Day thirty-five of showcasing books published by Parallel Universe Publications and it's the turn of our first (and only) chapbook: A Handful of Zombies: Tales of the Restless Dead by David A. Riley, illustrated throughout by award-winning artist Jim Pitts.
What was intended as the start of a series of low-priced chapbooks, A Handful of Zombies: Tales of the Restless Dead included four previously published short stories by David A. Riley with illustrations by Jim Pitts.
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All four stories in this collection cover a wide range of tropes within
the zombie genre.
Dead Ronnie and I is a tale
of high adventure by plane and sea, with an abortive escape by our protagonist
to the as yet untainted Isles of Scotland. This was originally published in Sanitarium
Magazine No 44 in 2016.
His Pale Blue Eyes is probably the most traditional take of zombie stories today,
featuring a young girl’s determined search for her parents during a zombie
apocalypse. It’s a story, though, about conditioning and how what someone is
taught can radically affect their behaviour. Is the horror in this the shambling
undead or the girl herself? See what you think. This first appeared in Bite-Sized
Horror edited by Johnny Mains for Obverse Books in 2011.
By contrast Right For You Now, originally
published in Weirdbook Zombie Annual No 3 in 2021, harks back to the original
concept of the zombie in Voodoo-haunted Haiti, though this tale is set in
present-day Britain. It’s a combination of a crime story, revenge, and a man’s
obsessive fascination with age-old practices.
Our final tale, Romero’s Children, is more
in the way of a science fiction story. The zombies here are certainly the most
different. For a start off they are not dead but have been granted near
immortality by a drug that swept the world with its promise to stop aging. Alas
for those caught up in the frenzied demand to use it, though, its side effects
were such that they would have been better off dead. This story appeared in
2010 in The Seventh Black Book of Horror edited by the late Charles
Black and was subsequently picked up by American editor Paula Guran for her
2012 anthology Extreme Zombies.