New Apocalypse Weird release: Medium Talent by Forbes West

April just rolled in with two new Apocalypse Weird releases. Up next is Forbes West's Medium Talent:

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 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. 

 Forbes is here today to tell us more about is AW new release. Welcome, Forbes!

EEG: Tell us about the inspiration behind Medium Talent.

FW: Key West itself was the main inspiration. It's an odd place, really- at the end of the world, so to speak as the last stop on the overseas highway stretching all the way from Miami. There's odd contradictions floating all around- one part of Key West is that it's touristy as hell, a frat boy heaven, full of tourists clogging the main drag. But there's this sort of bohemian flair in the corners, a sort of odd energy in the place from all the history and from the outcasts and the screwballs who couldn't make it in the normal habitats of the U.S.A. that have drifted in over the years. The atmosphere just breeds the imagination and I wanted to do for the longest time a book set in Key West (and a book about the end of the world and the great post-apocalyptic age that would come after) and I just put two and two together. Most of the post-apocalyptic stories you hear always are set in the deserts or the blown out cities with the same rough cast of characters and I wanted to see hell come to a place that would have been just a normal and decadent vacationland and a mysterious young woman stuck in the middle of it all.

Key West was famously the home of many writers and authors, including "Papa" Hemingway himself, and I wanted to use its connection to literary history. Hemingway's story, To Have or Have Not, was a huge inspiration for the book as he played with the town's contradictions long before I did in this story and crafted a realistic adventure story about poverty and crime. I thought it'd be a hell of a ride to read about life in a Key West that's barely survived the end times and what people there would have to do to survive in a life that's full of horrors from the sea and an oppressive bureaucracy running things into the ground.

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

FW: Wendy Wicker "The lead actress", so to speak. Boat captain. Criminal. Young and not who she thinks she is.
Tony Fire Fifty year old first mate of Wendy's boat, Medium Talent. Good and not smart.
Ernest Hemingway .....
The Brazen Head The main good guy.
Lenguas Largas The poor unfortunate undead with hideously stretched tongues.
Melanie Wicker The woman who cannot be killed.

EEG: Do you have a sequel in mind and if so, can you tell us a bit about it?

FW: Yes, I do. Called "Bad Dream Man", let's just say it's set in the 1930s and sort of like Dracula. Keep it that way.

EEG: Thanks so much, Forbes!

Below is a complete list of the Apocalypse Weird books published so far. Come back next week for a sneak preview of the next AW book, Genesis by Stefan Bolz.

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.