Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know
Of)
by F.J.R. Titchenell
Genre: YA Horror-Comedy
Release Date: April 4th 2017
by F.J.R. Titchenell
Genre: YA Horror-Comedy
Release Date: April 4th 2017
Summary:
The world is Cassie Fremont’s
playground. Her face is on the cover of every newspaper. She has no homework,
no curfew, and no credit limit, and she spends her days traveling the country
with her friends, including a boy who would do the chicken dance with death to
make her smile. Life is just about perfect—except that those newspaper
headlines are about her bludgeoning her crush to death with a paintball gun,
she has to fight ravenous walking corpses every time she steps outside, and one
of her friends is still missing, trapped somewhere in the distant, practically
impassable wreckage of Manhattan. Still, Cassie’s an optimist, more prone to
hysterical laughter than hysterical tears, and she’d rather fight a corpse than
be one. She’ll never leave a friend stranded when she can simply take her road
trip to impossible new places, even if getting there means admitting to that
boy that she might love him as more than her personal jester. Skillfully
blending effective horror with unexpected humor, this diary-style novel is a
fast-paced and heartwarming read.
Advance
Praise:
“Heartbreak, humor, a very large number of crushed skulls
and even romance ensue . . . . Readers who don’t mind a little brain spatter on
the windshield will be happy they took this particular trip.” —Kirkus
Reviews.
“You know
when you read a book about teens and you think the author just didn’t get it?
Well, F.J.R. Titchenell gets video gaming, paintballing, Vespa riding, teenage
tomboy angst, true love, the uses of theater paint—oh, and killing zombies.”
—Lehua Parker, author of the Nene Award-nominated Niuhi Shark
Saga.
“The story
is fast, filled with dark humor, and lots of blood and guts.” —All
Things Urban Fantasy.
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Excerpt
The day’s first light made it possible to see the few small
columns of smoke rising from the houses that were burning unchecked, without
interfering with the starkly perfect outlines of the patchwork power
outages.
It reminded me a little of the mornings after bad earthquakes
or storms, with one important difference. All of those mornings had been the
calm after, when the damage is assessed and rebuilding
begins.
This was what you would get if you took one of those mornings,
shrank it down, and sprinkled it with monster insect larvae. The whole valley
still wriggled, not with normal, productive human activity, but with continuing
disaster.
From the mountain police station’s height, I couldn’t see
every detail of the walls and windows and gardens that had been torn apart in
the single-minded attempts to reach the live people barricaded beyond. I
could see the movement of the bodies that were doing the
tearing. It was that same determined, methodical destruction from the
broadcasts, heedless of the rule that said bad things were supposed to be gone
when the sun came out.
The police presence was still visible too, but it was sort of
like a spiderweb in the path of a garden spigot, impressive only in its
optimistic persistence. The little clusters of blue lights stood out against
the sea of red because, oh yeah, here’s the important part: The streets were
completely, bumper-to-bumper, Super Bowl stacked parking lot
packed.
I’ve been late for school more than once because just one
traffic light was out, or one road was blocked with accident debris, or someone
was getting busted on too public a sidewalk, begging everyone to slow down to
stare.
All of those things were happening fifty times over at once in
the valley that morning, and that’s why, even though the car’s aging GPS might
theoretically have been able to lead me home, I turned back onto the road
leading back up the mountain, back in the direction of the campgrounds and
resort.
Well, “turn” is actually an excessively graceful word for what
I did. It doesn’t quite conjure up the grinding sound of the few seconds
between finding the reverse and noticing the parking break, or the screeching
flash of sparks when the bumper clipped a metal gate on the way out, but the
end result was mostly the same.
My chosen route wasn’t completely abandoned, but most of the
other cars I passed were headed down instead of up, or pulled over to the
sides, either with their hoods open or with their occupants simply staring at
the bleak scene below. I passed them with the siren on, trying to look taller,
wishing I’d taken a uniform shirt to cover my stained, grey tank top, but no
one looked at me closely enough for it to matter. A sight that might have
raised eyebrows on any other day was just part of the chaotic background noise
now, a minute scrap of help already claimed by someone
else.
Really, considering the fact that this
was
1: My first time driving
alone
2: My first time driving practically at
night
3: My first time driving mountain
roads
4: My first time driving during a state of
emergency
5: My first time driving on roads full of human-sized walking
obstacles that don’t try to stay out of your way, and
6: My first time driving, ever,
I think I did a pretty good
job.
In a way, my lack of conditioning actually seemed to be an
advantage. I’m pretty sure most of the other people out driving had figured out
what the zombies were, but some old, irrevocably instilled instinct made it
really hard to run them down. One guy coming down the other lane in front of me
swerved so hard to avoid one that he drove headlong into the face of the
mountain. I didn’t mind accelerating when it ran out in front of me and ripped
off one of my windshield wipers, but I couldn’t help muttering under my breath
as I did so, “seventeen.”
Seventeen murders, if people wouldn’t admit that these things
weren’t alive in the first place, or just one instance of manslaughter if they
would, I counted off in my head, plus escaping police custody, grand theft
auto, driving without a license, oh, and plain old grand theft if you counted
Suprbat and the rest of the stuff on the passenger seat. And I was pretty sure
that precisely not a single one of those things would end up
mattering.
One way or another, life was definitely never going to be the
same.
But like I always do when annoyingly big, smothering thoughts
like that one start creeping into my head, I looked extra hard at the moment
right in front of me, and I was getting all ready to pat myself on the back for
finding the resort safely, with all four tires intact and two hubcaps still in
place, angled neatly between the white lines and everything, when I gave the
brake an extra tap, only it turned out not to be the brake, and the world
disappeared into darkness and stars as the airbag claimed the space I’d been
sitting in.
About the Author
F.J.R. Titchenell is an author of young
adult, sci-fi, and horror fiction. She graduated with a B.A in English from
California State University, Los Angeles, in 2009 at the age of twenty, is
represented by Fran Black of Literary Counsel, and currently lives in San
Gabriel, California with her husband and fellow author, Matt Carter, and their
pet king snake, Mica.
The "F" is for Fiona, and on the
rare occasions when she can be pried away from her keyboard, her kindle, and
the pages of her latest favorite book, Fi can usually be found over-analyzing
the inner workings of various TV Sci-Fi universes or testing out some
intriguing new recipe, usually chocolate-related.
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