Australia
as the “Land of Nope”
Anyone
taking a cursory jaunt around the internet will come across the common
knowledge that the fauna of Australia is out to kill you. Great white sharks,
bull sharks, blue-ringed octopi, saltwater crocodiles, poisonous snakes of
every type and persuasion, spiders as big as your damned hand with fangs you
can see from clear across the room…need I go on?
Perhaps
not, but I will anyway. Our “cute” animals can hurt you too. Territorial
magpies swoop at your head and might take out an eye. The fat and cuddly wombat
will cause severe injuries if provoked, and is so strong that only a cage
comprised of either concrete or steel will contain it. A fully-grown kangaroo
can disembowel you by balancing on its tail and kicking out with its hind legs.
Now…what
if those “cute” animals were also zombies?
For my
novel Body Farm Z, I ignored Australia’s obvious killing machines and
focused on animals that most people say “aww” when they see, rather than
“argh!” One of my goals for Body Farm Z was to shy away from typical
zombie tropes and embrace the unexpected. Hopefully, after reading the novel,
you’ll never look at a kangaroo in the same way again.
Australia’s
fauna is out to kill you? Oh mate, you’ve got no idea!
To solve murders, you must understand the process of decomposition.
Australia’s newest body farm, the Victorian Taphonomic Experimental Research
Institute, is hidden in bushland some four hours’ drive from Melbourne.
Scattered across its 150 acres are human donor cadavers and pig carcasses
arranged to mimic some of the ways in which police might find murder victims:
exposed to the elements, buried in a shallow grave, wrapped in tarpaulin.
Forensic scientists and graduate students meticulously track each stage of
putrefaction. Today, Detective Rick Evans of the Homicide Squad is at VITERI
for the re-creation of one of his cold cases. A human donor will be locked
inside a car. But the donor has other ideas... So begins a facility-wide
outbreak of the reanimated dead.
I'm an award-winning author from Melbourne, Australia. I write short stories, novellas and novels across the darker spectrum.
My latest releases, through several publishing houses, include the horror novels "Body Farm Z", "Contrition", and "Devil Dragon"; the horror novella "Thylacines"; the crime-noir novellas "Dark Waters" and "Ronnie and Rita"; and the dark fantasy and horror collection "Perfect Little Stitches and Other Stories" (winner of the Australian Shadows Best Collected Work 2017).
My short fiction has appeared in many well-respected magazines such as Quadrant, Island, Aurealis, SQ Mag, and Midnight Echo. My fiction has been shortlisted for numerous Australian Shadows Awards and Aurealis Awards, long-listed for a Bram Stoker Award, and included in various "best of" anthologies. I'm also guest editor of this year's edition of Midnight Echo.
Other credits include TV scripts such as Neighbours and Australia's Most Wanted, feature articles for national magazines, non-fiction books published by Reed Books and Random House, and award-winning medical writing.
Publisher: Severed
Press
Facebook: @SeveredPress Twitter:
@severedpress
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