For a limited time, several of the Flames Rising crew’s favorite zombie horror novels are on sale at Amazon! Take a look at some of the great titles included in this sale: Twilight of the Dead by Travis Adkins Undead: Skin & Bones by D.L. Snell (Editor) Roses of Blood on Barbwire Vines by D.L. […]

I’ll have to post something of a caveat up front: I’ve never read the first installment of the Morningstar Saga, Plague of the Dead. That will have to change pretty soon though, considering the quality of Thunder & Ashes.

The zombie apocalypse has come and gone, and a handful of survivors–some of them ex-military, and one a brilliant female scientist–are fighting to find a cure that will save the world. Yes, the plot isn’t exactly original, but the quality of the writing and the characters manage to elevate Thunder & Ashes above most novels that share this popular plot.

Review by Leah Clarke

EMPIRE by David Dunwoody

The outbreak began in 2007. It’s now 2112.

The crippled U.S. government is giving up its fight against an undead plague. Military forces and aid have been withdrawn from the last coastal cities, leaving those who choose to stay in the “badlands” defenseless against hordes of zombified humans and animals.

It’s been a hopeless battle from the beginning. The undead, born of an otherworldly energy fused with a deadly virus, have no natural enemies.

But they do have one supernatural enemy… Death himself.

Skin and Bones is the second installment in Permuted Press‘ series of zombie anthologies, The Undead. It’s very much a case of what you see is what you get–which, of course, isn’t necessarily a bad thing, providing you like zombies.

The anthology opens with one of the strongest tales, David Wellington’s Cyclopean. The over-used ‘zombies working 9 to 5, no one even realizes they’re zombies’ theme is employed, but only lightly. Cyclopean is a fast-paced, entertaining and original zombie tale with Lovecraftian overtones.

Review by Leah Clarke

As zombies invade a barricaded apartment building, the vampire inhabitants must protect their human livestock. Shade, the vampire monarch, defends her late father’s kingdom, but Frost, Shade’s general, convinces his brethren to migrate to an island, where they can breed and hunt humans. In their path stands a legion of corpses, just now evolving into something far more lethal, something with tentacles–and that’s just the beginning.

Join authors D.L. Snell, John Sunseri, Ryan C. Thomas, and David Dunwoody as they fire four more rounds into the growing horde of living dead.

The latest zombie collection from Permuted Press has just been released. This is the fourth volume in the Undead series. Make sure you check out Grim’s review of Flesh Feast for a peek at some of the cool stuff offered in this series.

Headshot Quartet mixes things up a bit. Fitting for volume four of the series, instead of an anthology of short stories, this book features four novellas. Four brutal, action-packed tales of zombie hordes across the world.

The subtitle of this 2007 Permuted Press offering is ‘A novel about zombies.’ This isn’t entirely true. Ross fills his days with selling bootleg horror movies, cheating on his two-timing girlfriend and hating life in general. He feels trapped in a vicious circle of uselessness.

Just as he begins to resign himself to the mid-twenties twilight he seems unable to escape, he starts to notice men in radiation suits, following him. Filming him.

Review by Leah Clarke

Twilight of the Dead now a free online read! Five years after the dead rose a small band of survivors has taken refuge in the fortified town of Eastpointe. When a newcomer arrives claiming to know the location of the antidote to the zombie plague, it sends the town into an uproar. To retrieve this […]

Flesh Feast as an anthology of zombie-oriented horror fiction, currently available from Permuted Press, the third in a series apparently. The volume is presented much in keeping with the current, and ongoing, resurgent zombie fad but isn’t truly and entirely a zombie-oriented collection. While the stories do all follow the undead theme, zombie purists (those who foam at the mouth about 28 Days Later) are going to be a little disappointed and, to be honest, they have a point. The stories that stray the most from the more classic zombie fare are the weakest.

Dying To live is not only an intricate novel, but it also makes the reader think. Paffenroth is very intelligent in the way he tells a story, especially how he uses the way people think and react to a situation to make the characters seem more real. He does this by creating Jonah Caine, and by telling his story in first-person.

The prequel to this book did itself good by creating a story that made itself stand out, but with the sequel, the book seems to jut out on the bookshelf with a bloody and violent cover, one that official says, ‘Do not be alarmed, everything is under control . . .’

Down the Road is a relatively short read, wrapping up in 168 pages or so. I read it in one day while traveling across the state of Wisconsin. The adventure George has throughout the book is a fun and scary read for anyone who enjoys zombie fiction. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the sequel.

Twilight of the Dead takes five years after the initial outbreak of the zombie plague, and it is told through the view of a young woman named Courtney. Courtney is a sad, depressed person who is depressed at the loss of her father and the fact that her life has been ruined by the dead corpses that have now taken over the world, and this is what makes Courtney such an interesting character. Unlike the big, bad guy heros of the zombie genre, Courtney is the center point of Twilight of the Dead , and this helps make the novel different from any ordinary novel.

Plague of the Dead takes another twist with the zombie genre, showing that the zombies can and cannot be dead at the same time. Z.A Recht, author of the new zombie novel Plague of the Dead brings a new twist to the genre.

Beginning with a strange, if not disturbing, email from a scientist in the army, it tells of the inevitable danger that the new and strange plague may bring. While the scientist tries to warn people about it, it doesn’t do any good, and that means that people are vulnerable. It hits our home of the United States when a medical examiner turns his back for just one moment.