Happy Hour of the Damned [Paperback]

Mark Henry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2008

Seattle. One minute you're drinking a vanilla breve, the next, some creepy old dude is breathing on you, turning you into a zombie. And that's just for starters. Now, the recently deceased Amanda Feral is trying to make her way through Seattle's undead scene with style (mortuary-grade makeup, six-inch stilettos, Balenciaga handbag on sale) while satisfying her craving for human flesh (Don't judge. And no, not like chicken.) and decent vodkatinis.Making her way through a dangerous world of cloud-doped bloodsuckers, reapers, horny and horned devils, werewolves, celebrities, and PR-obsessed shapeshifters - not to mention an extremely hot bartender named Ricardo - isn't easy. And the minute one of Amanda's undead friends disappears after texting the word, "help" (The undead - so dramatic!) she knows the afterlife is about to get really ugly.Something sinister is at hand. Someone or something is hell bent on turning Seattle's undead underworld into a place of true terror. And this time, Amanda may meet a fate a lot worse than death...

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Call them the splatterati--werewolves who always know what to wear, zombies with bodies to die for, and vampires who know their fang shui--just don't call them late when it comes to happy hour, or the drinks might be on you."

About the Author

Mark Henry recently traded a career in the helping profession to scar minds with his fiction. He attributes his ideas to premature exposure to horror movies, and/or witnessing adult cocktail parties in the '70s. He's been further formed by surviving earthquakes, typhoons, and two volcanic eruptions. Happy Hour Of The Damned is his first novel. He, surprisingly, lives and breathes today in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and two dogs.

Product Details

• Paperback: 307 pages
• Publisher: Kensington; 1ST edition (March 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0758225229
• ISBN-13: 978-0758225221
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (69 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,261,294 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mark traded a career in the helping profession to scar minds with his fiction. He attributes his ideas to premature exposure to horror movies, and/or witnessing adult cocktail parties in the '70s. His development has been further skewed by surviving earthquakes, typhoons, and two volcanic eruptions. Despite being disaster prone, he somehow continues to live and breathe. Residing in the oft maligned, yet not nearly as soggy as you'd think, Pacific Northwest, with his wife and two furry monsters that think they're children.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hey, watch it with the blood! These Manolos are new., February 26, 2008

By 

Richelle Mead "Author Type Person" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Happy Hour of the Damned (Paperback)

If you're like me, you've always thought that the hot, flirty action on Sex and the City was missing one essential thing: humans getting eaten by zombies. Finally, someone has breached the gap in that field of entertainment, and his name is Mark Henry.

Happy Hour of the Damned follows ad exec Amanda Feral as she adjusts to life as one of the living dead, following an unfortunate slip in a parking lot. Amanda's a sassy, no-nonsense heroine with a taste for both quality fashion and human flesh. Her friends, vampire Gil and zombie Wendy, are fantastic, and the trio provides non-stop wit and banter as they unravel the mystery of what's happened to a missing friend.

Mark's easy writing style captures Amanda's voice perfectly and makes this urban fantasy book hard to put down. If you like your humor a little dark and twisted, you've come to the right place--and you'll never look at Starbucks the same way again.

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read This Book, February 26, 2008

By 

Jackie Kessler "Demon Author" (Upstate New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Happy Hour of the Damned (Paperback)

In case you missed it above:

"Gruesome, ghoulish and utterly groundbreaking. Mark Henry is daring and scathingly funny." --Jackie Kessler

I really, really enjoyed this book. It's dark and macabre, and seriously twisted -- which in my world makes it damn near perfect. Amanda isn't your average heroine. She's unapologetically biting -- both in her humor and her food choices -- and she's got a brutal fashion sense and a fine appreciation for booze. What makes the story really work for me is that Amanda is more than a well-dressed vehicle for a scathing one-liner: she changes over the course of the book. She grows, bless her dead little heart.

Like I said, the humor is dark. If EVIL DEAD is your thing, I bet you'll love this book.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "no it doesn't taste like chicken", December 23, 2008

By 

Rachel P. Smith "BittenbyBooks.com" (Nashville, TN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Happy Hour of the Damned (Paperback)

Another day, another book read. Today's review is about a new book by Mark Henry a fellow Seattleite. Amazingly enough the book is set in Seattle as well. Ok not amazing, but cool none the less! Happy Hour of the Damned is an urban fantasy about modern day and oh so hip celebrity ghoul (read zombie) Amanda Feral and her adventures as one of Seattle's newly undead. You really have to admit Feral is a perfect last name for a zombie!

Let me start by saying that zombies are really not my thing, and more than once felt myself fighting back a dry heave, upon reading some of the flesh eating, putrefying commentary. There was a line about a guy munching on an ear like a potato chip that almost did me in LOL. Give me a vampire and a little blood sucking any day! Pus and exploding bowels...not so much. It gives the phrase "no it doesn't taste like chicken" a whole new meaning. Thankfully there are also vampires, werewolves, and a few succubi involved in the storyline. Despite my initial squeamishness, I dug in and really got into this groovy tale.

I think none of you will be surprised that Starbuck's is featured and is at the center of a plot for global destruction. I commented to Mark that I would never look at bucky's the same after reading this great book. Our local Safeway barista really has an undead look to her gaze. <shudder>

Amanda is a hip and sassy undead fashionista with a skin care regimen to make Liz Taylor proud. Really, even I learned some things from her!

This book was a slower read for me than usual. for the most part I can knock out a book in just a few hours. One thing that is different that slowed me down were a lot of footnotes. Pretty much on every page. But these weren't your regular footnotes denoting resources, but a running commentary on whatever was going on. So, you have to read them to get the deeper nuances of some of the humor Mark presents. Since my normal Ellen Woodhead Sped Redding course mode of reading so fast I barely see the pages move wasn't working, I found myself forgetting the footnotes and then remembering and having to go back. It isn't critical that you read them, but they definitely add another dimension.

The humor presented in this book is definitely scathing and razor sharp. I pride myself on being fairly quick witted (no commentary from the Peanut Gallery needed thank you very much), but even I missed a few things that were thrown in, only to realize later what I had missed. So, it was good for a fun read, during and after. I am still chuckling about a few things. Plus I have a few new cocktail recipes to boot!

While I won't be going out and digging up (ha ha) any new sources of Zombie reading material, I cannot WAIT for the next installment in the Amanda Feral chronicles "Road Trip of the Living Dead".

Reviewed at Bitten by Books Paranormal Fiction Review Site by Rachel
The Bitten by Books review score for this book was 4.5 Tombstones