What I’m Reading: 4 APOCALYPSE WEIRD Novels

There’s a weird wind blowing this way. Apocalyptic, you might call it. In the words of author Stefan Bolz, Apocalypse Weird is the “Marvel universe of books for the digital age.”

As a subscriber to the Apocalypse Weird mailing list, I was offered ARCs (advance reader copies) of all five of the first flight of WYRD novels. The AW moderators are running a grand experiment here: take a broad topic—the end of the world, in this case—set up some basic plot waypoints, then turn each author loose to write her own full-length novel.

The result? A pantheon of work that feels genuine in author voice, but with each story adding to the overall world-building.

Join the AW Online Launch Party – Monday February 23, 2PM to 9PM PDT

If you’d like to be part of a grand, earth-shattering (pun intended) experiment, then hop aboard the Apocalypse Weird express. Each title is written as a standalone, so pick up whichever one strikes your fancy.

Here’s my thoughts on the first crop of Weird-os:

First up is Texocalypse Now, Digger 1.0, co-written by Michael Bunker and Nick Cole. The novel leads off with the event that ties all the stories together: a mysterious temporary blindness that comes over the world and brings modern life to a standstill. Planes fall out of the sky, cars run off the road, people freak out…you get the drift.

There are the usual tongue-in-cheek nuggets of Bunkerist social commentary—the popular weight loss drug Slenderex turned all its users into a ravenous horde of protein-seeking zombies, for example. (For more on Michael Bunker’s unique worldview, read my review of his Amish sci-fi novel, PENNSYLVANIA). But mostly this is Bunker-Cole at their best, with fast cuts between visceral action sequences as they keep up a blistering narrative pace.

In the power vacuum of the post-Blindness world, new leaders emerge. There’s The Baron, an ex-smuggler, now the ruler of the Scraps and salvager-in-chief. Reyes Badfinger leads a band of pillaging bikers. On the side of goodness, a young man named Ellis tries to hold together a family of orphans in a hidden valley. And then there’s “the Man in Black. Mayhem,” literally the personification of evil.

Bunker and Cole are founders of the Apocalypse Weird universe, and I suggest you start with this story first. You will not be disappointed.

EE Giorgi turns her scientific mind to deliver Immunity, a chilling tale of global pandemic. The story is told primarily through the eyes of David, a thrash metal-loving computer programmer who has been offered a job at a remote government lab in the middle of the desert.
In my review of her medical thriller, Chimeras, I raved about Giorgi’s prose, and she hasn’t lost her touch, tossing in phrases like, “Dawn snuck up on him like a mugger.” But her true calling is in making the fictional science both real and terrifying. When the evil Stein is about to seed the epidemic, he reflects:

The full potential has always been with influenza. Tiny particles could travel from one person to the next through aerosol—doesn’t get any better than that. Make them deadly and suddenly you’ve turned a sneeze into a machine gun.

In Giorgi’s world, we see little of the supernatural, just bad humans using science as a weapon against their fellow man—and that somehow makes the possibilities even more horrific.

Canadian scientist Jennifer Ellis goes North—all the way North—in her AW novel, Reversal, Polar WYRD – Book 1. Set at an arctic research station, the story is told through Sasha, one of the environmental researchers. Ellis fills her book with demons who can morph into humans, giant steaming craters that form in the frozen ground, and mysterious fogs that can move people back and forth between the poles of the Earth.

She even introduces us to one of the Four Horsemen of the New Apocalypse, affectionately know as Paul:

Hab, Ove, and Dev. You can call me Paul for short.” Sasha must have looked completely bamboozled because Paul gave a snort of impatience. “Habitat destruction. Overpopulation and Development. I thought you were an environmental specialist.

By playing off the headlines of today and adding in a heaping spoonful of demonic spice, Ellis mixes up an apocalyptic stew that will satisfy your reading taste buds. (OK, I may have stretched that metaphor a teensy bit too far.)

Chris Pourteau goes in a different direction: he makes the apocalypse intimate. Set against the backdrop of a failing marriage, The Serenity Strain tells the story of Mark, a manager at a traffic management center in Houston. Just listen to his first few lines: The sex had grown stale. Perfunctory even. Two people scratching an itch, and scratching lazily at that. …That was the first, obvious sign to Mark Hughes that his marriage to Lauryn was going bad.

Mark’s story, spun out over the course of a week as three hurricanes devastate the Houston area, is sprinkled with little flashbacks about happier times—even as the world falls apart around him. On the dark side is Marsten, a vicious inmate who has been given a gene therapy trial to curb his violent tendencies. (Spoiler alert: the drug doesn’t work.) Marsten breaks out of prison and sets off on a carnival of carnage that had me swallowing hard at times.

Like Bunker, Pourteau personifies his evil in the form of Id, a goddess literally born of the storm, sent to prepare the way for He Who Was To Come. Id meets Marsten and his band of ne’er-do-wells for a satanic baptism that is all sorts of creepy:

He smelled stardust and sex and the death of the grave on her breath. He felt the worms under his flesh again, only this time they drew patterns on his arm, which she clasped so firmly in her own. The worms and the fire and the nearness of her body made him roar aloud in the barren emptiness.

See what I mean? The way Pourteau tells the story through the characters—even the dark ones—lent an intimacy to the tale that made this book really hard to put down.

There is a fifth AW title, The Dark Knight, by Nick Cole that is on standby on my kindle. I’m told it’s awfully good. Cole's novel is a sequel to The Red Knight, released last November to kick of the Apocalypse Weird mayhem.

This post wouldn't be complete without a mention of the fabulous cover art. Mike Corley really does a masterful job of giving each cover a sense of the story as well as a universal AW theme.

I can easily imagine these covers as posters.

Sequels, Anyone?

All of the titles I've talked about today are the 1.0 stories. As such, they all end on an air of “what’s next?” If that wasn't gorgeous enough, there’s another crop of writers with all-new Apocalypse Weird novels coming out in the near future.

How Can I Get In On The WEIRD-ness?

Attend the APOCALYPSE WEIRD ONLINE LAUNCH PARTY tomorrow, February 23rd from 2PM to 9PM PDT. Meet the authors, win some swag, or even pitch your own AW story.

See you there!

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David Bruns is the creator of the sci-fi series The Dream Guild Chronicles, and one half of the Two Navy Guys and a Novel blog series about co-writing the military thriller, Weapons of Mass Deception, coming in May 2015.

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