Tag: zombies

Where should I start?

Posted on by Thomas

I’ve had eight novels published, all of them by Snowbooks. I get asked a lot of questions about my writing—where I get my ideas from, being one, very common query.

But another I’ve been asked frequently is: “In what order should I read your books, Thomas?”

Well, here’s the order in which they were published:

  • Maneater
  • Skarlet
  • Prey (the sequel to Maneater)
  • Zombie Britannica
  • Krimson (the sequel to Skarlet, and the second part of the trilogy)
  • Pandemonium Road
  • Pariah
  • Kardinal (third in the trilogy that began with Skarlet)

You could read them in the above order, of course.

But if you do read Maneater first, you might then want to read Prey, since it continues the story of Laura Greenacre.

You might want to start with Skarlet if vampires are your thing. You’ll then, probably, want to see how the story ends by reading Krimson and Kardinal.

If the undead grab you, you could start with Zombie Britannica.

So there’s the order for you; where you begin is up to you… enjoy.

Zombie Britannica among Ezvid Wiki’s top choices

Posted on by Thomas

Really delighted to hear from the fabulous people at Ezvid Wiki this week telling me that Zombie Britannica has been included in their recently published wiki, Books with Inventive Takes on the Zombie Genre.

You can see the list here. There are some great zombie books selected. Very proud to have been chosen.

Zombie Britannica is a very “love-it-or-hate-it” novel. What we call Marmite here in the UK. As you’ll see from the reviews, opinion is polarised. But I’m glad to say that the “positive” column has the edge.

One of the criticisms doled out was that everything happens so quickly. But you see, that’s the whole point. Partly, the idea for ZB sprang from the research cited at the beginning of the novel – and it is actually a real study.

Carried out by a group of University of Ottawa mathematics students, it says a zombie outbreak would be devastating – and rapid.

Unless we “hit hard and hit often”, the researchers say, we would be very quickly overwhelmed by the undead – and civilisation would collapse.

So really Zombie Britannica is realistic in that regard. It is backed by science.

Anyway, thanks so much Ezvid Wiki. And if you’d like to know what happens after Zombie Britannica, a sequel, in the form of the short story “Where Moth and Rust Destroy”, can be found in my collection The Trees And Other Stories.

The Trees and Other Stories in paperback

Posted on by Thomas

TheTreesWPMy short story collection The Trees And Other Stories has been on Kindle for a while now, but in the next few weeks it will be available as a paperback. Here’s the cover. What do you think? I’ve published most of my books in the mainstream way – get a publisher; they do all the work. But I’m a big fan of DIY, these days. Self-publishing in the past was a precarious business. You dished out lots of money to firms who sometimes didn’t have your best interests at heart, and you’d probably have to schlep a pile of books around the stores, hoping the manager would take a few copies; hoping they’d sell a few copies. But Amazon changed all that: first with Kindle; now with CreateSpace. I know people are snooty about Amazon, but I’m not. They’ve democratized the publishing industry, and made the big, powerful players sit up and think. An way, I enjoy working on my books for Kindle and CreateSpace; I like doing covers and formatting – I’m a bit of a geek like that. In fact, I enjoy it so much, I’m thinking about providing a cover-design service. Have a look at the cover I designed for The Trees and see if you think I’m talking through my hat.