Hey there, my
name is David Monette and I have just released the third and final book for my In the Time of the Dead Trilogy
called, The Eternal Undead. Today I’m going to discuss how and why I
came up with the type of zombies in my books.
To start with,
let’s look at the way that zombification typically occurs in today’s zombie
tales. For the most part, this happens by way of a virus, bacteria, fungus, or
radiation somehow infecting corpses or living people. This then somehow turns
them into either zombies or zombie-like sick people. We all know the way this
goes. Now, don’t get me wrong, this angle is interesting and fun. But frankly I
felt like it was pretty played out, not to mention (in the case of any of these
methods causing actual dead people to move around) physiologically impossible.
So what to do?
Well, there is another way. To find it, I went back to some of my first
memories, my first associations with zombies, back to when I was a kid playing
Dungeons and Dragons with my friends and we had that old Basic Rules Set open
before us (you know the one; red cover, stylized image of a water dragon
fighting a couple of adventurers, and that funky TSR logo right in the bottom
corner). At that time, when zombies would attack our group of characters, there
was never a thought about how they came to be. It was taken for granted that
some evil creature, some being with godlike powers, maybe even a god itself, had
granted its chosen followers, its necromancers, the ability to raise the dead.
How perfect. How
different from the common fare of zombification treatments.
In one swoop,
this explanation disregards any qualms one might have about the biological
feasibility of a nasty bug somehow reanimating dead flesh and granting it the
will to move around. And that was my starting point, that kernel of an idea. I
took it, and I ran with it, or in this case, wrote. If you have a chance, pick
up my books and give them a read… see if I succeeded.
The Eternal Undead
In the Time of the Dead
Book III
David Monette
Genre: Horror, Urban Fantasy
Publisher: Severed Press
Date of Publication: October 1, 2015
ASIN- B015NY9J4A
ISBN- 978-1-925342-53-6
ISBN- 978-1-925342-53-6
Number of pages: 280
Word Count: 100,579
Cover Artist: David Monette
Book Description:
They thought they had escaped.
The battle for Washington DC is behind them, and the last remnants of the human race have fled from their undead enemies to a remote Caribbean island where they try to salvage what is left of humanity. But even here, the zombies have come. Led by the architect of the holocaust, an invading army wreaks havoc trying to acquire the one thing that can stop them, and the one thing a small contingent of soldiers knows they must never get.
Join with Sasha, Terrance, Virgil, and the little girl, Max, in an all or nothing gamble as they fight down the road to either salvation or horrible defeat in the thrilling conclusion of this series.
Available at Amazon
Excerpt:
As the day
slipped away far off to the west, the darkness of the jungle became a living
thing. Knit together by the slow creep of lengthening shadows, it grew by
degrees into a massive being, shapeless and black. For nourishment it ate the
weak or the unlucky. In return it exhaled moist heat and a cavalcade of sound,
the sound of thousands of separate voices, large and small, all coming together
to meet the ear in a constant sheet of noise. Those who were responsible for
the making of this chaotic ballad were invisible to the naked eye of man. This
was so not just because of the darkness, but because most of the performers—the
frogs, birds, and insects—were hidden within the surrounding vegetation,
frightened of being killed by their neighbors, either eaten, or as was the case
with the troop of humans quietly slipping along a trail, flattened under a
boot.
For one of the
six members of this troop of humans, such an act would have been celebrated
with a certain degree of relish. Terrance hated the sound of the jungle at
night. There were not many things in his life that he gave away for free, but
in his hatred he was quite generous. He hated the bleats, the croaks and hoots,
and he hated the creatures that made the noise.
He hated the darkness and the fact that he had to wear a pair of thermal
goggles to plumb its depths. He hated the heat, and the plants, and the bugs.
He hated the head-to-toe leather suit he wore… and most of all he hated the
reason he had to wear the suit, the reason he was out in the jungle at night in
the first place. He hated the zombies. Or more accurately, he feared the
zombies and he hated them for that fear.
His terror of
these beasts was not unfounded. Since the first day of the apocalypse when a
host of diabolical necromancers eradicated most of the human population on
earth and then raised the dead as zombies, the resulting creatures could, with
a single bite, turn any living person into one of them. Terrance had seen it
done before. It was not pretty. The resilient leather he wore formed a fairly
reliable barrier between a bite and death, so day or night, no matter how hot
it was, whenever he or anyone else left the barricades surrounding the city of
St George’s on a patrol, they wore the protective clothing. The safety it
provided far outweighed the bladders of water they needed to carry or the
periodic “cool downs” they had to perform while nestled in the boughs of a
tree.
Either way,
Terrance hated it all.
In fact, he was
so busy nursing his various hatreds that he barely noticed when Danger, the
woman on point, suddenly raised her fist head-high and froze.
The fire team
immediately came to a stop.
Terrance’s
finger slipped from outside the trigger guard of his MP5SD sub-machinegun to curl
around the curve of the trigger. The contact made him feel safer, more in
control.
Around the task
force the sound of the jungle withered and slowly died.
The point person
opened her fist, laid the flat palm parallel to the ground, and took a knee.
Seeing this,
Lieutenant Burgis, the officer in command, looked back and motioned those
behind to follow suit.
They crouched
and in the dark waited.
There was
something out there.
About the Author:
David Monette was born and raised in the cold rural hinterlands of upstate New York. As a typical kid in a typical community, life for him was pretty... typical. He liked to draw creatures and contraptions but as the second born of four sons, such ability was merely a convenient way of standing out from the crowd. As he inexpertly stumbled through high school, his talent for capturing the images in his head onto paper was noticed and encouraged by both teachers and family members.
Without any other idea of what to do with himself after graduation, besides a vague idea of doing something art oriented, he decided to attend Mohawk Valley Community College where he received his associate's degree in Advertising Design and Production. Acting on excellent advice from his teachers at this institution, he went on to Syracuse University where he learned a great deal about art and eventually wound up with a bachelor's degree in Illustration.
With a disturbingly large amount of student debt and a decent portfolio, he learned what it was to be a starving artist. Namely, he found that artists don't starve; they simply pick up an endless series of part time work to pay the rent while continuing to plug away at their true passion. This was essentially what he did until he received his first illustration job and from that point on, he didn't look back. As an illustrator, his highly detailed fantasy and science fiction work has appeared in many books, magazines, board games, and collectible card games for such varied publishers as Dell Publishing, Wizards of the Coast, and Atlas Games. Initially, he had completed these diverse projects utilizing oil and acrylic paints as well as pen and inks.
As digital technology continued to improve, however, he decided it was time to tackle the arduous task of mastering the computer and eventually figured out a way to adapt his style to a digital format. With this knowledge and experience, he went back to school and received his master's degree in Illustration from the University of Hartford. While there, his instructors reviewed his written work and had strongly suggested that he combine his writing ability with his talent as an illustrator to chart his own path.
And hence, an author was born.
Facebook Author Page: https://www.facebook.com/davidmonetteauthor
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PaintWriteDave
Goodreads Author Page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7334521.David_Monette
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmonette
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