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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