Post-Apocalyptic – Timothy Johnson

March 5, 2018June 11, 2019

‘The Will To Survive’ Is Available Now, Proceeds To Charity

If you’re friends with me on social media (or you’re that damned stalker I almost caught in the tree outside my office that one time when my wife said, “it probably was just a couple of squirrels making that rustling sound,” and I said, “I know what I saw,” and she said never you mind what my wife said), you may have seen me mention this anthology, “The Will To Survive.”

If you’re not friends with me on social media, that’s fine, I guess. *kicks rocks

But this isn’t about us, friends, non-friends, and frenemies. This is about an anthology for hurricane relief.

I know last fall seems like ages ago, but it was, in fact, mere months, and if you recall, hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria pounded the Southeastern United States, Virgin Islands, and Caribbean in rapid succession. Damage estimates are in the billions of dollars, and still, five months later, parts of Puerto Rico’s electric grid remain down.

In case you need a translation on that, those are U.S. citizens who don’t have basic utilities five months after a hurricane.

April 30, 2017June 11, 2019

The Girl With All The Gifts Film And Book Review (The Book Is Better)

Generally speaking, whenever someone says, “the book was better,” about a book-to-film adaptation, I feel the need to punch them in the throat. I could go on a long digression here about my feelings of film adaptations, the different camps of people wanting them to be faithful, and creative freedoms of artists as well as the nature of truth, but I’m not going to do that. Suffice to say, The Girl With All The Gifts film adaptation gets it both wrong and right in really fascinating ways.

March 26, 2017June 11, 2019

The Reaper Virus By Nathan Barnes

Ashton Kutcher once said the only reason he works out is in case the zombie apocalypse happens and he needs to save his loved ones. Far too many zombie story protagonists seem prepared for it. While the main character in The Reaper Virus does have some resources that give him an advantage for survival, he isn’t one of those people. In Walking Dead terms, he has more in common with Eugene than Rick or Darryl, but the truth is he’s just an ordinary guy who finds himself in extraordinary circumstances, a classic setup.

The story begins with a preface from Nathan, the main character who shares the author’s name. In this preface, the story presents one of the coolest promises I’ve ever read:

“I ask that you judge me for who I am and what I fought for, not what I’ve done.”

February 19, 2017February 22, 2017

Short Story Accepted to Tales From the Lake, Vol. 4

Time for some good news. My story, “The Story of Jessie and Me,” has been accepted for Crystal Lake Publishing‘s anthology Tales From the Lake, Vol. 4.

I’m thrilled! Crystal Lake is doing great things, and it’s a family I’ve wanted to be a part of for a while.

I’m passionate about this story and this anthology. Go check out the previous volumes if you haven’t, and check this one out later this year. They also have a fantastic library of horror novels to choose from.

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August 7, 2016June 21, 2023

The Passage Trilogy by Justin Cronin

I’m sitting here at my desk, and instead of working on moving my WIPs to the “Ready for Humiliation” folder, I’m staring at my bookshelf. I’m gazing at the spines of Justin Cronin’s The Passage trilogy, and I’m thinking about reading them again.

I recently finished the third book, The City of Mirrors, and it’s one of few trilogies that I can legitimately, honestly say I loved. It has everything (well, many things) I look for in fiction: a fantastical, alluring world; rich mythology; risky storytelling; deep characters; solid writing that is at times literary; complexity in just about everything. In a word: depth.

I loved it, but I’m not thinking about reading it again only because of how I felt about it. You see, The Passage is one of the only trilogies or series I bought into immediately. I can’t recall any others that I picked up before they were all completely written. And Justin Cronin isn’t cranking out a new novel every quarter. He’s putting three or four years of his life into a book, and that’s a lot of time for a reader between books. But it’s part of the reason they are so good.

I’m increasingly of the mind that good fiction cannot be rushed out the door, that authors need to live in their worlds and with their characters to truly grant them the substance they need to create meaning and allow readers to leave and take with them whatever it is they find there in those pages.

Granted, I know plenty of authors who put out really good work annually and semi-annually. Those people are freaks.

April 7, 2016August 15, 2016

On The Walking Dead Season 6 Finale

I love The Walking Dead. The TV series is perhaps my favorite of all time. Everything about it resonates with me. I love it so much, in fact, that I go to places just to hear people talk about it.

Among super fans, I am not a super fan, because that kind of love takes a special kind of attention that I just can’t devote to anything that isn’t my wife, my work, or my dog. But in the scheme of things I’m a fan of, The Walking Dead is near the top.

This past Sunday, April 3, AMC aired The Walking Dead’s season six finale. I was more amped for it than any TV event in my life. For the first 89 minutes of the 90-minute (minus lots of advertising) episode, it was a 10 out of 10, one of the best episodes the series had ever created. But something happens in the final seconds that completely undermines everything the show had done in the second half of season six, and it’s a terrible shame.

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July 31, 2014June 11, 2019

Review: Tankbread by Paul Mannering

For a post-apocalyptic zombie novel that is set after the zombies have won and humanity isn’t just trying to survive but salvage some kind of lower existence, Tankbread would seem to present a story with nowhere left to go but into a bleak future; humanity has no existence left to fill except to serve the upper class, now comprised of zombies that have managed to sustain themselves and elevate their intelligence to near full capacity by feeding regularly on human stem cells. In this vein, Tankbread presents an interesting comment on class in our present, not-yet-apocalyptic society.

The story begins with a courier that remains unnamed throughout. He is being patronized by an evol, one of the upper class of zombies that is intelligent enough to lead. The courier’s charge is to go to the Sydney Opera House, where some of the last of humanity have set up a protected community, and pick up a package. There we learn the secrets of Tankbread and the morally questionable pact humanity has made with the evols for survival. Essentially, Tankbread are human clones the surviving humans create to feed the evols in exchange for an agreement that they will leave the humans in the protected communities alone. As the courier is learning all of this, feeling safe in this Australian landmark, the Opera House is attacked, but the courier escapes with a Tankbread he later names Else and a charge to get her to a research facility across the country.