Beach Blanket Zombie

Zombies are relentless, ravenous creatures, and their insatiable appetite for living flesh has given author Mark McLaughlin plenty of food for thought. In BEACH BLANKET ZOMBIE, you will sit down to a feast of zombie stories -- seventeen in all.


Zombies can rise from the dead for countless reasons. Any horror-movie enthusiastic can tell you that. Sure, a zombie’s bite can turn its victim into one of the living dead. But that’s not all. In films, corpses have been turned into zombies through voodoo, nuclear power, viruses, parasites, Egyptian curses (if you count mummies as zombies), toxic chemicals, the Black Mass, and more. In his stories, McLaughlin explores many different ways to bring the dead back to life.


As you read these stories, you will learn about zombies created by Internet witches, and discover the bizarre secrets of the isle of Zovemba, also known as Zombie Island. And that’s not all. To satisfy your hunger for horror, McLaughlin has added sixteen stories about other types of humanoid monstrosities. Fiends and freaks come in many forms, and some of the very worst attempt to pass for people.


In this collection, you will such ghastly, pulse-pounding tales of the macabre as “Beach Blanket Zombie,” “Vulture Soup for the Soulless,” “The Agony of Claude Bawls,” “Tears of the Expressionist Aphrodite,” “Cyber-Vengeance of the Internet Witches,” “ZOM BEE MOO VEE,” “Tell Your Secrets to the Slime,” “The Bloody Woman and the Chameleon Man, Also Known as Mom and Dad,” “Hello! My Name is Halja,” “Notes Concerning the Death and/or Decomposition of Reality," "The Tale Of The Cat-Headed Man, The Man-Headed Dog, and the Lady With Rats For Hands,” and many more.


Mark McLaughlin’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in almost one-thousand magazines, newspapers, websites, and anthologies, including Black Gate, Galaxy, Fangoria, Writer’s Digest, Cemetery Dance, Midnight Premiere, Dark Arts, and two volumes each of The Best Of The Rest, The Best Of HorrorFind, and The Year’s Best Horror Stories (DAW Books).