Those of you who enjoy delicious zombies might want to check out this debut by Carrie Ryan, called The Forest of Hands and Teeth.
I would tell you more about it, but I already wrote a signature review for Amazon, which starts like this:
Teenagers love a good apocalypse. Who doesn’t? All those annoying rules suspended. Society’s pretenses made irrelevant. Malls to be looted. School out forever.
But in The Forest and Hands and Teeth, Carrie Ryan’s marvelous debut novel, the post-apocalypse is defined more by constraints than freedoms. The book begins seven generations after the Return, an undead plague that has ended civilization as we know it. Of course, a zombie outbreak usually means shotguns and mall looting–the very essence of freedom. But more than a century on from the Return, the malls have already been looted, and shotguns are a distant memory. The novel’s heroine, Mary, lives in a village surrounded by one last vestige of industrial technology: a chain-link fence, beyond which is a vast forest full of shambling, eternally ravenous undead–the forest of hands and teeth. No villager ever goes outside this fence, unless they want to die. (And given this bleak scenario, some do.)
Mary’s world is bounded not only by the fence but by the archaic traditions of her people, which are enforced by a religious order called the Sisterhood. Marriages, childbirth, death, every stage of life must be controlled to sustain the village’s precarious existence. Even the houses are circumscribed–literally–with passages of scripture carved into every entrance to remind the inhabitants of the rules that sustain human life amid the horrors of the forest.
After so long an isolation, the village is beginning to forget . . .
Click here to read the rest of my review.
That’s it, except . . . it’s only 13 more days until Extras comes out in paperback. W00t!
In case you haven’t been following the zombie-versus-unicorn thread on the internets, it has come to a mighty climax with the announcement of:
The Zombie Versus Unicorn Anthology! A collection of zombie and unicorn short stories to settle the issue for good, co-edited by Justine Larbalestier (aka, my Justine) and the fabulous Holly Black.
Justine is, of course, the head of Team Zombie, and Holly is the head of Team Unicorn.
Here’s Justine’s announcement of it, and here’s Holly’s.
Stay tuned for an amusing video on this subject.
But first, some appearance news: Justine and I will be in Austin, Texas this Wednesday night, at the awesome bookstore known as BookPeople.
Wednesday, Nov 19
7:30 PM
BookPeople
603 N. Lamar
Austin, TX 78703
512-472-5050
800-853-9757
Click here for more.
And the next night, Justine will be appearing at a Barnes & Noble in San Antonio.
Thursday, November 20
7:00PM
Barnes & Noble
Northwoods Shopping Center
18030 HWY 281NSuite #140
San Antonio, TX 78232
210-490-0411
Hope to see you there!
And now, a short video from Lauren Myracle, she of the Scare-a-thon and (sadly) a member of Team Unicorn.
Let the battle continue!
Update
A few things that I need to remind everyone about are:
Westerboard! The oldest Westerfeldian forum on the web.
Midnighters, Inc. The newest forum about my books on the interwebs.
How Bubbly Are You? A survey for everyone who comes here regularly, old or young. Contribute to science!
Over at Inside a Dog, YA writer Maureen Johnson has just extended and expanded her Insert a Zombie, Win a Prize contest.
The basic concept is that any scene in any book would be better with a zombie, a truth universally acknowledged among certain of us genre fans. (Scroll down to the blue text in this post for Maureen’s own example, featuring a zombie in Pride and Prejudice.) To enter the contest, just take a scene from any book and add a zombie to it.
For the contest’s new and improved iteration, celebrity judges Meg Cabot, John Green, E. Lockhart, and Justine Larbalestier will choose the winning entry!
Here’s my entry, though I probably won’t win, given that I’m married to one of the judges.
Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Zombies.
It was the best of apocalypses, it was the worst of apocalypses. It was an age of brain eating, it was an age of shotguns. It was the epoch of damaging the head, or of removing it from the body. It was the season of light infantry weapons, it was the season of dark pursuits through abandoned sewers. We had everything at the local mall before us, but there were too many zombies in the way. In short, the period was so far like the present period—except for, you know, all the frickin’ zombies.
Here are the roolz:
1) Keep it to one paragraph. (250 words or less. Less is better.)
2) Make sure to give the title and author, so we can know whose work is being zombified. If these are not given, the zombified work will not be considered!
3) E-mail the entry to maureen@maureenjohnsonbooks.com. Please use the subject line: ZOMBIE INSIDE! You may enter as many times as you like. (So, if you want to zombify 30 stories, you can! But they must be different ones each time.) The deadline is February 14th. You can go right up to midnight (US, east coast time).
4) All of these wonderful entries will be read by Maureen and the other judges.
Round one: this week on insideadog . . . deadline, end of day, February 14th. The first five semi-finalists will go up to voting on the 15th. The prize for winning this round is the final copy of Maureen Johnson’s Suite Scarlett.
Round two: next week on Maureen Johnson’s blog . . . all entries submitted between February 16 and February 21st, with the next semi-final on February 22nd.
This all leads up to the crowning of the ULTIMATE ZOMBIE on Monday, February 25th.
5) You know who picks the winner? YOU DO! It’s ZOMBIE IDOL!
This just in: Justine adds a zombie to James Joyce’s Ulysses.
For those of you wearying of the Great Pullman Debate, I offer a pair of podcasts to soothe the spirit.
Back in October, when I was on tour for the release of Extras, Justine and I had a chance to sit down outside of Chicago with an old pal named John Scalzi. Scalzi was writing his first YA, so his publishers thought it would be cool to record our conversation and podcast it. Well, it’s finally ready for listening.
We discuss our books, hoverboard derring-do, and of course zombie suppression.
Here’s part one and here is part two.
Enjoy!
(No Pullman arguments in this comment thread! Here is where they go!)
Just got back from a signing at Copperfield’s Books that was unbelievably awesome. After our 7AM wake up call and three school appearances this morning, I thought I would be zombified by tonight. But the lovely, energetic crowd carried me through a really fun appearance.
Actually, all the signings have been so energy-making. Thanks for that.
And on the way out to Petaluma . . . the fog!
Another lovely thing: at one of my school visits, these four students had made a giant, hand-drawn Uglies cover.
It reminds me of the days before cheap oversized printers, when record stores would hire artists to paint giant album covers for their windows.
Thanks to the artists: Emily, Olivia, Victoria, and Namitha!
Tomorrow (Tuesday) night’s appearance is a very special one. For the only time on this tour, Justine is making a special command appearance alongside me:
Books Inc.
Opera Plaza
601 Van Ness Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94102
Hope to see you there.
And for more amusing reflections on the Extras tour, check out Justine’s blog.
After 28,000 miles of traveling we’re back in NYC, jet-lagged and getting ready for BEA. Lucky for 24-hour dry-cleaning, or we would be sartorially doomed for the next few days.
Of course, my posting is so far behind that there are still tales of Paris to tell . . .
Around the corner from our hotel was this graveyard. It was old and pictaresque, so I took the new camera over to shoot moody graveyard shots. Like this one:
Blah, blah, blah. Very artsy-fartsy.
But suddenly, I started finding famous dead people!
That’s the Baudelaire, the dude who translated Poe into French. And he was not alone; I was in the midst of a host of defunkt French celebs!
Without hesitation, I threw aside all pretensions of art, and became a paparazzo of the dead. This turned out to be much more fun than artsy photographs.
There were even honorary French people buried there, like American Man Ray, the guy who made the world safe for Dadaism.
Another yank there was Jean Seberg, aka the cute chick from Breathless.
Check out her birth and death dates. Drugs are bad for you.
But on the positive side, beautiful actresses get more flowers than philosophers. Even philosophers in pairs . . .
Hey, here’s one of my favorite playwrites:
I directed his play The Lesson in my senior year in high school. It was all about an etymology lesson, but I changed it to a tennis lesson. (Dude, I was so Dada, it still hurts.)
Okay, I think that’s all the good Paris photos. Singapore comes next.
And by the way, I just finished the copy edits for Extras. Yay!
Tired. But. Can’t. Sleep. Or. Jet-lag. Will eat me.
The Extras cover has gone in a new direction, which I think is pretty cool. I never was quite down with the first version.
Let me know what you think!
Update: This comment thread is full of massive Specials spoilers. Be warned!
Update 2: Extras is available now for pre order!
Update 3: This cover is an April Fool’s joke, people. The art is from a quick sketch by Katerate, more of whose fan art can be found here.
Hey, we’re headed out of town in an hour, and blogging may be sketchy, but to keep you guys entertained . . .
Is anyone planning any Westerfeldian Halloween costumes? Specials? Pretties? Midnighters? Peeps? Or just plain old zombies?
Let me know, and maybe we can put together a photo gallery in early November.
And to fill your swag bags with more than teeth-ruining candy, Penguin is running a bookclub sweepstakes! Enter to win up to ten copies of six books, including my latest, The Last Days. Basically, that’s one copy of each book for all of your bookclub members!
Spread the word.
Ciao till next week!
In the spirit of Last Days Month, I’ve decided to dust off a few old parasite posts I’ve been meaning to do. So . . .
Meet the exoparasitoids!
Um, what? Well, do you remember toxoplasma, the beastie that lives in peoples’ brains and makes them act like cats? (See chapter 5 of Peeps for details.) Toxoplasma lives its entire life inside other animals; it’s a pure parasite, in other words.
But exoparasitoids spend most of their lives as free-living animals, flying or walking or swimming around like the rest of us. But at certain stages of life, they transform into parasites, sort of like werewolves turning from human into beast. An example of this in Peeps is the screwflies of chapter 10. They are normal flies as adults, but they grow up as parasites.
A few days ago, I was checking out Carl Zimmer’s blog and came across a post about a wasp called Ampulex compressa. Ampulex lives its life like a normal wasp, until it gets ready to lay eggs, at which point it becomes a full-fledged, zombie-cockroach-driving parasite!
Warning to the squeamish: Stop reading! Flee to Kitten War right now!
So what happens is this: when Ampulex is ready to lay an egg, it stings a cockroach on its belly, temporarily paralyzing it. Then it sticks its stinger into the roach’s brain, performing a little bit of neurosurgery. When Ampulex is done, the cockroach’s willpower has been destroyed!
It’s a zombie cockroach, a slave.
Ampulex takes it by the antenna and leads it home. The roach meekly follows, allowing itself to be sealed up inside the wasp-lair.
Do you think what happens next is pleasant? Then you would be wrong. (But Kittenwar is still available.)
Ampulex lays its egg, and when the larva hatches it eats its way into the enslaved roach, feasting on its organs. After growing into a fully formed wasp, it pops out in Alien fashion, as shown in the photo above.
Was that fun? Then tune in next week for parasitic cancer!
Plus, go buy The Last Days. Or the new paperback of Peeps!
Don’t they look pretty together?
And if you want to check out where all my parasitology is stolen from, go buy Zimmer’s book, Parasite Rex.
Well, it’s about 1,000 degrees here, so the mayor has called a “heat emergency.” This means that city agencies will try to conserve energy, and ordinary New Yorkers run their air conditioners at maximum, continuing the unending competition to see who has the coldest apartment when the power grid fails.
But don’t you worry about Justine and me. We have a terrorism/blackout/zombie invasion survival kit in the pantry.
It contains the following:
8 liters of water
1 tiny plastic flashlight
1 AA battery of dubious charge
Okay, it’s a pretty crappy survival kit. Especially seeing as how that flashlight needs two AA batteries to work. (Where did the other one go?)
Still, I figure that any American home is full of batteries if you really need them. We must have 36 AAs in strategic reserve (that is, remote controls), and I happen to know that the VCR remote hasn’t been used for four years. If those two batteries aren’t covered with green mange, they’re bound to be full of juice!
The only problem is, I can’t even find the remotes when the lights are on.
Luckily, I know exactly where the refrigerator is, and it’s stocked with all sorts of bonus survival gear, namely:
12 liters of seltzer
1 young coconut
mustard
fuego mega-hot sauce from our favorite brunch place
1 bottle of prosecco
1 bottle of champagne
Tabasco
That’s how we roll. A whole lotta survival going on there. But not to worry: I just moved the pantry water bottles into the fridge, so they’ll get cold and keep the fridge cold for much longer when the inevitable blackout comes. That way, it’ll take ages for the mustard to spoil. Genius!
Feel free to panic.
This charming image adapted from Global Warming Art.
As you can see, my website has had its first makeover in many years. This is to celebrate the fact that my first new series in years, Leviathan, comes out this autumn. (October 6, to be exact.)
Things may be wonky for a while as we play around under the hood. But I hope you enjoy the new look. Let me know what you think!
Click here to contact Scott Westerfeld.
Jill Grinberg
Jill Grinberg Literary Management
244 5th Avenue, 11th floor
New York, NY 10001
212-620-5883
info@grinbergliterary.com
