They Rise...Out of the flooded streets of Houston, they emerge from plague-ridden waters. Dead. Rotting. Hungry. And as human survivors scramble to their rooftops for safety, the zombie hordes circle like sharks. The ultimate killing machines. They Feed...Houston is quarantined to halt the spread of the zombie plague. Anyone trying to escape is shot on sight - living and dead. Emergency Ops sergeant Eleanor Norton has her work cut out for her. Salvaging boats and gathering explosives, Eleanor and her team struggle to maintain order. But when civilization finally breaks down, the feeding frenzy begins. They Multiply...Biting, gnawing, feasting - but always craving more - the flesheaters increase their ranks every hour. With doomsday looming, Eleanor must focus on the people she loves - her husband and daughter - and a band of other survivors adrift in zombie-infested waters. If she can't bring them into the quarantine zone, they're all dead meat.
Flesh Eaters
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From the Author
CHILDHOOD FEARS, GROWNUP REALITY
In my day job I'm a sergeant in the San Antonio Police Department, and over the past twelve years I've gotten to do a little bit of everything a cop can do. I've been a patrolman, a disaster mitigation specialist, a homicide detective and an administrator. But I'm also a writer, and a lot of people have a hard time reconciling those two occupations. Especially when they find out I write horror. "Why?" they ask. "And why zombies for God's sake?"
To answer that, I have to turn back to the summer of 1983. I was fourteen. That summer gave me two landmarks in my education. The first was George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, a movie that scared the ever-loving crap out of me. I watched it one night on cable and slept cradling a baseball bat for the next month. No movie had ever done that to me before, and very few have done it since.
And then, just when I thought I had experienced real fear, Hurricane Alicia made landfall. I grew up in Clear Lake City, a little suburb south of Houston. We were just across the lake from the mouth of the Houston Ship Channel and the numerous shrimp camps down along the coast, and we were square in the path of the storm.
I spent all night in a closet, listening to the storm trying its hardest to rip my house from its foundation and send it sailing off like a kite. The next morning, I went to the front door and looked out over a sea of muddy water. Every roof was missing shingles. Trees were toppled. Cars and trucks were submerged to their roofs. I saw a water moccasin glide through the swing set in my neighbor's back yard. And at the entrance to my subdivision was a sixty foot shrimp boat that had been carried seven miles inland by the storm surge. The destruction was staggering, and for a boy of fourteen, it felt a bit like the world had been turned upside down.
Of course, my fear didn't last long. Later that day my best friend came by in a canoe and we paddled all around the neighborhood, acting like river explorers heading up the Amazon in search of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. It was a blast.
Nearly three decades have gone by since that summer, and a lot has happened. I've built a career in one of the most dangerous professions out there. I've become a father, raising two lovely children in a world that grows scarier every day. I've carved out a life for myself and my family. Doing that puts a hard grain of independence in a man's personality. It makes him proud. But it also makes him vulnerable. And I'm no exception: scared to death for the future, but too obstinate to let it show.
And that's why, when I set out to write about the world I knew, to tell the kind of stories I felt simmering inside me, the words came out as horror. I don't pretend to understand how that psychological alchemy happens. For me, the stories have never been about the horrors themselves, but about struggling to be human in a world that is increasingly strange and hostile. It is about finding beauty and peace in spite of all the obstacles thrown in our way. That, for me, is why horror works. It isn't about monsters. It's about hope and humanity surviving against extraordinary odds. That's why horror clicks with me.
My zombie horror novel Flesh Eaters is the third installment in the Dead World series. If you've read Dead City and Apocalypse of the Dead, the first two books, then you're familiar with the world of my zombie apocalypse. If not, you're still in good shape, because this book is the beginning. This is where it all got started. And I think it's fitting that the story pays respects to the fears of my youth. That's why it's about storms, and zombies.
But the story also mirrors my present day reality, for each of the main characters is a cop struggling to do the right thing in a world that is morally complicated and often savagely cruel. How does one stay afloat in a world like that? Flesh Eaters doesn't have the one true answer, because I don't think there is a one true answer, but I hope that it talks to readers about the things that are really important. Like honor. And duty. And most of all, family.
Perhaps you agree. Or perhaps your priorities are different. Either way, I hope this book makes you ask questions about what's important to you. But no matter how you answer, I hope you enjoy the apocalypse!
In my day job I'm a sergeant in the San Antonio Police Department, and over the past twelve years I've gotten to do a little bit of everything a cop can do. I've been a patrolman, a disaster mitigation specialist, a homicide detective and an administrator. But I'm also a writer, and a lot of people have a hard time reconciling those two occupations. Especially when they find out I write horror. "Why?" they ask. "And why zombies for God's sake?"
To answer that, I have to turn back to the summer of 1983. I was fourteen. That summer gave me two landmarks in my education. The first was George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, a movie that scared the ever-loving crap out of me. I watched it one night on cable and slept cradling a baseball bat for the next month. No movie had ever done that to me before, and very few have done it since.
And then, just when I thought I had experienced real fear, Hurricane Alicia made landfall. I grew up in Clear Lake City, a little suburb south of Houston. We were just across the lake from the mouth of the Houston Ship Channel and the numerous shrimp camps down along the coast, and we were square in the path of the storm.
I spent all night in a closet, listening to the storm trying its hardest to rip my house from its foundation and send it sailing off like a kite. The next morning, I went to the front door and looked out over a sea of muddy water. Every roof was missing shingles. Trees were toppled. Cars and trucks were submerged to their roofs. I saw a water moccasin glide through the swing set in my neighbor's back yard. And at the entrance to my subdivision was a sixty foot shrimp boat that had been carried seven miles inland by the storm surge. The destruction was staggering, and for a boy of fourteen, it felt a bit like the world had been turned upside down.
Of course, my fear didn't last long. Later that day my best friend came by in a canoe and we paddled all around the neighborhood, acting like river explorers heading up the Amazon in search of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. It was a blast.
Nearly three decades have gone by since that summer, and a lot has happened. I've built a career in one of the most dangerous professions out there. I've become a father, raising two lovely children in a world that grows scarier every day. I've carved out a life for myself and my family. Doing that puts a hard grain of independence in a man's personality. It makes him proud. But it also makes him vulnerable. And I'm no exception: scared to death for the future, but too obstinate to let it show.
And that's why, when I set out to write about the world I knew, to tell the kind of stories I felt simmering inside me, the words came out as horror. I don't pretend to understand how that psychological alchemy happens. For me, the stories have never been about the horrors themselves, but about struggling to be human in a world that is increasingly strange and hostile. It is about finding beauty and peace in spite of all the obstacles thrown in our way. That, for me, is why horror works. It isn't about monsters. It's about hope and humanity surviving against extraordinary odds. That's why horror clicks with me.
My zombie horror novel Flesh Eaters is the third installment in the Dead World series. If you've read Dead City and Apocalypse of the Dead, the first two books, then you're familiar with the world of my zombie apocalypse. If not, you're still in good shape, because this book is the beginning. This is where it all got started. And I think it's fitting that the story pays respects to the fears of my youth. That's why it's about storms, and zombies.
But the story also mirrors my present day reality, for each of the main characters is a cop struggling to do the right thing in a world that is morally complicated and often savagely cruel. How does one stay afloat in a world like that? Flesh Eaters doesn't have the one true answer, because I don't think there is a one true answer, but I hope that it talks to readers about the things that are really important. Like honor. And duty. And most of all, family.
Perhaps you agree. Or perhaps your priorities are different. Either way, I hope this book makes you ask questions about what's important to you. But no matter how you answer, I hope you enjoy the apocalypse!
About the Author
Joe McKinney is the author of numerous horror, crime, and science fiction novels, including Quarantined, Dodging Bullets, and the four-part Dead World series, which consists of Dead City, Apocalypse of the Dead, Flesh Eaters, and Mutated. He has a master's degree in English literature from the University of Texas at San Antonio, and has worked as a homicide detective and a disaster mitigation specialist for the San Antonio Police Department. Joe lives north of San Antonio with his wife and children. Todd McLaren was involved in radio for more than twenty years in cities on both coasts, including Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. He left broadcasting for a full-time career in voice-overs, where he has been heard on more than 5,000 TV and radio commercials, as well as TV promos; narrations for documentaries on such networks as A&E, Discovery, and the History Channel; and films, including Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
--This text refers to the
Audio CD
edition.
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More About the Author
Joe McKinney has been a patrol officer for the San Antonio Police Department, a homicide detective, a disaster mitigation specialist, a patrol commander, and a successful novelist. His books include the four part Dead World series, Quarantined, Inheritance, Lost Girl of the Lake, Crooked House and Dodging Bullets. His short fiction has been collected in The Red Empire and Other Stories and Dating in Dead World and Other Stories. In 2011, McKinney received the Horror Writers Association's Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel. For more information go to http://joemckinney.wordpress.com.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
By Michaelbrent
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
... what zombie stories should be about.
This story is not about zombies. It's not about blood and guts, it's not even about a devastating set of storms that flood southern Texas and reshape the Gulf of Mexico seaboard. It HAS all those things, but it isn't ABOUT them.
What it is about, first and foremost, is people.
Far too many writers of horror in general, and zombie stories in particular, think that the horror comes from the situation, and so they splash gore and foul language and viscera about with abandon, never understanding that horror only succeeds when it is happening TO someone that the readers care about. Joe McKinney never makes that mistake. In this unflinchingly terrifying book, the zombies are merely one more in a set of terrible obstacles that face both families and villains, heroes and scum. Indeed, even without the zombies this book would have been frightful, because the reader is made to understand what makes the characters tick, and then McKinney slowly puts those characters through purposeful paces. Some of the people unravel, some of them rise above tragedy to blossom into beauty. But the reader CARES about all of them.
This book is also horrifying in its scope. Though rooted in the experiences of certain individuals and groups, it is a truly apocalyptic tale. Like King's THE STAND and McCammon's SWAN SONG, the book is one about an entire world entering a serious and permanent change. It is the kind of book that puts you into its situations so fully that you find your heart racing, your breath coming in shallow gasps as you become an eyewitness to a paradigm shift in culture, in geography, in civilization itself. You can't help but wonder if you would be a survivor in such a scenario... or if you'd even WANT to be one.
Though there is gore enough to satisfy any zombie aficionado, though ribs snap and blood flows, though teeth gnash and chomp on innocent and guilty alike, the visceral thrills are handled carefully - even clinically at times - which only serves to intensify the fright as the reader is forced to participate in imagining what it would be like to live in (and hopefully through) a zombie apocalypse.
As a horror writer myself, it's doubly hard for me to just sink in and enjoy a good scary book, because all too often I am admiring (or irritated by) the author's words, the author's style, the author's particular voice. In this case, I simply forgot myself in a great tale, and spent a few long nights cramming in "just one more chapter."
All in all, this is a wonderful book. McKinney won a Bram Stoker award for Best Novel in 2012 for FLESH EATERS. For my money, it was well deserved.
This story is not about zombies. It's not about blood and guts, it's not even about a devastating set of storms that flood southern Texas and reshape the Gulf of Mexico seaboard. It HAS all those things, but it isn't ABOUT them.
What it is about, first and foremost, is people.
Far too many writers of horror in general, and zombie stories in particular, think that the horror comes from the situation, and so they splash gore and foul language and viscera about with abandon, never understanding that horror only succeeds when it is happening TO someone that the readers care about. Joe McKinney never makes that mistake. In this unflinchingly terrifying book, the zombies are merely one more in a set of terrible obstacles that face both families and villains, heroes and scum. Indeed, even without the zombies this book would have been frightful, because the reader is made to understand what makes the characters tick, and then McKinney slowly puts those characters through purposeful paces. Some of the people unravel, some of them rise above tragedy to blossom into beauty. But the reader CARES about all of them.
This book is also horrifying in its scope. Though rooted in the experiences of certain individuals and groups, it is a truly apocalyptic tale. Like King's THE STAND and McCammon's SWAN SONG, the book is one about an entire world entering a serious and permanent change. It is the kind of book that puts you into its situations so fully that you find your heart racing, your breath coming in shallow gasps as you become an eyewitness to a paradigm shift in culture, in geography, in civilization itself. You can't help but wonder if you would be a survivor in such a scenario... or if you'd even WANT to be one.
Though there is gore enough to satisfy any zombie aficionado, though ribs snap and blood flows, though teeth gnash and chomp on innocent and guilty alike, the visceral thrills are handled carefully - even clinically at times - which only serves to intensify the fright as the reader is forced to participate in imagining what it would be like to live in (and hopefully through) a zombie apocalypse.
As a horror writer myself, it's doubly hard for me to just sink in and enjoy a good scary book, because all too often I am admiring (or irritated by) the author's words, the author's style, the author's particular voice. In this case, I simply forgot myself in a great tale, and spent a few long nights cramming in "just one more chapter."
All in all, this is a wonderful book. McKinney won a Bram Stoker award for Best Novel in 2012 for FLESH EATERS. For my money, it was well deserved.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful
By Noelle
Format:Mass Market Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I waited for months, anticipating Joe's latest, as I've loved his work. But certain elements in this one just didn't work. Who would fight over money in a dying city being taken over by zombies? Humans make pale bad guys compared to the infected. Joe it's your characters we love, not plot twists that don't matter in a world gone zombie.
8 of 11 people found the following review helpful
By travb
Format:Mass Market Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I read and loved Joe McKinney's Apocalypse of the Dead and
Dead City. This book should have the word "hurricane" in the title, because 80% of the book talks about the hurricane. Unlike McKinney's other two books, there is very little action in this book until the very, very end. The book is very well written but extremely slow.
*SPOILER* *SPOILER* *SPOILER* *SPOILER* *SPOILER*
The heroine takes the moral high ground and chastises the crooked cops for robbing the bank, yet she stills the money from the crooked cops and uses it to successfully escape the zombie zone. Rather hypocritical.
Dead City. This book should have the word "hurricane" in the title, because 80% of the book talks about the hurricane. Unlike McKinney's other two books, there is very little action in this book until the very, very end. The book is very well written but extremely slow.
*SPOILER* *SPOILER* *SPOILER* *SPOILER* *SPOILER*
The heroine takes the moral high ground and chastises the crooked cops for robbing the bank, yet she stills the money from the crooked cops and uses it to successfully escape the zombie zone. Rather hypocritical.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Awesome
Joe McKinney's books are master pieces. All of his books are great, you have to read them in order, but even if you don't you catch on fast. Read more
Published 5 days ago by Rachel Stulberger
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another great book
I really enjoy McKinney's books. Very entertaining for a hardcore zombie fan. I can't wait until the next captivating book.
Published 2 months ago by Shawn
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good story
This book was a great read, engaging, good characters, nice story line. Everything I want in a good zombie tale.
Published 2 months ago by Kendra Bauser
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great story line
The Flesh Eaters has an excellent story line, it's well written, excellent character development and very few grammatical errors. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Sickpup94
4.0 out of 5 stars
Stay out of the water...
Flesh Eaters (Dead World series #3) is fantastic zombie fiction. Habitual readers of the Undead genre and fans of McKinney are not disappointed with his work. Read more
Published 3 months ago by John B.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great author, Good book!
Once again Joe McKinney does not disappoint with his zombie tales. This book keeps you on the edge of your seat. Fast paced, great action, great characters. Read more
Published 3 months ago by zombieluvajenny
2.0 out of 5 stars
Boring, overwritten, unlikable cardboard characters (audiobook review)
This is a real snoozer. It's overwritten, taking forever for anything even remotely horror-related to happen. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Baron Von Cool
2.0 out of 5 stars
Adept, but unfortunately nothing special
How could I skip a zombie story that won the Bram Stoker Award for best novel? Perhaps this set my expectations too high, but I was sorely disappointed. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Drake Vaughn
5.0 out of 5 stars
Loved it!
I loved every page! This series has me hooked! I get to the last few chapters and feel a sence of sadness that its almost over and then I'd have nothing to read till the next book... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Tatianna Flores
5.0 out of 5 stars
Loved It!
I love Joe McKinney's books as he injects philosophy into pop culture. My guilty pleasure isn't so guilty! I've gone on to read all his books.
Published 6 months ago by Angie Pangey
