Happy Release: Resurrect by Amy Miles

Resurrect
The Withered Book 2
by Amy Miles
-Horror Post Apocalyptic
Release Date: November 1, 2016
Amazon | Goodreads
iBooks | BN | Smashwords | Kobo
Nearly two months after having endured a military kidnapping, brutal gang attacks and the death of the only man she had ever loved, Avery Whitlock believed she could survive anything. At least she did until she crossed the Tennessee border and straight into hostile territory. Hunted by a ravenous pack of mutated Withered, she stumbled right into the military’s crosshairs and imprisonment.

Concealed within the ruins of the once Grand Ole Opry Hotel, Avery discovered a group of survivors protected by high walls of debris and ample firepower, but she quickly began to suspect that the real threat wouldn’t come from the outside, but from within their own ranks. When a perimeter breach forces Avery to risk it all to save innocent lives, she will find herself flirting with death and the horrific truth of how the Withered came into being.

Evolution couldn’t be stopped...especially when it was genetically engineered.

About the author:

Author Amy Miles has always been a bit of a dreamer. Growing up as an only child, and a military brat to boot, she spent countless hoursescaping into the pages of a book, only to spend the following days creating a new idea of how to twist up the story to make it unique.

Since becoming a mother, Amy has slowly nourished her love of the written word while snatching writing time in the midst of soiled diapers, tumbling over legos and peering around mounds of laundry and dishes that never seem to go away. Once her only son started school, Amy was free to let her fingers dive into dark mythology, tales of betrayal and love, and explore human nature in its rawest form. Her love of seeing the world from a different angle bloomed.

Amy is the author of several novels, including her popular young adult immortal books, The Arotas Series, which are an Amazon and iBooks bestselling series. Unwilling to be defined by any one genre, she proceeded to flip over to a science fiction/fantasy based idea with her Rising Trilogy. She then dove into contemporary romance with her novel, Captivate and explored the depths of her own faith with In Your Embrace.

She is currently working on completing her Immortal Rose trilogy, a prequel to her Arotas novels. She has also embarked on two new journeys this year, one in the form of a co-written banshee trilogy, The Hallowed Realms, which is currently represented by GH Literary.

Find out more about this book and author:
Amazon
Goodreads
BookExcerpt
Website
Blog
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter @AmyMilesBooks

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* heads up courtesy of Red Coat PR

Happy re-Release: Wither by Amy Miles

Wither
The Withered Book 1
by Amy Miles
-Horror, Post Apocalyptic
Amazon | iBooks | B&N | Smashwords | Goodreads
After an epidemic swept across America like a biblical plague, the government leapt into the fray with the release of a new vaccine—but what was meant to bring salvation to the survivors instead brought damnation. Mutations began within days of the drug’s release and the Withered Ones were born—those neither alive nor dead. They walked the streets, unblinking and unaware. And they were starting to evolve.

Growing up on the streets taught Avery Whitlock how to care for herself, but nothing could have prepared her for the outbreak of deadly gangs, a corrupt government bent on using her blood for experiments and the depths to which desperate people would go to survive. She soon discovered that it was not the Withered Ones that she needed to fear, but those still human. The ones who knew how to put a gun to her head when they wanted something from her.

Avery will be forced to decide how far she would will go to survive just one more day.

About the author:

Author Amy Miles has always been a bit of a dreamer. Growing up as an only child, and a military brat to boot, she spent countless hours escaping into the pages of a book, only to spend the following days creating a new idea of how to twist up the story to make it unique.

Since becoming a mother, Amy has slowly nourished her love of the written word while snatching writing time in the midst of soiled diapers, tumbling over legos and peering around mounds of laundry and dishes that never seem to go away. Once her only son started school, Amy was free to let her fingers dive into dark mythology, tales of betrayal and love, and explore human nature in its rawest form. Her love of seeing the world from a different angle bloomed.

Amy is the author of several novels, including her popular young adult immortal books, The Arotas Series, which are an Amazon and iBooks bestselling series. Unwilling to be defined by any one genre, she proceeded to flip over to a science fiction/fantasy based idea with her Rising Trilogy. She then dove into contemporary romance with her novel, Captivate and explored the depths of her own faith with In Your Embrace.

She is currently working on completing her Immortal Rose trilogy, a prequel to her Arotas novels. She has also embarked on two new journeys this year, one in the form of a co-written banshee trilogy, The Hallowed Realms, which is currently represented by GH Literary and she breached another genre with her upcoming adult horror novel, Wither.

Find out more about this book and author:
BookExcerpt
Website
Blog
Facebook
Twitter @Amy Miles

PeekAbook:



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* heads up courtesy of Red Coat PR

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

Zone One
by Colson Whitehead

Find out more about this book and author:
Amazon
Goodreads
BookExcerpt
Website
Movies that inspired book
Twitter @colsonwhitehead

Published: 2011
Publisher: Doubleday
Genre: Post-apocalypse, Zombies
Hardback: 272 pages
Rating: 5

First sentence(s):
He always wanted to live in New York.

In this wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel, a pandemic has devastated the planet. The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead.

Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuild­ing civilization under orders from the provisional govern­ment based in Buffalo. Their top mission: the resettlement of Manhattan. Armed forces have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street—aka Zone One—but pockets of plague-ridden squatters remain. While the army has eliminated the most dangerous of the infected, teams of civilian volunteers are tasked with clearing out a more innocuous variety—the “malfunctioning” stragglers, who exist in a catatonic state, transfixed by their former lives.

Mark Spitz is a member of one of the civilian teams work­ing in lower Manhattan. Alternating between flashbacks of Spitz’s desperate fight for survival during the worst of the outbreak and his present narrative, the novel unfolds over three surreal days, as it depicts the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, and the impossible job of coming to grips with the fallen world.

And then things start to go wrong.

Both spine chilling and playfully cerebral, Zone One bril­liantly subverts the genre’s conventions and deconstructs the zombie myth for the twenty-first century.

My two-bits:

Another smart zombie book where the focus is more on a look at society than a zombie food fest.

As the main character, Mark Spitz, travels through Zone One he tells us stories of what once was and of its people providing a history of modern day society.

Got me thinking of survival and hope for the future.

~*~
* part of zombie month (schedule)

The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey

The Girl With All the Gifts
by M.R. Carey

Find out more about this book and author:
Amazon
Goodreads
Website
Twitter @michaelcarey191

Published: 2014
Publisher: Orbit
Genre: Post-apocalypse, Zombies
Hardback: 416 pages
Rating: 5

First sentence(s):
Her name is Melanie. It means "the black girl", from an ancient Greek word, but her skin is actually very fair so she thinks maybe it's not such a good name for her.

Melanie is a very special girl. Dr. Caldwell calls her "our little genius."

Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant Parks keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don't like her. She jokes that she won't bite, but they don't laugh.

Melanie loves school. She loves learning about spelling and sums and the world outside the classroom and the children's cells. She tells her favorite teacher all the things she'll do when she grows up. Melanie doesn't know why this makes Miss Justineau look sad.

My two-bits:

This is one of those smart zombie books with some beautiful - yes, beautiful passages.

There are two types found in this novel. The ones we all know and love that focus on feeding frenzies (brrraaaainnss) are referred to as hungries. And, the second type are a different kind that we start to learn about.

The story gets into life as the second version of zombies and proceeds to draw you into their plight. By the end you are not too quick to pull the trigger at these zombies.

~*~
* listened to the audio version

* fyi: movie version is set to release September 9, 2016 in the UK - looking forward to the US release

* part of zombie month (schedule)

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel

Find out more about this book and author:
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BookExcerpt
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Tumblr
Twitter @EmilyMandel

Published: 2014
Publisher: Knopf
Genre: Dystopia, Post-apocalypse
Hardback: 352 pages
Rating: 5

An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur’s chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them.

Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten’s arm is a line from Star Trek: “Because survival is insufficient.” But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave.

Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty. As Arthur falls in and out of love, as Jeevan watches the newscasters say their final good-byes, and as Kirsten finds herself caught in the crosshairs of the prophet, we see the strange twists of fate that connect them all. A novel of art, memory, and ambition, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.

Zombie sighting:
Twenty-third Street wasn't busy — a little early for the lunch crowd — but he kep getting trapped behind iPhone zombies, people half his age who wandered in a dream with their eyes fixed on their screens.
-chapter 26, page 160

My two-bits:
Loved the intermingling of past, present, apocalypse and post-apocalyse in regards to pop-culture, theatre, music, and a comic book.

Survival with its dangers in a post-apocalyptic world is portrayed somewhat beautifully in this story. Beautiful? yes, weird to say it, but yes.

Special treat:

Nathan Burton's rendition of the fictional comic mentioned in the book:

Dust by Joan Frances Turner

Dust
by Joan Frances Turner

Published: 2010
Genre: Post-apocalypse, YA, Zombies
Paperback: 384 pages
Rating: 5

Description from the amazon:
What happens between death and life can change a girl.

Jessie is a zombie. And this is her story...

Nine years ago, Jessie was in a car crash and died. After she was buried, she awoke and tore through the earth to arise, reborn, as a zombie. Now Jessie's part of a gang. They fight, hunt, and dance together as one-something humans can never understand. There are darkplaces humans have learned to avoid, lest they run into zombie gangs.

But when a mysterious illness threatens the existence of both zombies and humans, Jessie must choose between looking away or staring down the madness-and hanging on to everything she now knows as life...

My two-bits:
In-a-word(s): hoo

Serious zombies here.

Very interesting take on zombies in the future. I liked the presentation of the evolution of humans to zombies to other.

The gangs and zombie living style made me think of the Neanderthal period.

This book also gives a new meaning to dying and death.

*** Zombie Book Giveaway courtesy of author ***
sign up for this book giveaway - for US only

sign up for this book giveway - for international only


=== September Zombies schedule of events ===
with links to posts and giveaways from the other Zombiettes

Zombie Plate: Pontypool Changes Everything

Another one to share with you from my zombie tbr pile...

Pontypool Changes Everything
by Tony Burgess

Description from the amazon:
The dark side of humanity is explored in this electrifying science fiction thriller in which an epidemic virus terrorizes the earth. Causing its inhabitants to strike out on murderous rampages, the virus is caught through conversation and, once contracted, leads its host on a strange journey—into another world where the undead roam the streets of the smallest towns and largest cities, hungry for human flesh.

Describing in chilling detail what it would be like if thousands suddenly caught such a virus and struck out on a mass, never-ending, cannibalistic spree, this terrifying narrative is perfect for those who are ready to explore their darkest secret imaginings through a sinister and compelling literary work of art.

fyi: there is also a movie version of this

~*~
* first heard of this from book review and movie review from Fishmuffins of Doom -- chilling


=== September Zombies schedule of events ===
with links to posts and giveaways from the other Zombiettes

After the End by Bonnie Dee

After the End
by Bonnie Dee
- ebook

Published: 2009
Genre: Post-apocalypse, Zombies
Rating: 4

Description from the amazon:
The end of the world is only the beginning.

Zombies are on the loose and the world is falling apart. In the tradition of apocalyptic novels such as Stephen King’s THE STAND, a group of strangers on a Manhattan subway are brought together in the name of survival.

The group follows the lead of Ari Brenner, a young man who doesn’t recognize his own leadership qualities and believes they follow him simply because he wears an army uniform. Lila Teske, a college student studying philosophy, finds her non-violent beliefs tested in the crucible of a zombie attack. There are other members of the diverse group, but the focus of the story is on Ari and Lila, two young people who learn about sacrifice and inner strength through the ordeal.

With the city’s infrastructure down and communication with the outside world curtailed the survivors head toward the nearest marina. When they meet a lab tech who may have a solution to the virus, they know his safety is paramount and it’s more important than ever that they get off the island.

But zombies aren’t the only danger that impedes them on their perilous journey.

My two-bits:
In-a-word(s): captain
A virus causes the zombie outbreak in this story that follows a group of survivors. Along with fighting against zombies the issues of individual and group dynamics in survival situations are addressed.

What got me thinking was the questions of to stay? or go?

In a zombocalypse world would you choose to stay put and wait for the cavalry? or be on the move and seek others?

fyi:kindle edition is currently available for $2.39.

Read an excerpt


*** Zombie eBook Giveaway courtesy of author ***

signup for this ebook giveaway


~*~
* review copy courtesy of author

=== September Zombies schedule of events ===
with links to posts and giveaways from the other Zombiettes

The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan

The Forest of Hands and Teeth 

by Carrie Ryan
Genre: Post-apocalypse
Published: 2009
Hardback: 310 pages
Rating: 4

Inspiration: Debut Author 2009 Challenge

Description from author's site:
In Mary's world, there are simple truths.
The Sisterhood always knows best.
The Guardians will protect and serve.
The Unconsecrated will never relent.
And you must always mind the fence that surrounds the village. The fence that protects the village from the Forest of Hands and Teeth.

But slowly, Mary's truths are failing her. She's learning things she never wanted to know about the Sisterhood and its secrets, and the Guardians and their power. And, when the fence is breached and her world is thrown into chaos, about the Unconsecrated and their relentlessness.

Now she must choose between her village and her future, between the one she loves and the one who loves her. And she must face the truth about the Forest of Hands and Teeth. Could there be life outside a world surrounded by so much death?

Zombification:  unknown how they came to be, but being bitten zombifies

Zombie mode:  feral

My thoughts:
In-a-word: Ocean

Overall I thought the story was just alright. Being my first zombie book, I had high expectations. However after letting the whole story sink in some and thinking about it, I agree that this is a pretty darn good book.

Growing up watching George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and subsequent zombie flicks, I could totally envision the Unconsecrated. It was sad to see how the people in the village were resigned to living the way they did in the forest.

Like a couple of the characters said in the story, it's all about Mary! The pacing of the novel is very much like the Unconsecrated beings. It slowly shuffles along forward reaching for its heart's desire. Even the love story lacks passion - maybe because their world is lacking. In the end, well I'll just say it ends well.

Read Carrie Ryan's thoughts and explanations on the book on Amazon.com.

Series:
The Forest of Hands and Teeth
The Dead-Tossed Waves (release: Spring 2010)