Guest Blog: A
Life Less Zombie by Colin Sinclair
As
soon as I noticed that Abaddon Books were hosting another open door, I knew
exactly what to do. I had a sure-fire stellar pitch already prepped and good to
go.
There
would be zombies, and Nazis, and Nazis fighting zombies, and Soviet Special
Forces battling Nazis, zombies and, yes, Nazi-zombies. All of this whilst our
heroes infiltrate underground bunkers of eldritch Egyptian magic and delve into
dungeons of dark betrayal. Maybe there'd be a plucky upper-crust British
officer sort—isn't there always?—keen to Do His Bit in the war against the
undead masses of the Last Reich. I'd probably also need a hard-eyed
Mademoiselle from La
Résistance,
seeking vengeance for a (mostly) dead family in war-torn France. In essence,
though, we're talking endless, tireless ranks of brain munching shamblers.
It
would be zombies-zombies-zombies, all the way down.
Except.
I'd
tried something similar for a previous Abaddon send-us-all-your-pitches event,
and it hadn't gone over terribly well. Not well at all. Soul crushing rejection
is how I'd describe it, although I'm sure they were perfectly pleasant about it
at the time. It still hurts though.
So,
anyway, I'm thinking maybe not so utterly zombie, this go around? That might be
a wise idea, yeah? Time for something new, I thought, or a fresh look over
something old.
Short
history lesson: Back when Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz first hit the cinema
screens, I'd had the notion that it would be great to see this sort of Spaced-style
keen-but-slightly-hapless bunch of characters engaged in a fight for survival
against an invading alien horde. I already had a title, didn't I? Midnight in
the Garden Centre of Good & Evil had been floating around in my head for
months if not years, and now was surely the time. Unlikely heroes tackle plant
monsters in a garden centre. It writes itself!
(No,
no it doesn't.)
I'd
wanted to do a movie—because scripting, producing, directing, how hard could
that be?—and decided that Midnight Garden would be the very thing. I'd be making
it local, I'd be doing it low-budget, and you can be damn sure I'd be
guilt-tripping every available friend and relative for help.
I
was already out-and-about scouting locations (read: spending my Sundays wandering
old and run-down garden centres). I'd fixed a solid outline of story on paper and
I'd started on a first draft, it was all guns go-go-go.
And
then.
Edgar
Wright and Simon Pegg announced that their next 'Cornetto Trilogy' movie would
be about alien invasion and, much as I'd like to have seen my fledging movie as
the Deep Impact to their Armageddon, the Volcano to their Dante's Peak, the
American Battleships to their Battleship...
The
effort I'd put into the project didn't seem to be worth it anymore. To be
honest, I'd probably been looking for an excuse to flee from something that was
getting out of hand and, given that I'd not yet recruited any cast or crew,
this was probably as good a time as any to quit. I was only failing myself,
wasn’t I? I'd get over it.
I
closed the file, set it to one side and moved on to shorter, easier, things.
Fast
forward to the slightly more recent past, and there it was: Abaddon's call to bold
adventure and my sudden need for Something Less Zombie.
I
dug out my original outline for Midnight in the Garden Centre of Good &
Evil, and got back to work.
The
rest is not exactly history, but it is a novella from Abaddon Books.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Read the synopsis of Midnight In The Garden Centre Of Good and Evil here:
Invaders From
Beyond!
They’re coming for us! Little grey men,
little green women, pod people, tripods, shape-shifting blobs and man-eating
plants; they’re in our neighbourhoods, under our beds, invading our minds. It could be your shopkeeper, your boss, your
best friend. It could be you...
The mid-twentieth-century ‘alien invasion’
genre of film and fiction, inspired at least as much by Cold War paranoia as by
the imagination-firing space race, is a crucial part of our cultural DNA, a
hokey, cliché-ridden, daft and undeniably fun
slice of genre history. Invaders From
Beyond! hopes to capture that fun. A new series of standalone novels (in
the vein of the ever-popular Tomes of the
Dead), Invaders From Beyond!
picks up the conventions of this beloved genre, from Invasion of the Body
Snatchers via The Thing, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and V to Mars
Attacks!, and pokes holes in the plots, pokes fun at the clichés and pokes
the readers in their eye(stalk)s.
*
Miller, fresh from too many pampered years
at university, has just managed to lose a PhD, a girlfriend, and her father’s
car in one magnificent bender. With parents now committed to a regime of
find-your-own-way tough love, he’s fallen off the fast track to success, and
finds himself working in a shabby garden centre on the edge of nowhere. The
staff are a collection of dropouts and oddballs, the boss is very shady, and
Miller’s not sure half the stuff they sell is legal.
Still, he’s learning to get on with things
and make do, finding a brand new path through life, but... an alien invasion
disguised as a bright and shiny big-box store from out of town? That really
isn’t helping.
If Miller wants to protect his job and save
the world, he’s going to have to dig deep and get his hands dirty.
About the author:
Colin Sinclair is a writer and roleplaying game creator
from Northern Ireland. He's written a lot over the years but most of it is
boxed up and buried deep where it can't cause trouble. When he's not forced to work in a dull office
job he's writing or reading, and when he's not doing that he's baking bread and
thinking "I should be writing". His house has been described as
"a library with some beds in it". He lives with his wife, some
children, probably a cat.
get you copy here:
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