The Undead Road by David Powers King is the most awesome kind of buzz that's kinda like honey for the mind.

This is the cover for David Powers King's new book, The Undead Road. It looks incredible, right? I love how there's so much yellow, because yellow isn't really used on a lot of books (to this extent). And the color choice is perfect. How do I know? Because I read the book and my review of it is below. But before I get to that, I want to inform you of all the pertinent details:

Title: The Undead Road: My Zombie Summer: Part One
Publisher: Dashboard Books / CreateSpace
Ebook Release: January 2nd, 2016
Paperback: January 26th, 2016
Cover art by Steven Novak
Edited by Reece Hanzon

I know you were waiting for the blurb so here it is:

Nothing brings the family together like a zombie apocalypse…

Fifteen-year-old Jeremy Barnes would rather watch a zombie movie than shoot a real one, but he has no choice if his family wants to survive the end of the world. Their plan? Drive across the infected United States to a cabin in the Colorado Rockies without a scratch, but their trip takes a complicated detour in the middle of Nebraska when they find Kaylynn, a girl who can handle a baseball bat better than Jeremy can hold a .45 Berretta. And when they stumble into a sanctuary, Jeremy soon learns that Kaylynn is stronger than she looks—a deadly secret lies inside her.

After the radio picks up a distress call from Kansas City about a possible cure, Jeremy’s parents go with a team to investigate. They never return. The only way to find their parents is for Jeremy and his sister Jewel to rely on a dangerous girl who might just turn on them at any moment.

Amazon
Amazon.CA
Amazon.UK
Amazon.AU
CreateSpace
Kindle Store

And then there's this "genius" quote that makes its appearance on The Undead Road:

Oh and there's a contest! Here are the details:

Visit davidpowersking.com and leave and comment and/or tweet about The Undead Road (at least once) for a chance to win a free ebook. One out of every 10 comments and tweets is a winner! Use the Twitter Button below to ensure the author will see your tweet. Thank you!

Tweet 

If the button doesn't work for you, please post this text:

"Nothing brings the family together like a #zombie #apocalypse..." #scifi #horror amzn.to/1RT8xly .99 cent #kindle! @DavidPowersKing

Now, the ebook version of The Undead Road is on sale Jan 25th-29th (that's this week) for .99 cents in the Kindle store

Oh and there's a Blog Tour! The hosts are:

Alex Cavanaugh Jan 25th

Donna Hole Jan 25th

Chemist Ken Jan 26th

Elana Johnson Jan 26th

Nick Wilford Jan 26th

Susan Gourley Jan 27th

Tara Tyler Jan 27th

Kristin Smith Jan 27th

Lidy Wilks Jan 28th

Elizabeth Seckman Jan 28th

M.J. Fifield Jan 29th

Michael de Gesu Jan 29th

About the Author: 

David Powers King was born in beautiful downtown Burbank, California where his love for film inspired him to be a writer. He is the co-author of the YA fantasy novel WOVEN, published by Scholastic. An avid fan of science fiction and fantasy, David also has a soft spot for zombies and the paranormal. He currently lives deep in the mountain West with his wife and three children.

You can click on the below links to be taken to:

Blog

Facebook

Twitter

Goodreads

Newsletter

And now, without further ado, here is my review:

There may be some light spoilers so please proceed at your own peril.

I think "The Undead Road" is a story that shows Mr. David Powers King has got the chops to be a world-class writer (as if that weren't already apparent with "Woven," the book that's being published by Scholastic). His take on zom"bees" is something I've never heard of in any zombie fiction (and I'm familiar with quite a lot of it). It almost reminds me of a cross between "The Walking Dead" and "The Borg" from Star Trek, only Kaylynn is ever so different from the Borg Queen. And it's really clever!

To be clear, I never saw any of that coming either. The whole buildup and reveal at the climax was also great. I loved the way Mr. King controlled the pacing and the tension. One example is using shorter and shorter chapters to heighten the action that's coming full force at the reader so that you don't even notice you're plowing through page after page. Fantastic! This book deserves to be made into a movie. Seriously. My take on the perfect director for this is Guillermo del Toro, but I may be biased just a wee bit.

I will never look at an apiary in the same way again. The Undead Road is the most awesome kind of buzz that's like honey for the mind.

The Woven release party was so fun I want to do it again

It's been kind of a Woven blitz on my blog lately, but I wanted to put up one more post and tell you about the Woven release party I went to on Friday evening. First off, David Powers King and his wife Joanna joined me and my friends Jake and Meg at the Paris Bistro (a French-style restaurant across the street from The King's English here in Salt Lake City).

Above is a picture of The Paris Bistro in the summertime. It's one of my favorite places to go (especially when the weather is warm) because you can sit outside, and they hire local musicians to come by and play accordion music which just kind of heightens the atmosphere of the place. David ordered a filet mignon (it was his first!) on my recommendation, and I'm glad he liked it. Then we talked lots of book stuff. At this point in my life, Mr. King is the most famous person I know, and he happens to be rather well connected with friends like James Dashner (who wrote The Maze Runner) on essentially "speed dial." I told him if he's ever hanging out with George R.R. Martin, to snap a selfie in the car and send that to me with a message: "Just me and George cruisin' around town."

Anyway, the book launch party started promptly at 7:00 p.m. and it was in the nice art gallery next to The King's English and boy did it ever fill up. Some of my pictures show empty seats, but as the speaking got underway, those quickly filled up. Here is a view of the gallery peeps:

There were also seats on one side and on the other, so this view is just of the main seating down the middle. You can see the paintings on display for the gallery in the background. Also, I bought two hardcover copies of Woven. One was for my friend Meg as a gift so that she could read it. The other is as pictured below. I did get it signed afterwards by both of the authors, and I want to say that the hardcover is much prettier than the Advanced Reader Copy. For one, it is just higher quality and for two, all the naturally occurring breaks are set off with a beautiful inscribed needle instead of bullets and the chapter heads all have swirling thread decorating the paper.

Finally, below is my picture of Michael Jensen and David Powers King. They both shared the microphone really well. Michael (who is on the right) burst into tears when he was telling his story of how difficult it was to get published. David is cool as a cucumber. Like seriously, the man probably barely lets his pulse get above 80. And David was the one who read us a few pages from the book. At the end, there were some prizes that got handed out. None of us won any, but there were some good books to be had for sure.

And I guess that's all I have to show. It was a lovely evening and there was a huge line at The King's English that wrapped all around their store and even went outside. I'm sure they sold out of all 90 of the books they had. Good thing David brought extras in his trunk. I bet they needed them. All in all, the Woven release party was so much fun I want to do it again. I guess it's a good thing there are sequels planned!

Woven by Jensen and King is the rare book that begins with a brilliant idea and ends flawlessly

Happy New Year my friends! I hope that Christmas, Thanksgiving, Hannukah, New Year's Eve, and any and all celebrations that I might have missed in my time off went well for you. As for me, I had a great Christmas. I saw Into the Woods and loved it because Meryl Streep nailed the witch role and made me think she'd be a good manager for a business run by capitalist pigs. I played plenty of games of Bananagrams and Mare Nostrum (maybe I'll blog about these later because it makes for great fun on the "cheap"). And speaking of "cheap," I don't think that authors David Powers King and Michael Jensen have anything to worry about in that respect with their book, Woven, coming out this year because it's absolutely brilliant, and if it doesn't sit at the top of the New York Times "bestseller lists" for fantasy for at least twenty weeks...I may just lose faith in the barometer of what I consider "good taste."

"Woven" in hardcover. Not every book from a Big Five publisher is graced
with a hardcover print. The fact that Woven is means that there's a big marketing
push for this book, and honestly it deserves every penny. I hope King and Jensen
become millionaires over and over. It's raining hundred dolla bills y'all!

Okay, so I've known David for quite a while now, and he sent me an arc of "Woven" in November (for the first time in my life, I actually felt like I knew somebody important--thank you, David!), and I basically read all 365 pages in three days. Woven is the kind of rare, original fantasy that I was thirsting for. In a way, I felt like a man that hasn't had a drink while attempting to cross the Sahara desert on foot and is about to collapse with exhaustion and dehydration when suddenly there's this oasis with Palm Trees and a Four Seasons hotel.

"Woven" came along at just the right time (kinda like a 90-minute massage at the Kura Door spa in Salt Lake City), it's fingers kneading my jaded temples back to life with respect to a genre that I think has grown stale with copycats and nerds who all played Dungeons & Dragons as a kid and decided they'd write stories about their characters and expect people to read about them. Woven is free of magic schools and universities! It is free of hipsters and man-scaped spornosexuals that bounce between the real world and the world where magic, fairies, and vampires are real! It's free of "fantasy bloat" (which is how I describe pretty much any of the Wheel of Time books). It's free of the narcissistic author: the writer that sets out to dazzle and horrify you with his epic-ness because no one has ever thought of anything as epic as weirdly-named epic monsters and epic labyrinths and epic seasons that last ten years and epic walls and epic power struggles and epic descriptions of food and epic battles and the epic idea that killing off beloved epic characters makes the story epic, dammit! Hell, I don't even know what "epic" means anymore since it has become as useless in describing things as the word "very."

Much like its cover, Woven is simple and that makes it beautiful. Let's look at the cover for a moment. It features a ring and a needle, both of which are important for the story. The ring is something Tyra gets from Gleesel (the coolest goat witch ever), and it isn't The One Ring. However, it does allow the wearer to distinguish between truth and lies. I'd love something like that. As for the Needle? It's a bit more on the cool side of things. It's called the Needle of Gailner, and it has the ability to alter reality in the same way that a weaver can alter a pattern on a loom.

Woven is also clever. Nels is a strapping lad that's had his "thread" woven together with that of a beautiful princess named Tyra (when they were babies). The idea of "arranged marriage" is very medieval (I didn't really like this part but understand that for the majority of history, arranged marriages are how things got done). I do like how it is essential to the story, because without it Nels would have stood no chance at all.

Because Tyra's "thread of life" was woven together with Nels, she could always find him even in death. As romantic as that seems to Notebook lovers everywhere, each possesses a personality that's like a cheese grater with respect to the other, and this is mined to great effect by the authors for comedy. As expected, circumstance (and the fact that they are both gorgeous people) pretty much ensures that they grow to love each other (which ends up being something even more powerful than the most powerful artifact in the world, a.k.a. the Needle).

The engine behind the whole story is the diabolical Rasmus who is a powerful magician bent on destroying Nels because, as Shakespeare wrote in the Merchant of Venice, "The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children." Rasmus is a well-developed villain, having been the apprentice of Ickabosh (a master fabricator/sorcerer) and a person that's willing to do anything in the grasp for power, even if it means murdering lots of people and using his magic to impersonate them once their dead.

Although I've never met Michael Jensen in person, from what I know about him, the idea of Woven's magic system came to fruition in his mind over the course of ten years. Forgive me, Mr. Jensen, if I get that wrong. But in reading this book, and thinking of the hard work both of these authors did, I can say that all that time and dedication shows in the pages. Woven is a polished jewel among books. It deserves it's Big Five publishing contract hands down, because this thing is a masterpiece. The pacing in Woven is perfect, every single character has a purpose, every place the characters journey to moves the story forward, and "fabrication" is probably the most original and elegant magic system I've encountered in books since David Eddings introduced me to the Will and the Word in the Belgariad over thirty years ago.

Woven is a book whose peers are Stardust by Neil Gaiman, the Belgariad by David Eddings, the Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny, and the Prydain chronicles by Lloyd Alexander. It's a book that can be read and enjoyed by all ages, and I hope it gets made into a big budget movie. Disney are you listening? I own your stock so making this into a movie would make us shareholders happy :).

Anyway, for clarity's sake (and for that old Amazon bone), I give Woven five stars out of five, and it's honestly one of those books that had I known something was going to be this good, I might have rated other books lower in comparison. Alas, these are the challenges in life I must face when it comes to reviewing books.

I hope you all stop by David Powers King's website, congratulate him on Woven, mark it "Want to Read" on Goodreads, buy the book when it's out, and shout out some love for #teamScholastic (they brought you such fun stories as Harry Potter and The Hunger Games and now, well...Woven). Please stop by on January 30th of this month when I'll be honored to be an official stop on the Woven blog tour! Let's hope that Mr. King and Mr. Jensen's literary agent and publicist don't mind the interview questions I sent them (and answer them) because they are some pretty good ones. But if they don't get answered, well that's what twitter (and sequels) are all about.

The Strain starts on Sunday and I'm ready to be infected

This Sunday, Guillermo del Toro's "The Strain" unleashes itself upon America. I'm super excited because uber blogging website io9 recently did an expose on how similar the scenes from the pilot are to the comic panels from Dark Horse. When you hug your source material this close to your chest, it has to be good...at least if you're a true fan. For the casual person who just happens to land on FX Sunday night by accident, all the hard work that went into the series will probably have no effect. So here are some of the panels taken from the io9 website:

So what do you think? Intriguing enough to watch? I think so.

Also, today is the day for the Woven cover reveal. Co-authors David Powers King and Michael Jensen worked together on this book, and it's being published by Scholastic. If you have the time, please click on one of the links below and go and check it out.

Michael's FB

Woven FB

David's FB

David's Blog

David's Twitter

Oculus

The Cosmic Laire of Science Fiction and Fantasy (for the record, I never noticed that "laire" could be spelled that way) tagged me with a meme. It's called "Be Inspired" and has this plain "Google-esque" (that's a word, right?) badge here. The rules are simple. Answer the questions in the meme and pass them on to five other authors. Also give thanks to the person who awarded you with the meme as well as linking back to them. Thanks David and GO VISIT HIS BLOG HERE!

1. What is the name of your book? Oculus.
2. Where did the idea for your book come from? It's a sequel to my first book, Slipstream. It came from the characters doing stuff.
3. In what genre would you classify your book? Speculative Fiction/Dark Fantasy
4. Who would you pick to play your characters in a movie adaptation? No idea at this point. Someone young, hot, and blond with like 5% body fat and sparkling blue eyes.
5. Give us a one sentence synopsis of your book? A boy with NHL dreams must kill demons slaughtering hundreds of cops in the streets of New York City following the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.
6. Is your book already published? Nope. I'm finishing up with my edits soon. I had the best editor I've ever worked with help me with my manuscript. She really was frickin' awesome.
7. How long did it take you to write this book? I started it in May 2010. So that's 2.5 years. Geez, I'm slow. In my defense, Oculus is an incredibly intricate and complex book. I think readers who liked Slipstream will see that this book definitely raises the bar. Plus I feel that my climax is really awesome, and all my beta readers seem to be blown away by it too. That makes me feel confident, because I think endings are difficult to write.
8. What other books in your genre would you compare it to? I have no idea. I'm not trying to be obtuse, because I'm well read. But I honestly have no idea. One beta-reader said it had a Harry Potter-esque feel to it because of the Cornell University setting and the sport element. But it's an adult book, darker than Slipstream, with graphic sex, extreme violence, murder, gore, and terrifying demons. I'm going to say, it would be a cross between Harry Potter and Hellraiser, if you can even imagine that.
9. Which authors inspired you to write this book? Oh, all that I've read. Seriously, every book I finish is an inspiration to pen my own story.
10. Tell us anything that might pique our interest in your book. I did a ton of research to make the places in New York featured in Oculus leap off the page. The book loops continuously on itself, referring back to earlier events, which is some of the things that I really enjoy about great books I've read. There are many, "Oh that was mentioned two chapters earlier and now it's important" moments. It's been cut and rewritten to the point that every character is necessary (and I have a lot of characters). Each one has a role to play. Each person pulls their own weight. It's gone through beta reads and two professional level edits even before sending it to the publisher. There are no unnecessary characters and events at this point. Jordan and Kathy's powers grow in unexpected and strange ways that I think will have people marveling at my unique "magic" system. I honestly think it's pretty clever, but I wrote it.

Five people I would like to tag with this meme:
Huntress
Mina Lobo
P.T. Dilloway
Alex J. Cavanaugh
M.J. Fifield

Bonus Person: Elise Fallson 'cause I must know what she's writing and you should too.

Second Bonus Person: Matthew MacNish because I beta-read Warrior Monks, and I want him to talk about it.

Since I'm talking about my writing projects in this post, I wanted to thank all the supportive people who have purchased my book. I got my royalty statement from Double Dragon Publishing for sales thru June 30th, and it was much bigger than I ever expected (DDP by the way is really professional in case you are looking for a publisher). Then following that, I got a couple of amazing emails from readers who aren't bloggers (like actual readers who aren't authors and that's all that they want to be) who raved about my book to me. That just felt good. It made all the work that I put in seem worthwhile. I guess what I'm saying is that fan mail is really frickin' awesome. Plus, I had a person request a review copy of my book. That has never happened. I've always had to pester people "Can you review my book, pretty please with sugar on top?" This person just found me and asked for it. Maybe that's how real authors feel? I dunno. But maybe they don't have to go begging at doors asking people to post reviews of their book. Anyway, it just made me feel good for a brief moment in my day, and I hope that you get that feeling all the time with your own publishing endeavors.

Have a great Thursday. I will be featuring author J.L. Campbell as part of the Distraction Tour on Friday. I will resume blogging on Tuesday (I'm taking Labor Day off, as should you).