunts, humiliation, and isolation. They are the misunderstood, the neglected, and the abused. They are . . . The Lifeless.

For them, every school day is a nightmare.

But on Monday, October 2nd, they will discover the true meaning of terror.

Classes are cut short by news of explosions in the city across the river, part of a series of horrific terrorist attacks that paralyze the nation. But that is only the beginning: amber clouds fill the sky, burning rain pelts down, and the surviving students of Verlaine High learn that their tormentors have mutated into something far worse-reanimated corpses with a primordial instinct for murder.

It’s time to stand up to the in-crowd . . . or be consumed by it.

The Lifeless: A Zombie Novel is available at DriveThruHorror.com.