Craig DiLouie's Apocalyptic Horror Fiction

I had a lot of fun playing LAST NIGHT ON EARTH, a zombie board game, with some writer pals.

The game is tongue and cheek but ruthless. It’s hard to win as the survivors!

The game is split between players controlling the zombies and those controlling the plucky survivors, each a stereotype from a typical zombie movie. I played the high school sweetheart and the drifter. My friend Adam played Billy the track star (the high school sweetheart’s boyfriend) and his dad, the sheriff. We were all split up and had to find each other and weapons while the zombie horde grew around us. The zombie players get a lot of action cards that make life hell for the survivors.

The wounded sheriff flees to safety whlie the drifter digs around the garage for weapons and Billy and his girl team up, locked and loaded, at the high school.

The sheriff got killed pretty early in the game after his revolver ran out of bullets (which I saw as movie justice for not believing the crazy drifter’s warnings). After the lights went out in the high school, Billy and his girl fought back to back with a shotgun and revolver and killed every zombie that came near. The zombies now focused on my hapless drifter, who couldn’t find a weapon and barely escaped one tight spot after the next.

The zombie players, led by the evil Erika, played a "lights out" card, cutting the power to the high school. Billy and his girl are soon fighting back to back as zombies pour into the building.

I imagined him barely surviving so he could find Billy and his girl and tell them the reason for the zombies. Then they could go on the offensive and finish the zombies off to win the game, just like in a movie.

Sadly, the horde caught up to and overran the drifter, thus ending the game, creating a movie zombies would like to see.

The poor, crazy drifter tried to warn the town, but nobody listened. His secret went with him to the grave, or rather, into the bellies of a bunch of zombies.

It was a fun game, very playable and balanced, and I’m looking forward to taking another crack at it. I had just one complaint, which is the rules are a bit hazy, so you might end up having to make some of your own house rules on the fly.

Another zombie commercial, in which sporting equipment saves the world.

Mama Knows Books reviewed SUFFER THE CHILDREN, writing, “Extremely creepy! … DiLouie creates a world based on every parent’s worst fear … All in all a very disturbing twist on the vampire genre.”

Click here to see the complete review.

A man and a woman are being chased by a horde of zombies. Only one of them will escape.

YOUNG ONES, a dystopian film/futuristic western set in a near future where water has become incredibly scarce, resulting in the desertification of the planet, tells the story of a boy struggling to survive and protect his family. The film stars Michael Shannon as a father trying to protect his land and rejuvenate the soil, but his daughter’s boyfriend wants the land for himself and will do anything to get it. YOUNG ONES premiered at Sundance, and it looks like it will get a release in October 2014. Looks interesting, I’ll definitely be checking this out.