OHMAGOSH! Happy Halloween Month!!
I have been very impatiently and ungraciously awaiting this day. Because this day starts the best month of all the other totally loser months. This month, I get to be creepy and no one can say anything about it! Also, drum rooooolllll:
This month my blog is going to be the spooky literary equivalent of Germany’s Oktoberfest!
I’ve got a contest that will make heads roll, an honorary zombie Hot Blogger, some seriously awesome spooky short stories, DEAD Wonder Woman, and let’s not forget–on the 13th–starts the experimental readings of Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree…
The ZomBreePod Presents:
But today…we start with a contest!
In the comments section:
Write a THREE SENTENCEopening to a zombie book. It can be funny, it can be terrifying, it can be totally bizarre out of this world. The best one, judged by myself and fellow ZomBreePod member D.M. Cunningham, will win a few of my favorite spooky books, including Jonathan Maberry’s Rot & Ruin and R.L. Stine’s Fear: 13 Stories of Suspense and Horror.
You will have until Oct. 22nd to submit.
This is NOT a contest you want to wimp out on!!
So hop to it!
…and remember…
this literary life 
I loooove October! My hubs always hooks us up with creepy decorations and props with his mad skills. Did I mention he will be working on a new zombie show for the SyFy channel? Wooot!
I’m going to be at this blog every day, rolling all over the Halloween/October-y goodness. Just… so you know.
CONTEST ENTRY! Bizarre is good. I had thoughts of using this for a weird short story in my blog for Halloween.
—
Bob Tillson didn’t know what to do with the twice-dead body of his huntin’ hound, Buck, and dumping him at the vet to be disposed of seemed as good a choice as any. After all, he’d tried burying him once and that hadn’t worked.
If he’d known Buck would be shipped off to a warehouse and processed into pet food, spreading the infection to animals all across the country, he might’ve thought to burn the body himself.
Okay, so here’s the deal; I am in love with a zombie. Well, he’s a half-zombie anyway. It’s hard to believe, but everything I’m about to tell you is true; for real.
SWEET RELEASE
I ate another one today – alone without the others. My body now unleashes hell upon the pure while I, a spectator in my own body, watch in repulsion. I wait for my savior, a lone girl child who roams our streets with her companion of sorts – a sawed-off appropriately named… “Sweet Release”.
Can’t wait! October is obviously the superior month.
Entry:
I pick up a charred human thigh and roll it over in my hands. Watch the black flesh flake away like old paint. My frustration boils in me until I drop my head back and scream into the air, throwing the wasted meal across the empty street.
I’ve got to admit that I’m a bit that I’m a bit of a wuss when it comes to Halloween and scary stuff, but that Ray Bradbury clip has me intrigued.
The only thing deader than the rotting fall leaves is me. I crumble one of them between my two remaining fingers, and that leaf crumbles like I do, like crumbling when your mother dies and you’re still alive, but pop culture ceases to recognize you as a sex symbol. Vampires have all the fun, while my yahoos are found in the skin that peels off with my five o’clock shadow.
I can’t enter because I am a judge, but I am soooo going to do my first three lines just for fun and posting because I like to get my spooky on!!! This is going to Octoberawesomesupagooddynamitesauce!
You said bizarre, right?
Aside from the fact that zombies had finally taken over the world, not much had changed in the way of everyday life (although you could lose an arm or worse for saying the “L” word). The undead still went about their business as per the usual, scavenging for what was left of the humans, moaning and losing limbs, even visiting Subway on lunch rush, although the foot-long now consisted of an actual foot. It was almost the same as it had always been, and that was was probably why it came as such a shock when the aliens arrived…
Leonard sat bolt upright, grazing his skull against the ceiling of the dimly lit mausoleum. He grimaced as he stretched and heard all his joints pop and crack in a hideous choir. He stared down at the decaying flesh on his hands in utter horror and yelled, “What is going on here?”
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A mind is a terrible thing to waste, mom says. But I’m sick and tired of brains: brain-salad, brainburgers, brains, brains, brains — can’t we ever eat anything else? No dessert for you, young man, unless you clean that plate, she tells me, but guess what’s for dessert…brains!
My story is called: I Have A Feeling We’re Not In Canned Sauce Anymore
“I’m aware we’re in a tomato factory, Frank, but where did all the blood come from? Look at all the blood! THE BLOOD!!!”
oh the horror :)
Here’s my entry…
Don’t you hate when a book starts out with “I’ve got a secret”? Well, I’ve got a secret, and no, it’s not that I’m a zombie (that’s kind of obvious, right?) I haven’t been taking the pills they’ve been giving us, and I remember EVERYTHING.
My submission:
For sale: used coffin. Dad wasn’t kidding. Mwa-hahahaha.
The October sun was warm and inviting, it should have felt like great time to be outside and alive. Instead my group of survivors were huddled in the damp basement, waiting for me to return. I was covered with blood and gore, but at least I had the canned food we needed.
The witch doctor knelt down next to the fresh dirt of a grave. She took a handful, sprinkling it on the voodoo doll in her hand while mumbling a few words under her breath. She raised the doll’s arm and a hand shot from the mound with its fingers reaching for the night sky.
Death is near, and the medical staff struggles in hurry and desperation to save her pale-grey turning life. “Clear!” The doctor yells as the shock wave bounces her body off the bed in the final sound of the flatline heartbeat. He sits, angry and desperate on the last string of hope while slowly accepting the reality and questioning himself, “This isn’t right. How can she die so sudden and unexplained?”
There are a few things I used to take for granted in my old life – free speech, safety and most of all, memories – In my new life, I am denied the first, have to fight for the second and nobody thinks I have the third from before I came here, they think I turned up, out of the blue a survivor and an amnesiac, because the only way to keep surviving was for them to think that. Only, I have something most of them don’t – memories; memories of before, memories of outside and most dangerously, memories of what happened and who caused it. I know why there are zombies now when there wasn’t before and I think it’s about time I exercised my long denied freedom of speech and started to tell people.
Okay, firstly, Halloween… BEST holiday EVER. Seriously.
Here’s my entry for the Zombie contest, from The Upside of Dead:
Who knew that getting hit by a gravel truck and slammed through the side of a burning building could be a good thing? I mean, how was I supposed to know that the more trauma you go through on your way out of life, the more indestructible you are after you get your foot back through the door of the living? Really, the higher-ups should think about issuing a zombie handbook to all of us Freshies so we don’t have to figure everything out the hard way.
From: I’M NOT A REAL ZOMBIE, I JUST PLAY ONE ON T.V.
I stabbed the eyeball right through the iris, popped it into my mouth, chewed . . . and hurled.
“What’s the matter with you today?” the director yelled.
“Isn’t there something in the child labor laws about eyeball eating?” I asked, forking the third eye of the shoot.
Used to be when I responded to a code blue I had a team of nurses with me. Now my only assistant is a man with an ax. If I can’t ‘em back to life, he makes sure they stay dead.
Aw, crap. Of course I copied/pasted my first draft the first time I entered. Here goes again:
Used to be when I responded to a code blue I had a team of nurses with me brandishing defibrillators and syringes full of epinephrine. Now my only assistant is a man with an ax. If I can’t bring ’em back to life, he makes sure they stay dead.
Wow! This is such an incredible contest! Here’s my entry:
James watched as the rich blanket of fog around the bottom of the building lifted. The graffitied garage door was still there, but now partially obscured by another blight. This morning the dead covered the streets, shambling along like a different type of vandalism – a crime against nature instead of property.
Here is my entry – this is fun – wish I had more lines!
I remember dying the first time. I ran until the muscles in my legs simply gave out and then I crawled ripping my nails bloody on the rough velcro of the road’s asphalt until finally the weight of them on my back threatened to smother me followed by moment of terror and pain and blackness.
I remember rising, numb and cold and hungry.
I look down from the top of the water tower and all I can see is zombies in every direction. My wife is down there among them having been bitten earlier this morning when we first dared venture out of the house to try to get to the “safe place” that was broadcast on the news. That may end up being the first bad decision I made in a day filled with bad decisions.
I do everything with my best friend Billy. Our favorite games are tag and hide-and-seek. We’re the same height and the same age! The only difference is at night I go inside the house to have dinner with my family and go to sleep. Billy goes into the crawl space under the house to eat alone, and he doesn’t sleep at all.
Oops! That wasn’t 3 sentences! Hmmm a hook for a spooky kid story… How about this:
My best friend Billy is quiet as a mouse. While I eat burgers upstairs he eats brains under my house.
That wasn’t 3 sentences either. Lol
ok here it goes:
All I wanted to do was die and leave this awful world, to go somewhere else, anywhere else. But of course he found me right as I was taking my last breath and he took that time to forever bind me to the world I despised . As the infection seeped through every vein, every pore, every musclce I thought to myself this will be the last time I will feel fully human.
Great contest! My entry:
Hi, my name is Eva Jonstone, and I’m a zombie.
I wasn’t always undead—I used to be a normal young woman, trying to find my place in the world, dating a guy I thought was great (but really wasn’t, isn’t that always the case?) and working a fulfilling but stressful job. I worked in a hospital, helping people yet unable to help myself.
My death was no accident.
I signed papers and took an oath to serve my country two months out of high school, naïve enough to think that I was invincible and that my government would not betray me. Hovering over my mangled body, I scrutinize the CIA surgical team utilizing my remains to create another monster for their battalion of the living dead.
Looking back, Father Rotrou was probably the best priest Dunworth had ever seen, even if he was one of those good-for-nothing Frenchmen. He knew everyone’s name and how they took their tea, and his sermons tended to leave the children a shivering complacent wreck for several days after. When he died of typhus the townspeople put him to rest with a fond farewell, and thus it was doubly unfortunate when he appeared in the town square three days later wielding a shovel like a bludgeon and missing most of his skin.
Soft music and candle light set the mood as they gazed into each others eyes. “You’ve stolen my heart,” he whispered.
“Sorry, do you want it back?” she replied, lowering her eyes bashfully and holding it out for him to take.
Love this site!!
Entry for Zombie contest:
Lucas thought he was so cool.
What, with his ridiculous fake blood, (“Corn syrup,” he told me the first day I met him) and zombie makeup, he thought he could easily pass for one of the undead; I told him one day it would get him into trouble.
Unfortunately for me, I was with him on that day.
Must it be prose? Here’s a three sentence sonnet, perhaps the beginning of a book of monster poetry:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing, like the sun
has burned them out of her shapely skull,
but it’s only time has scraped her sockets
and left holes empty as souls and full
of night and secrets and wormy womanly love.
Her song’s a moaning howling thing ungainly,
melodies fresh as the brains she’s dreaming of;
the neighbors on our street react by mainly
running for the holy water or calling 911.
Her complexion at its best is somewhat mottled,
and her disconcerting rictus smiles in fun
when an innocent dinner-guest’s been throttled;
but when she dances slow to Norah Jones,
ah—to watch the lovely creaking of her bones!
Good fun! :
Bill and Jean really loved the idea at first; for Gus, there wouldn’t be any fighting for preschool spots, adolescent hormones or paying for college.
They hadn’t thought though, that with time and persistence Gus would walk, talk and get hungrier. And they might get too old to control him.
Cool! Here is mine. If I keep working on it I think I’ll call it TASTEFUL PUTREFICATION
My blasted thumb had gone missing again! I realize for most this isn’t a catastrophe since it would eventually resurface as do all lost items, like car keys or the remote. Tonight, however, was the gala opening of Festered Comestibles, and as it’s top chef I kind of needed two opposable thumbs to cook.