Saturday, March 9, 2013

Zombies of Byzantium


Taking place in Byzantium (the Eastern Roman Empire) in 717 A.D., Zombies of Byzantium is the story of Stephen Diabetenos, a young monk who specializes in painting icons. Sent to a neighboring monastery to replace a dead painter, Stephen and his friend Theophilus happen upon a small country village that has been hideously ravaged by the undead. After a pitched battle with the ghouls at a local inn, Stephen and Theophilus decide they must hurry to Constantinople, the capital, to warn Emperor Leo III about the outbreak of undead flesh-eaters and appeal to him to send a Byzantine legion to destroy them. Unfortunately Leo has other things on his mind–such as the impending siege of Constantinople by the Saracens, the Byzantines’ mortal enemies. When Leo decides he can kill two birds with one stone by using the ghouls as a weapon against the Saracens, all hell breaks loose–with very bloody results!

How about a little taste of what this book is about with part of this excerpt:

I’ll skip over the details of my last weeks at Chenolakkos. I finished the icon, it was delivered to the fat old rich man in Nicaea, I packed up my stuff and Theophilus made ready to accompany me on the road to Constantinople. We left on a warm morning in mid-June. Our path would take us down out of the mountains, past Nicaea and northward toward Kios, where (I hoped) we could catch a boat to Constantinople. We traveled light. I brought only a small leather shoulder bag containing my paints and a Bible. Theophilus brought an extra cassock and one blanket. We had no food other than a few scraps of bread. Between us we had only a few gold solidi in a leather drawstring purse that Theophilus insisted on carrying. It would probably be a four-day journey to Kios and who knew how long after that. We’d be depending on the Christian kindness of strangers and innkeepers to sustain us along the way.
 

Theophilus was a perfectly humorless man. Dressed winter or summer in a long thick black cloak and hood, he had long snow-white hair and a scraggly beard reaching down to his chest. In the six years I’d been at Chenolakkos, I’d heard the old guy say three words, and “Amen” was two of them. Even that morning as we set off from the monastery he said nothing. At the start of the old cobbled road leading down from the hills we paused, looking up at the blocky building with its bell tower and single gnarled turret, and I remarked, “You’ll probably be back, Theophilus, but I doubt I’ll see the place ever again. Makes you think, you know?”

He looked back at the monastery, but then turned his head, planted his walking stick (which was a foot taller than he was) and moved past me toward the road. Theophilus didn’t strike me as the sentimental type, and surely he’d return after dropping me off at Constantinople, but I doubt he’d been outside the walls of the monastery in years and you’d think he’d have something to say about it. When he remained impassively silent, I realized that I was going to have to entertain myself on this trip.

Finish reading the excerpt at:



And then you can get a copy of the book at: 





And get prepared for another zombie book from author Sean Munger coming in 2014. Check out the details here:


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