Author of adventure/thriller and horror fiction

SUFFER THE CHILDREN Optioned for TV

by 4 Comments

I’m proud today to announce my horror novel SUFFER THE CHILDREN has been optioned by Perro Azul for potential adaptation for Netflix, Vix, or another venue.

Perro Azul is a Mexican production house with a solid track record developing Spanish-language TV series and movies. Their work ranges from zombie series to cop dramas to political dark comedies.

Published in 2014 by Gallery Books, SUFFER THE CHILDREN is about a disease that kills the world’s children only to bring them back requiring blood to stay alive a little while longer. The kids are vampires, but the true monsters may be the parents who will do anything to keep their children alive. As the blood supply wanes, their only source may be each other…

This book has been optioned before but failed the funding test due to its grimdark material. I’m hoping this time will be different and this story will finally be brought to life on a screen. Fingers crossed!

THE RETREAT Audiobook Omnibus Now Available

by Leave a Comment

Get it while it’s hot! And by “hot” I mean on fire, emitting screams, and surrounded by laughing, machete-wielding maniacs. The Retreat, the apocalyptic military fiction series by me, Stephen Knight, and Joe McKinney, is now available as an audiobook omnibus narrated by the great R.C. Bray.

The world would die laughing….

When a new disease turns people into sadistic, laughing killers, a light infantry battalion fights to maintain order in Boston. As infection spreads, the Army loses control, and the soldiers find themselves fighting the people they once swore to protect.

As the country slides into violent collapse, the lost battalion learns the last bastion of the federal government is still holding out in Florida. Harry Lee, its commander, decides the only hope is to lead the survivors there.

But first, they must cross more than a thousand miles of an apocalyptic America, hunted by a savage and merciless enemy.

Inspired by The Anabasis and written by a team of best-selling zombie authors, The Retreat: The Complete Series for the first time brings together all six volumes, chronicling a horrific vision of the apocalypse and a brutal depiction of courage in the face of impossible odds.

This omnibus includes the following works:

The Retreat: Pandemic
The Retreat: Slaughterhouse
The Retreat: Die Laughing
The Retreat: Alamo
The Retreat: Crucible
The Retreat: Forlorn Hope

I was very happy to contribute Pandemic and Alamo and have a chance to work with these great authors.

Click here to check it out at Audible.

And of course, there’s always the eBook option.

THE LAST OF US

by Leave a Comment

Based on the popular computer game and shot in my hometown and surrounding areas, THE LAST OF US is a post-apocalyptic HBO show about a man tasked with transporting a girl, who may be humanity’s last hope, across what’s left of the United States. In my view, this is an almost perfect apocalyptic series.

Twenty years after the world ended due to a rampant pandemic of fungal infection that turned its victims into monsters, Joel (Pedro Pascal) has lost what was most important to him and lives as a hardened survivor in a quarantine zone. When he’s contacted by the leader of a local rebel organization called the Fireflies to transport a girl named Ellie (Bella Ramsey) across the country to a research facility, he resists at first but takes on the burden. For humanity, the stakes couldn’t be higher, as the girl is immune. The story rolls out as a series of encounters on the road, with substantial flashbacks and back stories that slow the pacing but ultimately enrich the overall story and world building.

From every angle, this is my favorite kind of apocalyptic story. Realistic, gritty, savage, inhabited by an evolving and monstrous predatory enemy, full of horrifying moral choices, and showing that humanity doesn’t just come to an end but is holding out in small tribes and in old government quarantine zones now run by a brutal descendant of the military under endless martial law. What used to be that rare breathtaking money shot is everywhere now thanks to cheaper effects, presenting communities and survivors living in the crumbling ruins of American civilization. This is an apocalypse that is hazardous, beautiful, has its own rules and logic, feels real, and looks lived in.

The casting is solid. I had to get past Bella Ramsey looking so different than the Ellie in the game, but she grew on me as the show progressed, and she’s a great actor with a lot of range, portraying a girl who is tough and brassy but also vulnerable and longing. As for Joel, I couldn’t have asked for better than Pascal, who fully inhabits a man who is a true survivor and killer but haunted by trauma and the physical effects of decades of rough living, from minor hearing loss to aching knees. He’s no superhero like in the game, but instead a worn-out, traumatized, bitter survivor who does what it takes and knows how to kill.

The moral choices are absolutely terrific. The organization the government morphed into has eradicated individual rights and freedoms, but they’re also the only thing holding the infected at bay. Soldiers must make a choice to kill refugees, because if they don’t, they may end up fighting them later. A group resorts to cannibalism, but it was either that or die by starvation. It all culminates in the last episode with an ultimate moral choice that may appear to most viewers to be the wrong one even if it is for some good reasons. In this series, there are few heroes and villains, just people trying to survive in different ways, with survival itself meaning different things to different people.

Overall, I loved THE LAST OF US and highly recommend it.

DESERT CREATURES by Kay Chronister

by Leave a Comment

I recently enjoyed Kay Chronister’s DESERT CREATURES, a novel about a future slow apocalypse due to environmental catastrophe.

In this story, toxic rain has driven humanity into the desert, where clever businessmen have set up a religion based in Las Vegas to establish and maintain their power and wealth. In this dangerous and evolving world, Magdala, a child, struggles to survive and wants to make a pilgrimage so that a saint will heal her clubfoot, a deformity where the foot is turned inward. The novel follows her life in a world that is slowly dying along with a heretic priest who may be able to perform miracles.

This is an odd one, I have to say that first. The environment is hostile but also evolving, developing new strange life forms and imposing escalating pressure on human biology and society until it is barely subsisting and seems ready to simply join the desert itself. There is a lot of religion. The narrative jumps protagonists and then forward in time, with a lot of wandering and frustrated hopes and no clear theme, making the story feel a little disjointed with some readers likely wondering, what’s the story here, and where is this all going?

Yeah, okay, but I liked it. It’s less one thing than a collection of things, and the mosaic they formed caught me. The new desert life in particular was interesting and weird, I liked the adaptation of Christianity to cowboy saints and casinos, the ongoing degradation of society is pretty bleak, and the story drags you through the dirt and dust while maintaining a mythic feel to it, with some fantasy elements as strange as the landscape.

Overall, I admired what Chronister was trying to do here in this ambitious, different novel. It didn’t quite come together for me as a reader to make it a favorite, but I enjoyed the aspiration and what I received, enough to say, hey, take a look and see if this one might be for you.

THE DRIFT by C.J. Tudor

by Leave a Comment

C.J. Tudor’s THE DRIFT is a terrific apocalyptic thriller with clever construction, a cascade of page-turning thriller elements, and a strong thematic focus on how crisis brings people together and tears them apart.

The story follows three main narratives, each with its own protagonist. Hannah, a student at an elite Academy, awakens on a crashed bus that was evacuating the school to a secure mountaintop facility called The Retreat due to an outbreak of a viciously persistent disease that is slowly destroying the world. Former detective Meg awakens with several strangers on a cable car suspended above a snowstorm; they were on their way to The Retreat, but the power is out and they’re stranded. And Carter, who works at The Retreat, struggles to survive with a small band of other survivors, but there may be a murderer in their midst.

Tudor proves herself a thriller master, as each of these storylines quickly portrays clear, easy-to-remember characters, sets up a locked room and ticking time bomb, and then bombards them with an avalanche of obstacles, problems, and escalating threats. By the end, we get to know their backstories and why they’re here, how the narratives tie together, and what it’s all adding up to.

I liked almost everything about this book. The pandemic is handled in an interesting way, the thriller style keeps the pages turning at a swift pace, there is some engaging reader detective work about how the storylines tie together, and there’s a solid thematic focus on how crisis unites and then breaks societies. As a fan of apocalyptic fiction, I’ve always been interested in how people would react to something like say zombies. I’ve always been a believer that humans are primarily cooperative animals and that this trait helped us reach the top of the food chain. This cooperation, however, is based on the principle of reciprocity–if I do for you, you do for me. Eventually, that principle may break down, and then it’s every person for themselves.

One potential downside for readers, particularly apocalyptic fiction fans, is there isn’t a lot of backstory on the state of the world and the pandemic itself. Almost all the events in the book happen in isolation, with the story’s focus being on these characters and their immediate survival. And if you’re new to thrillers, be prepared for a veritable kitchen sink of sudden obstacles.

Overall, I really enjoyed THE DRIFT and will be keeping an eye out for future works by this author.

VESPER (2022)

by Leave a Comment

In VESPER, civilization has collapsed due to environmental catastrophe, resulting in humans struggling to survive in a world filled with parasitic and poisonous flora. Despite the plotting being stretched to the breaking point, it’s a remarkable film for its fantastic world building and strong characters. I liked this one quite a bit.

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of an apocalypse caused by a radical ecological transformation resulting in humans no longer being at the top of the food chain. In VESPER, humanity resorted to using genetically engineered organisms in an attempt to save itself from climate disaster. Unfortunately, the organisms ran amok and displaced most of the flora while consuming all of the animals and most of the humans. In this depopulated world overrun with monstrous plants and insects, most of the survivors eke out a living in small communities, while a lucky privileged few live in advanced communities called Citadels, where they started genetically engineered themselves to live forever. Each year, the Citadels sell seeds to the people outside, which enables them to grow enough food to survive, but the seeds expire at the end of the growing season, keeping them dependent and selling their blood that is used for life extension.

It’s an utterly ruthless world where everything uses or outright consumes everything else, a status quo that seems impossible to change. That doesn’t stop 13-year-old Vesper from imagining something better. Though a child, she forages for food, pulls together power to keep a machine running that in turn keeps her father alive, craves the love of her missing mother, and does her own genetic engineering projects. When a mysterious stranger arrives, she believes she can get a better life. But the place the stranger came from and the local chief will fight her.

The trailer suggested the story would be about a journey, but that’s only a small part of it. Most of VESPER deals with the girl fighting to keep her hope alive, in particular against the local chief, who makes a fantastic villain. He doesn’t want things to change, as in the status quo, he is in control of the world as he understands it. He is what she will become if she surrenders hope that things can change for the better, which makes him such a great antagonist. He’s monstrous, but he came by it honestly, informed by a rational worldview.

The last act kind of breaks down in how far it made sense to me, but the ending is pretty clear in its intentions, and by then, I’d gotten so hooked on this fascinating, exotic, and harsh world that I was good with it. Overall, I liked this one a ton. It’s imaginative, affecting, and for its budget, it created an extraordinary world that felt both bizarre and real, lived in by characters who are the product of it and must make their way within its rules.