Worse that his bite?

Okay, okay, so that's a really labored pun, but it is a good way of making you aware of a couple of interviews with the supremely talented Mr Jasper Barke, author of Tomes of The Dead: The Way of The Barefoot Zombie, The Afterblight Chronicles: Dawn over Doomsday and Sniper Elite: Spear of Destiny.

Check out what Jasper has to say on Horror Re-animated and Dark Markets and then go buy his books!

Jon

Gods of Manhattan

“You’re in New York. Protocol went out the window the second you arrived.
This isn’t a protocol kind of town.
This is a town that breeds monsters and heroes, geniuses and madmen.
This town makes gods, and heaven help you, you wanted to be one of us.”

I've just finished editing Gods of Manhattan. I'm rather sad that I've finished, I had so much fun editing it, but hey, I can console myself with the fact that, very soon, our readers will get to enjoy it! It'll be out in shops at the end of July.

Book reviewers, bloggers, friends, (Romans, countrymen) and other editors who're on my personal Twitter and Facebook feeds will know that, while editing, I just Could Not Shut Up about how good this book was. I kept on quoting from particularly brilliant passages, telling people much fun it was, even declaring myself Queen of the Leopard Men at one point, after the fantastically pulpy character, Maya, Queen of Zor-Ek-Narr and girlfriend of the superhero Doc Thunder.

Well, just one blogpost about it, and then I'll find something else to talk about, I promise...

Maya frowned at Doc Thunder, irritated.
“You were flirting with her, weren’t you?”
“I wasn’t flirting, she’s an evil–”
“Oh, please! Like she’s not your type! Chain you to a dungeon wall and you’re anybody’s, I should know. Let me guess – did you tell her that beneath her iridescent beauty her evil shone cold and hard as a diamond?”
“Well, I didn’t say that exactly…”

Gods of Manhattan is set in Jon Green's steampunk universe, an alternative 20th Century where Britannia never did stop ruling the waves, and where Queen Victoria is still kept 'alive' by steam technology: our Pax Britannia line of novels. However, whereas Green's books focus on Ulysses Quicksilver, the most dashing secret agent the British Empire has ever employed, Gods of Manhattan takes us over the pond, to the good ol’ United Socialist States of America (By the way, you certainly don't have to have read the Ulysses Quicksilver novels to enjoy Gods of Manhattan, but they are very good).

NEW YORK, USSA - The steam-powered city of tomorrow where psychedelic beat-poets rumble with punk futurists in the rain-drenched alleys, and where mad science colludes with the monstrous plans of the Meccha-Fuhrer!
NEW YORK, USSA - City of dazzle and danger. Only here could we find The Blood Spider, Doc Thunder and the saint of ghosts known as El Sombra!
NEW YORK, USSA - The setting for a bloody battle of steel will and science gone wild in a contest to save the city of tomorrow - or end it!

If you like superhero comics and secret identities – and you love stories like Watchmen and Astro City that play with the genre – you'll want to read this book.

If you like steampunk and alternate histories, if you want a writer who's really thought about what steampunk and alternate histories actually mean, you'll love it.

If you want a story about heroes wrestling with human and superhuman problems, about what happens when characters' moral codes collide, about being on the right side of the wrong side of the law, you'll love this book.

And if you just want a story about some guys and gals beating up Nazis who really, really deserve it, this is also your book.

Doc Thunder says all true patriots will read this book. And you wouldn't want to make him mad, would you?

[click picture for larger, high-def version]

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Aggressive Archaeology

Oh! Forgot to mention, Mike Wild has a blog now! Glad to see you've caught up with the rest of us, Mike. ;-)

http://www.mikewild.blogspot.com/

Mike Wild is the author of the Kali Hooper novels for Abaddon Books, an arc in our Twilight of Kerberos fantasy series.

I was filling in keywords for Amazon the other day, and one fo the ones I typed for Kali Hooper was 'aggressive archaeology.' I think it fits. She's a bit like Indiana Jones or Tomb Raider, except she'd kick Lara Croft's ass any day, and still have time to whisk Indy away for a dirty weekend...


You know she would.

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BRAAAINS.

Go tell Pornokitsch about your favourite zombie for a chance to win shiny new first editions of Ryan Brown's Play Dead, Weston Ochse's Empire of Salt and a signed copy of Rebecca Levene's Anno Mortis. Competition is here.

Me? My favourite zombie is either Bub the Zombie from Romero's Day of the Dead, or Zombo from 2000 AD's Zombo comics, or maybe the talking zombie head of Deadpool in the Marvel Zombies comics and beyond. Let's face it, I really can't decide on just one!

Speaking of Empire of Salt, Weston pointed me to a nice little review of it here, by San Diego bookshop Mysterious Galaxy. The reviewer warns us: Cheer all you want for the heroes, but reader be warned, there are many twists and turns that will leave you laughing, crying, screaming in rage, and hoping against hope that someone comes out of this alive. You won't put it down until it's over.

By the way, 2000 AD's wise-cracking Zombo was created by Abaddon Books author Al Ewing! I've just finished editing his latest work for Abaddon, Gods of Manhattan, so stay tuned here for a post all about it...

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"Real Gamer Girl" Reviews Tomes of the Dead

Hi all,

Bit of a backstory to this one. A young lady from over the pond called "Zephri" (real name Cassie) somehow managed to get the attention of a couple of gaming websites called Bell of Lost Souls and Chainfist, who breathlessly reported the existence of an actual girl who plays games, and interviewed her for the sites. You can read the interview starting here.

Now you may well be thinking "so what?" and I gather Cassie would agree with you. We're not quite sure why this was considered as desperately newsworthy as all that, but it did manage to get her blog a massive boost in readership and a flurry of comments, and made her that most fleeting of things, an internet celebrity.

Anyway.

I come into this when trawling the internet for zombies (professionally, of course; I love my job) and I trip over Cassie's post "I ♥ Zombies," in which she tells of her disappointment upon reading a zombie romance anthology (from a rival publisher, natch), professes her deep passion for the zombie genre and complains at the lack of good genre fic.

What ho, think I, we've done a zombie romance novel and it was brilliant. I bet she'd enjoy that. And I start drafting a comment on her blog nudging her in our website's direction, when I see how many comments she's getting and read her subsequent post about her newfound fame. So I figure she's an opinion-former now and send her comps of four of our zombie books.

Anyway, that was a few months back and I gather she's been very busy and has had a computer failure to boot, but she's finally posted this review for us, sharing her thoughts on Gary McMahon's Hungry Hearts ("this book gives you everything you'd expect from a zombie romance novel and then some") and Al Ewing's I, Zombie ("I can't really describe this book without "WTF?!").

But I particularly wanted to share this quote:

"[I, Zombie] gives you a seemingly simple concept, a sentient zombie that works as a mercenary/detective, but that concept is but the candle on top of a giant cake that secretly holds a really hot stripper, and she jumps out with the keys to a Ferrari then you all go out for ice cream and puppies. Then your head explodes."

By an astonishing coincidence, that actually happened to Al once. Tragically the puppies tasted dreadful and the ice cream melted in its basket.

So go swing by her blog and check it out.

Cheers,

David

Interview with Jon on The Literary Project

Hey all,

Okay, slightly late bringing this one to your attention, but Gemma Noon at The Literary Project has interviewed our loving dictator boss, Jon!

Read it here.

"We publish good fun, action-oriented genre fiction."

Cheers,

David

Zombies and other stuff...

Two things to blog about today, one, Weston Ochse reports queues out the shop doors on his booksigning tour in Arizona promoting his epic zombie novel Empire of Salt, and sent us some photos to share. (Too bad you didn't take photos of the queues Weston, we're not sure we believe you! Just kidding...)

And secondly, Scott Andrews has done a brief interview here at Pornokitsch about the conclusion to his apocalyptic St. Mark's School trilogy, Children's Crusade, which came out last month.

Also, because it's a bloody fantastic question, I'm going to steal one of Pornokitsch's interview questions and put it to you, dear readers... but you'll have to read the interview to hear Scott's answer!

Zombies attack. You can have one weapon, one sidekick and one song for your zombie-slaying soundtrack. Go...


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