Canister X – A.P. Fuchs: Zombie, Paranormal Romance and Superhero Novelist, Blogger, Artist, Publisher

First appearing last year in the awesome anthology, Metahumans vs the Undead, I’m now making available to all Axiom-man fans my story, “There’s Something Rotten Up North,” as a short story download.

It is currently available on Kindle, Smashwords and Drivethru Fiction, with other e-outlets to shortly follow once their systems update.

Here’s the write-up:

When Axiom-man is notified of the dead coming back to life in Flin Flon, Manitoba, he takes flight and heads north to verify the terrible news. Upon his arrival, he is greeted by hordes of the walking dead and wonders if this outbreak is tied to his visit to a parallel Earth where the undead had replaced the living. As he struggles to combat the undead and search for survivors, Axiom-man soon discovers the problem is far worse than he thought.

Note: This story takes place between The Dead Land and City of Ruin.

Please take a moment to download this story at any of the e-outlets mentioned above and likewise share this announcement with any superhero and zombie enthusiasts you may know of. Thanks. Hope you enjoy it.

This weekend I created the Blood of my World Boxed Set for Amazon Kindle, a collection of my paranormal romance series containing Discovery of Death, Memories of Death and Life of Death. It is Volume Two of the A.P. Fuchs Library, with Volume One being books from The Axiom-man Saga (coming this week). These boxed sets are a great way to grab a bunch of my titles and/or complete your collection for a great price. It is also on Smashwords, Drivethru Fiction, and should start showing up on the Nook and iPad shortly.

I wrote an introduction to the Blood of my World Boxed Set and want to share it here.

Hope you check the collected book sets out.

The intro:

Blood of my World Boxed Set Introduction
by
A.P. Fuchs

It seems to me that there is a direct correlation between love and horror, the both of which are two sides of the proverbial coin. They are extremes, where one is light and bliss, filled with goodness, hope, stability–physical, emotional, mental. The other is darkness, danger, pain and untold suffering. They also have a tendency to gel, namely in the arena of romantic relationships.
One can’t help but wonder how much different our world would be if these two elements–arguably one element–were not present. I suspect life would look more like a simulation than an actual experience, with folks walking around conducting business mechanically, without nuance–robotic.
Is it not true that human life as you and I know it are birthed and lived from either horror or love or a mix of both? Is not every other human emotion rooted in one of these?
Love is an especially dangerous thing. Beautiful, yes, but dangerous. While ascending to new heights with your lover, when during those early stages all is well in the world and inner peace is achieved–the fear of it all slipping away always lingers a little or a lot until, perhaps, that fateful day comes and your fear becomes reality. The darkness descends, hope is abandoned, and searing pain rips through your chest until you can barely stand. Once you collapse, you think it’s won and the hot coils of loss’s embrace will finally leave you, but instead, it continues to ravage you in waves, bringing you to the brink of apathy and beyond, into self-destruction and mental chaos. Life is looked at through fogged glass. All other emotions are felt through the jagged pieces of a broken heart. Cynicism sets in, walls go up and survival kicks in full gear and you do all you can to fill the void and repair the damage your loved one has done.
Love and horror. Life and death. It’s what defines us. It’s what’s defined my fiction since I wrote my first book twelve years ago. In fact, my entire career was born out of this bizarre relationship between love and horror, and if you’re a reader of my work, you would have noticed that everything I’ve written touches on this in some way, whether a little or a lot.
There’s my novel April, written under the pen name Peter Fox, which is a firm statement about how people get to you and you fall in love because they touch that secret part of you no one else has.
There’s A Red Dark Night, a tribute to B-horror summer camp movies in which the main villain is a creature comprised of blood and evil–the blood you shed when your heart is broken and knife is brought to skin. For some this is metaphorical, for others, it is not.
The Axiom-man Saga, my superhero opus about a man without self-esteem who, as one of the motives for donning a pair of tights, is simply to prove to himself and others that he is indeed something of value after a lifetime of always feeling rejected and second best.
My zombie fiction–books like Blood of the Dead and Zombie Fight Night–utter indulgences into the world of the walking dead. Is this not what we become after love has crushed us? Is not survival our primary concern? Do we not find folks who are fighting just like us, whether in our relationships or even through the music we listen to so we can feel better?
These are more, but let’s move on to what you hold in your hands.
This boxed set, Blood of my World. Three novellas. Three aspects of love and horror–Discovery, memory, life.
Vampires are the horror world’s romantic hero. They are the regular world’s romantic villain. They embody life and death, love and horror unlike any other creature in fiction.
I set out to tell a story about two romantics whose love for each other was thicker than blood and just as red with passion and devotion. The reader must know, I decided, that there are others out there who live in love’s stream, who have gotten burned yet who also have lived and are living because of it.
Who have grown.
The vampires in the novellas you’re about to read are ruthless. There is blood and pain and indifference to human life. They are monsters.
The people in these novellas are you and me, folks living in two worlds: the past and present; light and darkness; love and horror.
I want to thank you for reading these as you join Zach and Rose on their journey of love’s joy, love’s pain–
–love’s horror.

- A.P. Fuchs
Winnipeg, MB
February 25, 2012

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-926712-99-4 eBook ISBN: 978-1-927339-06-0 15 years ago . . . The world fell. Armies of the dead swept across the globe, toppling civilization and bringing humanity to its knees. Now, as the dead virus has ran its course and is fading away, those who survived face a new terror: the ever-growing numbers of the Sasquacth species. The Earth is an apocalyptic wasteland, survivors barely managing to make it day-by-day. Food is scarce, hope is hardly found. Yet all turns on a dime when a secret base is discovered underground and it is learned that it might hold the hope for victory in this deadly world. War breaks out, and this time man and machine combine as the struggle between humanity and the beasts wages anew to see who will hold the top spot on nature’s food chain.

Available as a paperback at: Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.co.uk Barnesandnoble.com Other On-line Retailers Available as an eBook at: Amazon Kindle DrivethruFiction.com Mobipocket.com Smashwords

Other Books in the Bigfoot War Series:

Other Coscom Entertainment Books by Eric S. Brown

The Last Coscom Entertainment Release: Flame of Surrender by Rhiannon Paille
For the Entire Coscom Entertainment Monster Fiction Catalog, please go to www.coscomentertainment.com

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-926712-88-8 eBook ISBN: 978-1-926712-89-5 Under intense aerial bombardment by the German Luftwaffe, the British government arranges for the most valuable exhibits in the British Museum to be shipped to the Smithsonian for safekeeping. Charged with shepherding the priceless artifacts across the ocean is archeologist Priscilla Stuyvesant. Leaving Great Britain on the Limpkin, an aging freight vessel, the ship is overrun by a gang of Nazi deserters loyal to a doctor exiled from Germany for conducting genetic experiments on his own people. But the desperate deserters aren’t the worst terror on board: three of the exhibits from ancient Egypt return to life. In life, they were the Pharaoh’s most skilled assassins. In death, they are something far more dangerous: undead warriors with mesmeric powers and a thirst for revenge that defies the centuries. Book Trailer: What People Are Saying: “Intense, sharp, and gut-wrenching, Eternal Unrest sucks you in and holds you tight. I don’t normally read war novels, but this one I couldn’t resist. Dixon knows how to blend horror (mummies!), history, and humanity together to create a powerful merging of the three. Highly recommended!” -Elizabeth Massie, author of Sineater “Buckle up, folks… On the heels of putting his stamp on werewolf (Snarl) and zombie (The Lifeless) lore, Dixon now gives us a memorable mummy tale that spans centuries and continents, provides Hollywood-sized action, and shows the author’s aptitude to draw well-developed characters. Eternal Unrest is Dixon’s most ambitious work yet.” -Harrison Howe, author of R.I.P. “No longer will the Mummy be an over-looked horror trope, I foresee many trying to emulate what Lorne Dixon has created here with Eternal Unrest.” - Keith Gouveia, author of Animal Behavior

Available as a paperback at: Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.co.uk Barnesandnoble.com Other On-line Retailers Available as an eBook at: Amazon Kindle Drivethruhorror.com Fictionwise.com Mobipocket.com Smashwords

Also by Lorne Dixon:

The Last Coscom Entertainment Release: Bigfoot War 2: Dead in the Woods by Eric S. Brown
For the Entire Coscom Entertainment Monster Fiction Catalog, please go to www.coscomentertainment.com

The first Bigfoot War book took the cryptozoological horror world by storm. Now Eric S. Brown unleashes his follow-up, Bigfoot War 2: Dead in the Woods, with faster, meaner, more terrifying bloodthirsty sasquatches unlike any you’ve seen before.

This ain’t no Harry and the Henderson’s remix. This isn’t even like Sasquatch Mountain. We’re talking hordes of lean, mean killing machines covered in hair, with razor-sharp teeth and claws that’ll have you running for the door before you even finish the book.

The story:

Mere hours after the Babble Creek massacre, the beasts strike again, rampaging across the American Southeast. A small group of survivors in Jackson County, North Carolina, fight to stay alive as things get worse. Bigfoot is everywhere, terrorizing the citizens of Jackson County, tearing them

limb from limb and feasting on their flesh. Even the powerful US military stands in awe as the enormous beasts take their stand against them, going toe-to-toe with some of man’s most lethal technology.

Just when the survivors thought it couldn’t get any worse, death kicks into high gear as the dead begin to rise, hungry for the flesh of the living.

The military, tasked with restoring order and destroying the beasts, now find themselves racing to contain a virus that could mean the end of the human race. Colonel Drake and the small unit of tanks under his command are trapped inside the quarantine zone as the war between man and beast is

joined by the undead.

The body count rises. Humanity is on the run. The night is filled with terror, the vicious growls of the Sasquatch and the haunting moans of the living dead.

Are you ready to join in the fight?

Paperback:

Amazon.com
Amazon.ca
Amazon.co.uk
Barnesandnoble.com
Other On-line Retailers

eBook:

Amazon Kindle
Nook
Smashwords
Drivethruhorror.com
Mobipocket

The last Coscom Entertainment release: Blood of my World Vampire Series by A.P. Fuchs

For our full list of books, please see: www.coscomentertainment.com

Copyright 2010-2011 by A.P. Fuchs. All rights reserved.
46: Plastic Swords
The blade’s hard plastic tip connected squarely with the zombie’s temple, knocking his undead head to the side. It was enough of a distraction for him that I was able to push the creature to the side, get past him—only to be surrounded by three others: one in front, one to the left and right. I kicked to the right, getting myself some distance from the closest undead. The one on the left grabbed me, her filthy hands and sharp nails digging into my arm. With a quick twist of the waist, I managed to bring the plastic sword across the head of the one in front of me. His skin was so rotted around the neck that the blow was enough to knock his head off his shoulders. Talk about a break.
The light coming in from the door to the shop was mostly covered in shadow, undead bodies blocking the sweet scene of the empty street beyond. The girl who held me on the left pulled my arm close to her mouth. With a shout, I jerked my arm free from her grip, felt a hot sting across my bicep, adrenaline quickly wiping the pain away. Like a madman, I swung the sword left and right, hacking my way through the undead like a safari guide plowing my way through the jungle. Of course, the blade didn’t cut them down, but was sturdy enough to send them a step to the side, buying me enough room to push my way past them to the street beyond.
A gunshot went off in the distance. I whirled around; Jay sprinted toward me, lumbering zombies on his tail, something small and dark in his right hand.
When he caught up to me, he said, “I hate this.” That was all. I think he was my new King of the Understatement.
“We gotta go,” I said.
Jay dipped his head between his knees for a couple seconds, took a deep breath, then straightened. “God be with us.”
“No kidding.”
We ran down the street, the calls and moans of the dead rising behind us. A skyport was just off to the side down the next street. We headed there and hoped that folks had left a vehicle or two parked inside when the outbreak hit.
Each zombie that came our way, our first goal was simply to avoid them and run past. Except for the two near the skyport. The walls around the light gray, spiral-shaped garage were too high to climb. Two undead blocked the entrance though I doubted they actual realized that’s what they were doing.
Jay and I cautiously approached them and when the dead old geezer with skin that flaked off his face like dry pastry saw me, he raised his arms and came right at me, moving much faster than expected. I wound up my sword, ready to hit him as hard as I could.
A loud CRACK echoed through the air, rocking my insides. The old man’s head burst open at its top in a spray of blood and bone, and he fell to the ground. Another CRACK and a thud and the other undead was down, too. Jay stood by the one at his feet, raised his hand and showed me the gun.
“Where did you get that?” I asked.
“One of the dead had it. He got hold of me and as we wrestled, I noticed he was once an Enforcer. Old school, if he’s still using bullets. Could have been a ceremonial thing, for all I know. Doesn’t matter. I noticed the gun in the holster so fought into him to get my hands on it. Fortunately, it was still loaded. Blew his head off, too.” He said that last bit with a grin that made even me unsettled.
“How many shots left?”
Jay cracked open the old revolver and checked the cylindrical chamber. “Two.”
“Better keep them as last resort, then.”
“Good idea.”
More undead appeared down the street.
“Come on,” I said.
We jogged into the skyport and began the long, winding ascent through the lot, looking for abandoned zipscars or skyvans. On the third level, we found an old “hauler” tucked into the corner. Haulers were kind of like large skyvans meant for families with too many kids. They were also used as repair vehicles around the city for skylights and hoversigns.
Jay and I approached the vehicle with caution. He held the gun aloft; I had my sword ready, and suddenly felt like a kid trailing his daddy on a hunt with a toy just so he felt like could actually contribute something even though that wasn’t true.
We kept our heads below the back windows, one of us on either side of the rear door. With a slight nod to each other, we quickly peeked into the hauler’s windows.
It was empty. But was it open?
Jay checked the handle. Locked. We each took a side of the hauler and checked the other doors.
All locked.
We met up again at the vehicle’s rear.
“I need a break,” Jay said.
“Me, too.”
There was only one thing to do, then. I took the plastic sword and smacked it against the rear window. The sword bounced off.
“Nice,” Jay said.
“Hope this Sword of Omens isn’t trying to tell us anything.”
“A ‘Sword of What’?”
“Nothing.”
With a quick flick of his arm, Jay used the gun to bust open one of the back windows. He reached in and unlocked the door from the inside.
We got in and closed the door and caught our breath in the dark. After a few minutes, my racing heart finally slowed, and a sharp, heated sting ripped through my arm. I touched the skin and felt fresh blood on my fingers.
“Oh no,” I said quietly.
Jay cleared his throat. “What?”
“They got me.”
< Last Chapter — Table of Contents — Next Chapter >

Copyright 2010-2011 by A.P. Fuchs. All rights reserved.
45: Old School Comics

Immediately I swung around, lashing my fist out and connecting square with the creature’s jaw. It was a bonehead move. Had I been off by even a couple millimeters, I could have easily snagged my knuckles on its teeth and probably would have gotten infected. The zombie shuffled back a step, paused, then stumbled towards me again, arms out.
My heart pounded—but not from fear. Only anger. These guys had caused so many problems and had hurt me personally with making Selena one of their own. Worse, making many Selenas one of their own.
The sound of shoes scraping against the sidewalk behind me forced me to reconsider decking the zombie in front of me. It was run or be killed. So I ran. I dodged around the nearest two undead, their hands raising into the air a second too late to grab onto me. Another I shoved to the side as I bolted down the sidewalk, hoping Jay was somewhere nearby.
Don’t go too far, I thought. We need to stay in the area. For now, anyway.
I scanned the undead that were a block or block and a half away. None of them looked like my sweetheart.
A figure ran out from between a couple of fallen sky signs just ahead. A pack of zombies lumbered after him.
Jay.
“Hey!” I shouted, waving my arms and hoping he’d heard me. It didn’t seem he did because he kept running and disappeared between a pair of apartment buildings across the street, the zombies still keeping after him.
But someone heard me. The undead in my nearest vicinity immediately set their rotten gaze in my direction and started towards me.
“Oh man . . .” I breathed, glanced back over my shoulder, and tried to come up with a plan. It seems there was only one in this undead world: run.
I took off further down the street, but a pack of zombies up and to my right saw me and joined their brethren in their mission to take me down.
A blur of color materialized on my left as I ran past an outlet store, then quickly disappeared. I halted my run, turned, and headed back. It was a comics shop, the kind that still sold old paper copies of comic books that nowadays most people read on their eReaders and telecom units. Maybe they had a back room I could hide out in. Maybe even a room with a lock on the door. Its large front window had been smashed during the riots when the zombie plague first hit. I stepped over the frame, my shoes crunching against the broken glass on the floor. Comics and old school graphic novels littered the floor like a squirrel’s nest, panels of Axiom-man, Superman, Captain America and others catching my eye as I stepped quickly through the shop and to the rear of the store. This was a place I had meant to go into back before all this chaos started. Interesting I was here now, looking to save my life amongst images of heroes that did it all the time.
A dented and overturned moneycomp lay on the counter to my left. Whoever smashed it up must have thought that because this place dealt in vintage comics, it must have dealt in vintage cash, too. Idiots. Paper money and coins were phased out completely a good ten years ago if not longer.
Behind me, undead feet shuffled through the scraps of comics on the floor. A loud thunk made me look over my shoulder only to see one of the zombies—a much-decayed one—had tripped over the window frame and landed on its face.
I was already at the back of the tiny shop, with nothing near me to use against them. Just a bunch of very old collectibles, some hanging on the wall behind me, others on the floor at my feet. Most of them were action figures. One was a Spider-Man webshooter for kids. There was a Superman costume, a plastic lightsaber, and a cap gun. I thought maybe I could get away with using the lightsaber, but its plastic handle was already cracked, presumably from whoever had been in here before me. There wasn’t a back room.
Adrenaline quickly kicked in and I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it out this time.
The zombies drew closer.
My foot stepped on something soft at first, but it gave way and my heel landed on something hard. I kicked at it through the scraps of comic pages covering it.
It was a sword. A fake one, but one that would still be dangerous regardless. Kind of. It was still in its black cardboard package, a red logo with what looked like a wild cat roaring, followed by silver letters reading: THUNDERCATS. Never heard of them.
I quickly bent down, picked up the sword and ripped it from its package. Crap. It was plastic, its gleaming silver paint job having fooled me. But the plastic felt hard, solid.
Realizing how stupid this was, a brief note of hope still sounded in my heart. I lifted the blade and wound it back like a baseball bat.
The first zombie moved in.
I took a swing.
< Last Chapter — Table of Contents — Next Chapter >

Walter Rhein has an interview with me up on his blog.

In it we talk about the most important attribute of any writer, books, Axiom-man, the undead, comics and more.

You can access the interview by going here.

Thanks.

The amazing new mass market edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim by Mark Twain and W. Bill Czolgosz and illustrated by Sean Simmans is now available from Coscom Entertainment and Simon and Schuster in bookstores nationwide as well as at the following on-line retailers:

Paperback:

Amazon.com
Amazon.ca
Amazon.co.uk
Barnes and Noble
Other On-line Retailers
Simon and Schuster

eBook:

Amazon Kindle
Nook

Synopsis:

Free at last! Free at last! This ain’t your grandfather’s Huckleberry Finn. It’s nineteenth century America and a mutant strain of tuberculosis is bringing its victims back from the dead. Sometimes they come back docile, and other times vicious. The vicious ones are sent back to Hell, but the docile ones are put to work as servants and laborers. With so many zombies on the market, the slave trade is nonexistant. The black man is at liberty, and human bondage is no more. Young Huckleberry Finn has grown up in a world that shuns the N-word, with its scornful eye set on a new class of shambling, putrid sub-humans: The Baggers. When his abusive father comes back into his life, Huck flees down the river with Bagger Jim, seeking a life of perfect freedom. When the pox mutates once again, causing even the tamest of baggers to become bloodthirsty monsters, the boy Finn is forced to question his relationship with his dearest, deadest friend. In this revised take on history and classic literature, the modern age is ending before it ever begins. Huckleberry Finn will inherit a world of horror and death, and he knows the mighty Mississippi might be the only way out . . .

The last Coscom Entertainment release: Alice in Zombieland by Lewis Carroll and Nickolas Cook

For our full list of books, please see: www.coscomentertainment.com