The trouble was-except for a few movies of varying quality-they were hard to find.

My fascination with zombies began right then. I remember watching that when I was about thirteen or fourteen and then going off to bed every night for the next three weeks clutching a baseball bat. Night of the Living Dead was the first horror movie that ever really scared me, and it remains one of the few that’s ever done so. Let’s start out with a bang: Why zombies? You’ve written in your blog about why horror-“fear is the most authentic, and the most useful, emotion available to the storyteller”-and elsewhere you’ve compared zombies to abandoned buildings, but what is it about zombies specifically that’s so compelling for you? McKinney’s next book, The Savage Dead, comes out this month from Kensington. In addition to being a Bram Stoker Award-winning (for Flesh Eaters) horror writer, McKinney is also a lifelong Texan, a husband and father of two, the holder of a Master’s Degree in English Literature, and a San Antonio police officer who has also worked as a homicide detective and disaster mitigation specialist. However, McKinney has found the greatest success with his Dead World series, which consists of Dead City (2006), Apocalypse of the Dead (2010), Flesh Eaters (2011), and Mutated (2012), all published by Kensington Books. It seems slightly unfair (if hardly inaccurate) to label Joe McKinney one of the reigning kings of zombie fiction, because his work has extended beyond the walking dead into ghost stories (his novels Inheritance and Crooked House), virus thrillers ( Quarantined), and hardboiled noir ( Dodging Bullets).

Apocalypse of the dead by joe mckinney