“Black Moon” by Kenneth Calhoun (Hogarth)

An interesting premise, well-executed, but still slightly flawed

“A black moon had risen, a sphere of sleeplessness that pulled at the tides of blood-and invisible explanation for the madness welling inside.”

The world has stopped sleeping. Restless nights have grown into days of panic, delirium and, eventually, desperation. But few and far between, sleepers can still be found – a gift they quickly learn to hide. For those still with the ability to dream are about to enter a waking nightmare.

Matt Biggs is one of the few sleepers. His wife Carolyn however, no stranger to insomnia, is on the very brink of exhaustion. After six restless days and nights, Biggs wakes to find her gone. He stumbles out of the house in search of her to find a world awash with pandemonium, a rapidly collapsing reality. Sleep, it seems, is now the rarest and most precious commodity. Money can’t buy it, no drug can touch it, and there are those who would kill to have it.

I hadn’t heard of this novel before it arrived through the post. As someone who has a soft-spot for post-apocalyptic novels (and the various sub-genres that covers), and also someone who has always suffered from varying degrees of insomnia, Black Moon’s premise jumped out at me. Given its slim length, too, I decided to read it right away. What I found was a novel that is, strangely, both excellent and also wanting.

Upcoming: “Black Moon” by Kenneth Calhoun (Hogarth)

This is a really intriguing-looking novel. A copy of the novel arrived in the mail yesterday (complete with an eye-mask…). Here is the synopsis for Kenneth Calhoun’s dystopian future novel, Black Moon…

Insomnia has claimed everyone Biggs knows. Even his beloved wife, Carolyn, has succumbed to the telltale red-rimmed eyes, slurred speech and cloudy mind before disappearing into the quickly collapsing world. Yet Biggs can still sleep, and dream, so he sets out to find her.

He ventures out into a world ransacked by mass confusion and desperation, where he meets others struggling against the tide of sleeplessness. Chase and his buddy Jordan are devising a scheme to live off their drug-store lootings; Lila is a high school student wandering the streets in an owl mask, no longer safe with her insomniac parents; Felicia abandons the sanctuary of a sleep research center to try to protect her family and perhaps reunite with Chase, an ex-boyfriend. All around, sleep has become an infinitely precious commodity. Money can’t buy it, no drug can touch it, and there are those who would kill to have it. However, Biggs persists in his quest for Carolyn, finding a resolve and inner strength that he never knew he had.

Black Moon will be published in March 2014 by Hogarth (an imprint of Random House) in both the UK and US.

“Ex-Heroes” by Peter Clines (Del Rey UK/Broadway)

Superheroes-vs.-Zombies Novel Fails to Impress

Stealth. Gorgon. Regenerator. Cerberus. Zzzap. The Mighty Dragon. They were heroes, using their superhuman abilities to make Los Angeles a better place.

Then the plague of living death spread around the globe. Billions died, civilization fell, and the city of angels was left a desolate zombie wasteland.

Now, a year later, the Mighty Dragon and his companions protect a last few thousand survivors in their film-studio-turned-fortress, the Mount. Scarred and traumatized by the horrors they’ve endured, the heroes fight the armies of ravenous ex-humans at their citadel’s gates, lead teams out to scavenge for supplies—and struggle to be the symbols of strength and hope the survivors so desperately need.

But the hungry ex-humans aren’t the only threats the heroes face. Former allies, their powers and psyches hideously twisted, lurk in the city’s ruins. And just a few miles away, another group is slowly amassing power... led by an enemy with the most terrifying ability of all.

I had high hopes for this novel – mixing superheroes and zombies seems like such an awesome, perhaps even common-sense mélange, yet it had not been done before. So, when the three books arrived on my doorstep, I was eager to get stuck in. While Ex-Heroes had some good bits – the action-scenes, in particular, are well-written – ultimately, I do not think this book was ready for publication. This was a big disappointment.

Excerpt: THE DETAINEE by Peter Liney (Jo Fletcher)

Today, I’m very happy to share with you an excerpt from Peter Liney’s debut novel, The Detainee.

An Interview with E.J. SWIFT

E.J. Swift is another of Night Shade Books’ highly anticipated 2012 debut authors. Her first novel, Osiris, is a sci-fi novel set in a post-environmental-disaster world. As one of my most-anticipated reads of the year, I decided to get in touch with Ms Swift, and ask her to tell us a little more about her novel, writing, the genre, and her sword-fighting skills…

“Guardians of the Phoenix” by Eric Brown (Solaris)

Reviewed by Bane of Kings

A distant, dry future dystopia…

For ten years, Paul has scrabbled for survival among the sand-shrouded ruins of the once-great city of Paris. The seas have dried up, deserts cover much of the Earth’s surface, and humanity has been all but annihilated, as much by the drought as by the nuclear and biological conflicts following the great Breakdown.

Desperate bands of humans still survive. Some scrape a living in the remains of shattered cities; others resort to murder and cannibalism to survive. When Paul is rescued from one such group of killers, he joins his benefactors in their journey south in search of water and salvation.

Guardians of the Phoenix tells the story of the last survivors on planet Earth, their desperate fight for survival and their last hope to save the world.

Whenever you pick up a book by an author who you’ve never heard of, you don’t really know what to expect when you go into it. Is it going to be a good read? Is it going to be a bad one? With Eric Brown though, I’ve heard a lot about him and his work before, and most of it good. The author is prolific, with fifteen novels already published (not including children’s books), and has also been a reviewer and an editor. I’ve been interested in picking up Brown’s novels for a while now, but I finally decided to take the plunge with the standalone novel Guardians of the Phoenix.

“Bad Blood” by Chuck Wendig (Abaddon)

The novella sequel to Double Dead

San Francisco after the zombie apocalypse.

Vampire-predator turned human-protector Coburn is on the trail his his vampire sire. When he finds him, it is not to catch up on the good times, but to take revenge.

Alcatraz. Super-zombies. A ketamine-trip cult of New Age weirdos who eat the flesh of the zombie as some kind of grotesque communion.

In this second instalment of his Double Dead series, Wendig has done it again – he has written a darkly humorous, action-packed horror romp. It fast-paced, witty, eloquent and engaging. Just more evidence that Mr Wendig is an author everyone should read.

[Warning: There are some minor spoilers for the previous novel in the series, Double Dead.]

“DMZ Vol.1: On The Ground” (Vertigo)

The Ultimate Journalist Embed: New York City…

Writer: Brian Wood | Artist: Riccardo Burchielli

In the near future, America’s worst nightmare has come true. With military adventurism overseas bogging down the Army and National Guard, the U.S. government mistakenly neglects the very real threat of anti-establishment militias scattered across the 50 states.

Like a sleeping giant, Middle America rises up and violently pushes its way to the shining seas, coming to a standstill at the line in the sand — Manhattan or, as the world now knows it, the DMZ.

Matty Roth, a naïve young man and aspiring photojournalist, lands a dream gig following a veteran war journalist into the heart of the DMZ. Things soon go terribly wrong, and Matty finds himself lost and alone in a world he’s only seen on television. There, he is faced with a choice: try to find a way off the island, or make his career with an assignment most journalists would kill for. But can he survive in a war zone long enough to report the truth?

DMZ Volume 1 exceeded all my expectations. I can’t quite remember what made me pick it up in the first place, but I’m very glad that I did. DMZ paints a bleak, fascinating picture of a fractured America, and one man’s attempts to understand the wreckage.

“Double Dead” by Chuck Wendig (Abaddon)

A vampire wakes up after a zombie plague. What to eat?

Coburn’s been dead now for close to a century, but seeing as how he’s a vampire and all, it doesn’t much bother him. Or at least it didn’t, not until he awoke from a forced five-year slumber to discover that most of human civilization was now dead – but not dead like him, oh no.

See, Coburn likes blood. The rest of the walking dead, they like flesh. He’s smart. Them, not so much. But they outnumber his by about a million to one. And the clotted blood of the walking dead cannot sustain him. Now he’s starving. And on the run. And more pissed-off than a bee-stung rattlesnake. The vampire not only has to find human survivors (with their sweet, sweet blood), but now he has to transition from predator to protector – after all, a man has to look after his food supply.

I’ve never been much taken with the zombie apocalypse genre. There just doesn’t really seem like there’s very much one can actually do with it that hasn’t been done in film, fiction and comics many time before. Then along comes Double Dead, proving that the zombie apocalypse genre has plenty of life left in it. Wendig makes genre tropes his own, as well as adding a great, original twist. After all, in a world populated predominantly by zombies, what does a vampire have to do to get a meal?

“The End Specialist”/“The Postmortal” by Drew Magary (Voyager/Penguin)

An interesting novel about life and immortality. Superb

2019. Humanity has witnessed its greatest scientific breakthrough yet: the cure for ageing. Three injections and you’re immortal – not bulletproof or disease-proof, but you’ll never have to fear death by old age.

For John Farrell, documenting the cataclysmic shifts to life after the cure becomes an obsession. Cure parties, cycle marriages, immortal livestock: the world is revelling in the miracles of eternal youth. But immortality has a sinister side, and when a pro-death terrorist explosion kills his newly-cured best friend, John soon realizes that even in a world without natural death, there is always something to fear.

Now, John must make a new choice: run and hide forever, or stay and fight those who try to make immortal life a living hell.

I knew nothing about this book before it arrived in the post. The premise appeared intriguing and original. Having now read the book, I can say that it exceeded my already positive expectations. It is a great novel, one with depth and an interesting message.