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Last Chance for WEIRD Things

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Remember last week when I told you about the Apocalypse Weird fund raiser?

Of course you do. You came here and read about it. Maybe you even clicked on the campaign link and donated. And you did these things because you care about brave new ideas in the world of fiction and about my willingness to be part of it.

So here we are, with 13 hours to go before Indiegogo closes the campaign, tallies up the numbers and your change to be part of something new and awesome disappears.

But . . .

If the campaign makes its goal, then Indiegogo will keep the clock running. That’s added time to donate in exchange for outstanding perks, a heartfelt “Thank you!”, and maybe some mention of the project and books to friends who like to read books about the world ending in wacky and outlandish ways.

So this is it, The Big Push. As I write this the campaign is 66% funded. Another $3,421 puts us over the edge and allows the process to continue, giving you access to perks long after the clock stops as well as many more months of outstanding books.

But for now, the clock is ticking . . .

 

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Donation Clock of Doom Awaits!

 

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You Can Have WEIRD Things

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(I know, I owe you a post about imagining the “death of the library.” But this is a big deal.)

I recently got into a Facebook thread with a former (now grown up) student over e-book pricing decisions. She’s an avid reader but refuses to buy any e-book that’s more than a dollar or two in price. It was nothing against the authors, or the books themselves, she explained. She just didn’t see why she should ever pay more than that for a book. Neither did her friends.

It’s a fair point, especially if all you’ve ever known about the experience of acquiring books is looking at price lists on Amazon and clicking a button. From the producer’s side of the transaction, it’s more complicated.

There’s the author, who creates a labor of love until the minute someone decides to click that yellow button that says “Buy”. There’s the editor, who toils over the manuscript to make it readable. Some editors will carve out whole chunks of text to achieve that, others will simply correct the grammar, spacing, and spelling, but the effort is the same.

There is the cover artist who brings a point of story from inside the pages of the manuscript into blazing life.

The point, as Kevin G. Summers makes clear here, is that books cost money to make. Considerable amounts of money. In the case of indie publishing, everyone except the author makes money, at least until he or she sells enough copies to recover the costs of the book in question. Speaking as someone who has just started down this road, it’s a steep learning curve.

Indy authors Nick Cole and Michael Bunker, and ThirdScribe creator Rob McClellan have made a thing, called Apocalypse Weird. I’ve mentioned it on Facebook and Twitter, and I’ve reviewed a bunch of the books they’ve released.

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To be blunt, they need money to keep the ball rolling, and have built an Indiegogo project to raise it. Three greats ways of donating stand out:

First, just drop a buck into the bucket. It makes no dent in your budget and still helps us out.

Second, you can drop a fiver into the bucket and get a neat perk.

Third–and my favorite option–$20 buys you the first eight AW novels, which have been getting rave reviews across the board for months. Or, for the same $20, you can pre-order the next eight AW novels in the series, which are sure to be every bit as good.

Sixteen outstanding works of End of the World fiction for $40. It doesn’t get better than that.

Actually–it does get better. There are plenty of awesome perks to choose from. But, the sale ends in 8 days, so check out the fund raiser to donate now!

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Reader Advisory: AW: Genesis

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Everyone remembers the day they truly became an adult; some call it the best day of their lives while others think of it as the worst. Kasey Byrne will never make that choice, because it’s just been taken away from her. Her old life has ended along with her world. What remains is an existential comment on the details; her memories, her regrets, her dashed hopes for the future, and the insanely deadly situation which she now navigates on a one way trip to the End of the World.

As the book opens, eight-year-old Kasey is playing on the beach when a stranger hands her an amulet, insisting that he’s sorry. For all the fuss her Mom makes of the encounter, Kasey feels safe when wearing the device, embossed with the figure of a white dragon.

Ten years later, she’s living the life of a million other Long Island girls her age: school is done, and summer approaches. She baby-sits her neighbors’ kids for cash. She has friends, a decent home life, a new car (a birthday present from her Dad to compensate for a bitter divorce), plenty of time to go surfing on the South Shore, and a boy who is interested in her.

All that comes to a screeching halt after she wakes to find thousands of dolphins in the process of beaching themselves, in obvious terror from something looming on the horizon.

That thing is, of course, the Apocalypse, embodied in this case by the Blood Riders and Red Ship minions which hold the people of Babylon, New York, in their bloody grip. Kasey must find other survivors as she and Jack (the boy mentioned previously) weather the death of her mother and murder of the police who answered the call; the kidnapping of Jack and Kasey’s long, hard journey to retrieve him.

She picks up valuable help in her travels: Jennifer Wang, an ex-Marine M.D., Blair, just a professional guy trying to keep it together in the face of his wife’s death, and Aarika, the extremely practical, forward-thinking Indian kid who ran his uncle’s gas station until all hell broke loose.

All this leads to Douglas, the man who gave Kasey the amulet ten years ago. And he is the only one who can train her to weather the rigors to come as the world teeters and tips into oblivion.

Stefan Bolz has given us what he describes as a “very personal” story. It’s a poetic tale that draws readers in by dangling the myth of childhood as an idyllic, perfect, blissful state of being before us, and shatters it (and his characters) by smashing the mythology against the ugly, harsh face of disaster.

Suitable both for adult and YA audiences, my only complaint about Genesis is that the book ends on a cliff hanger: with Kasey taking a literal leap of faith in order to learn what she needs to harness the power of the White Dragon and save the world.

But that’s another (eagerly awaited) book.

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Reader Advisory: AW: Medium Talent

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Confession time: I just finished Forbes West’s addition to the AW universe, Medium Talent, and oh, does my head hurt. West has a Hemmingway thing going on, and it’s grizzly, ugly, and stressful to read. Forget the facts, the iceberg theory of writing, the Kilimanjaro stuff, or the Spanish civil war. Hell, forget about the old guy alone in the cabin with the shotgun on his lap. Forget all that, because if you don’t, you head will hurt, too.

Medium Talent is the tale of Key West survivors of a world-spanning hurricane three years earlier; the Supply Org (the AW version of FEMA) is the last bit of government around, which gives aid and comfort to the fortress fleet of the rich and powerful, while the denizens of the Florida Keys and most other places scratch what they can out of crappy local economies. Danger is ever present: if it’s not the Supply Org shaking you down, it’s the playboys on their armored yachts, or the sea monsters, or the zombies, or local thugs, or even the infected who are warehoused in the Depository.

Into this sub-tropical hell hole we meet Wendy Wicker, captain of the Medium Talent, who presents herself as a smuggler, artist, wife, adopted mother, and incredibly violent borderline sociopath. Somehow she is all these things, and yet, truly none of them. Trying to give you a linear picture of this distinctly non-linear world and story would be a hopeless gesture, but I can tell you the Wendy is far more complicated than she seems, she does meet Hemmingway back in 1934 Key West, and deep down she really does want to save the world. Or at least her little corner of it.

Anyway, the Hemmingway thing has its advantages; it creates a fascinating thread through a rollicking world that alternately confuses and makes perfect sense. It gets weird, but that’s sort of the name of the game, isn’t it?

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Reader’s Advisory: AW: Phoenix Lights

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Ezra Pound famously told writers to “make it new” even while others told them there was nothing new under the sun. Eric Tozzi has managed to do both with the latest addition to the Apocalypse Weird universe, the novel Phoenix Lights.

The title of the book is taken from the 1997 UFO sighting over Phoenix, Arizona and Tozzi uses this background as a springboard for his own world-shattering rendition of an alien invasion. In the text, super-secret lab resident Gage Slater is at odds with his sister, Kris, who deals with an apparent alien abduction by creating a UFO Busters show. In search of what? We don’t know–and neither does Kris or her crew, really–but in the end it doesn’t matter, as the aliens arrives in a massive city-sized ship and find them (and everyone else) first.

Gage and Kris re-connect in the ruins of Sedona, Arizona as they come across a blind musician named April Vargas, who has her own past and problems: in a world of literal blindness, she is able to see for the first time in her life, for a limited time. A much worse problem arives in the form of Vincent, who clearly knows more than he’s saying and has no one’s best interests at heart except his own.

Tozzi has set up a unique sandbox for the AW setting. Even though we get the standard setup of 88, Black Hand minions, and a band of survivors braving the end of everything, the story never seems hackneyed nor the events unnecessary. The action pulls us along on a road trip from hell and never lets up as we find out more about the aliens’ objectives and their reasons for arriving. There’s just enough real life setting to make the wackier potions of the drama seem like they could be possible, which is what good fiction does.

Bottom line is that Tozzi knows how to tell a good story and this book is too darned short. I’m waiting for his next installment and I’m curious to see if anyone will pick up the mantle of a second tier book in this particular setting. (We can hope.) In the meantime, we can buy this book and tell others about it. It’s that good.

 

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Reader Advisory: AW: The Dark Knight

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There are many things that annoy me as a reader. Authors who insert horrific scenes about the abuse of children or animals as a quick way to move the plot forward is one of them. Nick Cole, however is not one of those authors, and his latest contribution to the Apocalypse Weird universe is proof of that.

AW: The Dark Night is Cole’s second solo AW book, which immediately follows the action in AW: The Red King. In AW: TRK we read about the fall of civilization in southern California. About Holiday, a depressed drunk with repressed memories of boot camp; about Ash, a Spetznaz trained M.D. with a heart of gold; about Frank, an older guy with a taste for fine Italian cuisine and disturbing marksmanship skills; Ritter, a skinny white guy who badly wants to be a gangsta; and Braddock, a special forces soldier with orders to revenge the U.S. government against its enemies, “whatever it takes.” Over the course of the book, these folks learn to deal with the appearance of zombies, the breakdown of civilization, and the secrets that they dole out with eyedroppers to each other.

In this follow-up novel, we see that Frank, Ash, Ritter and a few others have built themselves a fortress out of the remains of their suburban housing complex, no thanks to Holiday who nearly got them all overrun in the previous book. In a self-conscious attempt to get back into Frank and Ash’s good graces, Holiday comes upon the idea of surrounding the complex with shipping containers. It works well enough to impress the others but Frank and Ash are not so easily placated.

Into this environment comes Cory, a special needs teen who has lost the only world he’s known and is not well adapted to the one he finds himself in. He has one survival technique which is adapted for the new world: he puts on a cape and gloves and mask and becomes Batman. Batman can go out at night. Batman can defend himself against the undead hordes (“stranger danger” in Cory-speak) and Batman is never scared, even as Cory is quaking in his shoes.

Batman gets Cory through the ruined landscape one step at a time: from the house where he hides with the sitter to the local pharmacy, to escaping with Heather the stock girl, to accidentally plunging into a horrific blasted wasteland populated by killer robots and malevolent computers, to his own shattered world of zombies, to the suburban castle where he finally finds refuge.

Frankly, the only way you can not be sick with worry over Cory’s plight is if you either A) have no heart, or B) have been dead for six weeks. And this gets to what I wrote about earlier: there is no sign of cheap emotional manipulation by Cole at any point in the narrative. He writes succinctly, getting deep into Cory’s head, letting us experience where the boy is coming from on every step of his adventure and it never feels overdone or sentimental. It is merely authentic story telling.

Just about the only thing I didn’t like about this book was that it was over way too soon. But that’s fine, because Wonderment Media has a lot more material in the pipe and it’s a very big world.

Reader Advisory: Reversal

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Have you ever had one of those days where things go wrong, and then instead of straightening out, they just  go wronger and wronger until everything you know is just completely screwed up? Sasha has one of those. She’s the heroine in Reversal, Jennifer Ellis’s contribution to the Apocalypse Weird universe. And boy, does she have problems.

Sasha Wood, a twenty-something meteorologist, has just landed her dream job as a research assistant at the International Polar Research Station. There are the usual pitfalls of dealing with new situations: co-workers who run the gamut from friendly to hostile, the painful isolation of living at the top of the world, and the weird fact that climate change seems to be, well, reversing itself. Her workplace crush on Soren Anderson, the station’s caretaker and survival expert, does not help. But after six months of dealing with the hostile environment, she feels that she’s managed well enough.

Then the arctic literally explodes as meteors rain down, blasting open methane pockets in the permafrost. Planes streak overhead to crash into nearby mountains while an apparently worldwide episode of mass blindness causes panic all over the globe and wreaks havoc inside the research station. Sasha and her co-workers manage to cope in the face of ice storms, but at the loss of half her team to the elements. As if that’s not enough, there are strange fog banks rising up from the methane craters which twist time and space to create passageways between the arctic and antarctic circles. To add to the fun, the magnetic poles are wonky, all communications with the outside world are down, and the only voice Sasha can get on the radio is a crazy woman who chatters about the imminent arrival of The Dragon. We won’t even discuss the supposedly dead volcano that’s violently erupting in the south pole.

If all this sounds confusing, it’s because confusion is the name of the game in Reversal. Jennifer Ellis has created a scenario that manages to be both claustrophobic and agoraphobic simultaneously. As we follow Sasha through her attempts to make sense of what’s going on around her, Ellis gives us small pieces of a massive puzzle one by one and trusts her readers to put them together in their heads. Some of Sasha’s co-workers are Black Hands either by design or last minute recruitment, and allies and enemies appear from the wastelands and disappear right back into them. (The penguins are relatively benign but the polar bears are literally out for blood.) There is one fixed point in the narrative: when the member of the 88 who goes by the name “Paul” (short for “Pollution”) lets her know that the world is ending and she has a chance to work for him. She refuses and navigates Hell on Ice in an attempt to save her life and Soren’s. As Ellis describes it, think The Thing meets The Core.

There are times when the narrative bogs down between the snowmobile chases and the blind treks through ice blizzards, especially as we’re constantly trying to figure who is working for which side (and I would have liked more polar bears). There are a few details that never get resolved–is the Dragon real or not, and where the heck is he, was one of my personal nitpicks–but the final result is a thoroughly enjoyable romp through Ellis’s environmental nightmares.

 

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The Apocalypse Arrives and It’s Weird

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Today sees the launch of an ambitious new series from Nick Cole  and Michael Bunker, titled Apocalypse Weird. The concept is simple: the end of the world is very f-ing nigh and you have front row seats. Five novels drop today and join The Red King, Cole’s previously released work in this ‘verse: The Dark Knight by Nick Cole; Reversal, by Jennifer Ellis; The Serenity Strain by Chris Pourteau; Immunity, by E. E. Giorgi; and Texocalypse Now by Nick Cole and Michael Bunker.

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While shared universe series aren’t new (remember Bill Fawcett’s The Fleet? How about David Drake’s Crisis of Empire?), what makes the AW ‘verse unique is the fact that Cole and Bunker have  partnered with Rob McClellan’s ThirdScribe outfit to open the field to any and all contributors. So-called “Tier 3” authors are considered purveyors of AW fanfic. The stories are non-canonical, but they are also open to anyone who wants to publish them using the ThirdScribe platform. Readers vote on their favorite stories and well-received contributions get both the attention they deserve and perhaps a bit more.

The rules of the series are straightforward: in the not-too-distant-future (or past) a demonic mafia known as “The 88” have decided that they can’t sit around waiting for mankind to doom itself forever. Their solution: give homo sapiens a big push into the abyss. Their foot soldiers in this work are human servants known as “The Black Hand.” As civilization crashes and burns, individual actors, perpetrators, and survivors share talents, stories, actions, and supplies to manage their own little corners of the devastation. It’s up to each author to mix and match the mayhem according to his or her tastes and writing style. The results are brilliant, fresh, and exciting.

I’ve read Reversal and The Dark Night, and I’ll be posting reviews of those later today. But all five books are now up for grabs (and linked above). If what I’ve seen so far is any indication, this is the best apocalypse to come along in years.

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