New Apocalypse Weird book release: Genesis, by Stefan Bolz

Apocalypse Weird is still in full publishing mode, with April featuring two new book releases: Medium Talent, by Forbes West (featured on the blog last week), and Genesis, by Stefan Bolz, author of The Three Feathers and The Fourth Sage.

This is the story of the very beginning of an apocalyptic event as seen through the eyes of an eighteen-year-old girl. Nothing could have prepared her for what is about to happen and she has to face some seriously tough stuff before the end. During the thirty-six hours of terror that turn Kasey Byrne's life upside down and strip her of everything dear to her, something inside her awakens. It is gift and curse alike for it can destroy her or turn her into the most powerful weapon against the evil that has reached the shores of our world.

Stefan is here today to tell us more about the book. Welcome, Stefan!

EEG: Tell us about the inspiration behind Genesis.

SB: It all started when Nick Cole sent me the document describing Apocalypse Weird. The apocalyptic event popped into my head almost immediately. It was something I had thought about for a while (what, you don't think about the apocalypse in your free time? ;-). I wanted to have something happen that was scary and would most likely leave people in emotional shock. I've taken a lot of screenwriting classes over the years and one of the many techniques in those classes is called, "The innocent is brought to slaughter." You can find it in many novels and movies as a story archetype. I would probably be pretty scared if I'd wake up on the beach in the morning and see hundreds, if not thousands of dolphins in shallow waters, refusing to swim back out to sea and dying in front of my very eyes.

The story developed from there, almost in real time as the event unfolded minute by minute. I came to think of it as a supernatural episode of 24. Except Chloe O'Brian is the main character. "Damnit, Chloe!" :-)

EEG: Can you introduce each one of the main characters in just a few words?

SB: Kasey Byrne is the main character. The night of her 18th birthday, which is also summer solstice, is when the end begins... Until then, she was just a regular teenager who loved baseball and surfing and life in general.

Jack Reeves is her love interest. He's a nice guy who will be having a very rough time in the book. We writers are evil, wouldn't you agree? We do all kinds of stuff to our main characters and then we wonder why they don't invite us to their graduation party. I've read this fantasy series a while back called "Wizard's First Rule" by Terry Goodkind. I believe it was in the second book where the reader finds a torture scene that lasts some forty pages. This somehow stuck with me. And now, poor Jack Reeves, a really nice guy from Albuquerque, who just met this really nice gal who's into baseball and surfing and life in general, is getting a first-hand experience of what it means to be tortured by a shape shifter demon who looks like his mom.

Aarika and Blair are two guys who join up with Kasey later on in the book. They are funny at times, scared to death at others, and generally really brave in the face of overwhelming evil.

Jennifer Wang is a warrior in a doctor's outfit who is giving our gang a serious education on weapons and where to point them.

Can an amulet be a character in a book?

Douglas McNamara is an awesome character who started in a small side role (he only had to say "I'm sorry" three times and stumble along the water while bleeding profusely) but then he convinced the producers to possibly have a whole novel written just for him. Lucky bastard.

Ember, member of the 88 and the evil shape shifter demon bitch from hell (one of the character's description, not mine!!)

A bunch of the hands who do the dirty work for her.

Blood Riders (I'm too scared to talk about them).

A red ship. Really scary. Blood dripping sails, seriously???

A two-door, sky blue, 1975 Jeep Wrangler SRT-8 with a HEMI crate 5.7 liter engine, five-inch suspension lift, 3/4 roll cage and Cobra Daytona front seats.

EEG: Can you give us a sneak preview of the rest of the series?

SB: I have 3 books planned in this series. Whether or not the second and third gets green lit, depends on how well Genesis is doing (hint, hint, Cough-Reviews-Cough). But book 2 is already forming in my head, and so is book 3. Then there is the story of Douglas McNamara that might be awesome. And then there are a few crossroads in Genesis where it intertwines with other Apocalypse Weird locales. One is Texas, the other I'm not yet sure about. There are 18 hours in Jennifer Wang's life that are completely unaccounted for (and her ambulance was parked right smack in the middle of a thinnie, so who knows what could have happened. But knowing her, it must have been really cool)

P.S. The White Dragon is not what you expect her/him/it to be.

EEG: I have no doubt the book will do extremely well. :-)

To kick-off things in great style, Stefan has a lunch party planned for today on Facebook. Don't forget to sign up so you can win lots of freebies and other goodies!

Apocalypse Weird Books:

The Dark Knight by Nick Cole continues the story begun in The Red King as survivors band together to build a modern-day castle against a tide of dark forces overrunning Southern California. While Frank and Holiday struggle for power, Ash ventures into the night to rescue a lost special needs adult who has unknowingly glimpsed a horrifying future: a future where man is on the verge of extinction and a new predator rules the planet. The Apocalypse Weird is beginning, and it might just be something bigger than anyone ever imagined ... or feared.

Scorched by fire and the longest drought in recorded history, survivors flee the Land of Enchantment to escape a mutated flu virus that turns ordinary people into mass-murderers. In E. E. Giorgi’s Immunity, few resilient scientists remain, gathered in one of the last national laboratories still working on a vaccine. Then the disease starts spreading within the soldiers guarding the laboratory, bloody carnage reigns. Immunologist Anu Sharma pairs up with computer geek David Ashberg to find a cure and escape the massacre. Outbreak meets World War Z in the deserts of Apocalypse Weird.

The Thing meets The Core in Jennifer Ellis’s Reversal, where the isolated International Polar Research Station on Ellesmere Island becomes an incredibly dangerous assignment for Sasha Wood. Stalked by killer polar bears, Sasha and her partner, Soren, search for their missing colleagues in the frozen tundra as their compass reveals an incredible truth: a magnetic pole reversal—fabled and feared in the scientific community for years—has occurred. The North Pole is now the South and vice versa. Psychotic scientists and giant methane-venting craters are just the beginning of a terrible and strange new reality.

Chris Pourteau’s The Serenity Strain finds Houston, Texas, at the epicenter of an apocalypse both natural and unnatural. Three hurricanes wreak unprecedented devastation on the Texas Gulf Coast. Amidst the anarchy left in the wake of the storms, six prisoners—the genetically altered test subjects for a viral strain known as Serenity—escape the state prison in Huntsville. Their hunger for murder and destruction gorges itself on society's survivors. One being of immense power and wanton appetites, a member of the demonic 88 named Id, arrives to oversee the destruction of mankind and morality. The Stand meets 28 Days Later in this epic tale of genetic manipulation gone awry.

Lord of the Flies meets Mad Max in Texocalypse Now by Michael Bunker and Nick Cole. It’s a gritty tale of survival set in the post-Apocalyptic West Texas Badlands. Packs of feral, cannibalistic humans called “hordes” and other psychotic groups threaten a band of children led by Ellis, a boy barely a man. Ellis and the children make a home for themselves in a hidden valley atop a mysterious mesa. But when a member of the 88, a Man in Black simply known as Mayhem, arrives in the Badlands, Ellis and his small “family” of orphans are forced underground to survive.

The apocalypse comes to the south with Kim Wells' Hoodoopocalypse. Kalfu, the ultimate evil-twin and Voodoo Loa of the afterworld and crossroads kicks off his plans for possession of the Southern Mississippi corridor. Dark half of Papa Legba, Kalfu sets off events that cripple New Orleans, tries to take control of the over 9 million visitors to the Big Easy a year, and seeds his Hoodoo mafia, the Guédé, across Louisiana and the world. If the fire, category HUGE hurricane spawned by magical means, and roving mobs of mayhem-inducing zombi astrals don’t get you, the angry goddess and nuclear meltdown might. Laissez the End Times Roulez, y’all.

The aliens have come to end the world with Eric Tozzi's Phoenix Lights. On March 13, 1997, the incident now known as the Phoenix Lights left thousands of witnesses at a loss to explain the sudden appearance of the massive V-shaped craft that hovered in the skies above Phoenix that day. Now, eighteen years later, the Vs have returned. Bargains will be made with an intelligence beyond our grasp deep within a super-secret government blacksite. Can a crew of TV UFO Busters find out the truth about the visitors or are they going to get far more than they ever bargained for? Whereas once they were blind, now they will see. Welcome to the invasion. Welcome to the Apocalypse Weird.

Three years after the great storm destroyed the planet, three years after the demonic undead rose up to hunt the survivors, Wendy Wicker scavenges and steals in the deadly ruins of Florida to keep her adopted family alive. In his book Medium Talent, Forbes West imagines a post-apocalyptic Key West that is plagued by hunger and ruled by an amoral bureaucracy, a life of crime is the only way to live. After Wendy betrays a couple of passengers she was to take north on board her fishing boat, her life takes an strange turn and she must confront some dark secrets as to what really happened the night the world ended, while surviving the monstrous creatures that infest the waters around her hometown and the never ending threat of an evil woman that cannot die...

An homage to Ernest Hemingway’s To Have or Have Not and George Romero’s Living Dead series of films, let Apocalypse Weird take you on a fast paced voyage through the dead Florida Keys and into an violent noir tale filled with time travel, black magic, suppressed memories and what life is really like after the end of the world.