Dead of Night: A Zombie Novel

( 51 )

Overview

A prison doctor injects a condemned serial killer with a formula designed to keep his consciousness awake while his body rots in the grave.  But all drugs have unforeseen side-effects.  Before he could be buried, the killer wakes up.  Hungry.  Infected.  Contagious.  This is the way the world ends.  Not with a bang…but a bite.

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More About This Book

Overview

A prison doctor injects a condemned serial killer with a formula designed to keep his consciousness awake while his body rots in the grave.  But all drugs have unforeseen side-effects.  Before he could be buried, the killer wakes up.  Hungry.  Infected.  Contagious.  This is the way the world ends.  Not with a bang…but a bite.

Read More Show Less

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
Maberry (The King of Plagues) combines visceral horror and psychological terror in this bleak zombie thriller. When smalltown Pennsylvania police officers Dez Fox and JT Hammond respond to a break-in at a funeral home, they discover several bodies that refuse to stay dead. The bioengineered disease soon turns other locals into ravenous monsters. Meanwhile, Dez’s estranged ex-boyfriend, reporter Billy Trout, investigates the strange case of the missing corpse of executed serial killer Homer Gibbon. With the National Guard under orders to maintain quarantine at all costs, Dez, JT, and Billy are the only ones who can protect those untouched by the plague. Maberry grounds the story with scientific confidence, spares no attention to detail, and presents the undead as more than faceless targets, but despite clever usage of social media and a unique take on “zombie zero,” this is mostly a rehash of familiar elements. (Nov.)
Library Journal
A prison doctor injects a condemned serial killer with a drug intended to keep his brain animate while his body rots in the grave. But the drug malfunctions, and the result is—surprise!—a zombie who makes a snack out of the mortician servicing his corpse. Of course, he's contagious, has passed on the infection, and—voilà!—the zombie plague has begun. As it turns out, this particular infestation was orchestrated by the Reagan administration when it captured the Project Lucifer documents from the Soviet Union. Lucifer engineered the creation of "metabolically minimalized ambulatory organic hosts." Code for zombies? You bet. This is yet another government-engineered zombie plague. Maberry (Patient Zero), who has ended the world in previous novels, will not disappoint his fans with his latest mishmash of crime noir, horror, and gore. While zombie-savvy readers may become impatient at the length of time it takes the heroes to figure out that an apocalypse is in the offing—really, haven't they ever seen a George Romero film?—Maberry enthusiasts will love it. [Library marketing.]
Kirkus Reviews
A rogue scientist's experiment in revenge wreaks havoc on a rural township in Pennsylvania. A rare one-off from the prolific Maberry (Dust & Decay, 2011, etc.) recycles bits and pieces from B-horror flicks and adds a few twists of its own. The author dedicates the book to George A. Romero, penning an unapologetic love letter to Romero's Night of the Living Dead, right down to a setting in rural Pennsylvania. It's here in pastoral Stebbins County that things go to hell. It starts at a new-age funeral home whose proprietor, Doc "Lee" Hartnup, is startled to find the corpse of serial killer Homer Gibbon. Stumbling into a grotesque crime scene are two local cops, JT Hammond and his partner Desdemona "Dez" Fox. JT is more soulful, a quiet, cautious cop and father figure. Predictably, the book focuses on the voluptuous Dez: "Built like Scarlett Johansson, with ice blue eyes, bee-stung lips and a natural blonde if the rumors were true." Her self-destructive rage veers dangerously near caricature while her characterization as "Genghis Khan with boobs" doesn't exactly inspire affection. Still, this shortcoming won't detract Maberry's legions from enjoying his breathless, clipped prose as the zombie plague accelerates--just as a hurricane bears down on Stebbins County. The truly creepy part comes when local hack and serial-killer aficionado Billy Trout starts tracking down Gibbon's back story. Billy roots out Dr. Herman Volker, an East German scientist smuggled out by the CIA. To avenge an old family trauma, Volker has resurrected a secret formula. "Can you think of a more fitting punishment for a serial murderer than to be awake and aware in a coffin while his body slowly rots?" Volker's detailed, believable description of the unspeakable cocktail he's invented, right down to cribbing from The Serpent and the Rainbow, is as inventive as it is sickening. An outlandish but superfluous zombie yarn that is gruesome, imaginative and grateful to its inspirations.
From the Publisher
"This has to be one of the best traditional zombie tales I've ever read... This is a zombie book for the ages."

—Seattle Post Intelligencer

 

"Maberry grounds the story with scientific confidence, spares no attention to detail, and presents the undead as more than faceless targets."

—Publishers Weekly

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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780312552190
  • Publisher: St. Martin's Press
  • Publication date: 10/25/2011
  • Pages: 368
  • Sales rank: 171,538
  • Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.20 (h) x 1.00 (d)

Meet the Author

Jonathan Maberry

Jonathan Maberry is a NY Times bestseller and multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Patient Zero, the Pine Deep Trilogy, The Wolfman, Zombie CSU and They Bite.  His work for Marvel Comics includes the Punisher, Wolverine, DoomWar, Marvel Zombie Return and Black Panther.  His Joe Ledger series has been optioned for TV by Sony Pictures.

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Read an Excerpt

Dead of Night

A Zombie Novel
By Jonathan Maberry

St. Martin's Griffin

Copyright © 2011 Jonathan Maberry
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781250000897
CHAPTER ONE
 

This is how the world ends.
 
CHAPTER TWO
HARTNUP’S TRANSITION ESTATE
STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
He was sure that he was dying. It was how he imagined death would be.
Cold.
Darkness flowed slowly into the edges of everything. As if the shadows under tables and behind cabinets were leaking out to fill the room. Soft. Not painful.
That part was odd. In his dreams—and Lee Hartnup often dreamed of death—there was pain. Broken bones. Bullet wounds. Deep knife cuts.
But this … this wasn’t painful.
Not anymore. Not after that first bite.
There had been that one flash of pain, but even that was beautiful in its way. So intensely painful that it possessed purity. It was beyond anything in his personal experience, though Hartnup had imagined it so many times. With the quiet people with whom he worked. The hollow people, empty of life.
The police and the paramedics brought him demonstrations of every kind of pain. Brutalized and beaten. Crushed in car wrecks. Suicides and murders. Even the old people from the nursing homes, the ones everyone believed died peacefully in their sleep. Hartnup knew that they had experienced pain, too. For some it was the rat-hungry gnawing of cancer; for others it was the mind pain that came with having memories carved out of their brains by the ugly scalpel of Alzheimer’s. Pain for all. Pain was the coin that paid the ferryman.
Even now Hartnup smiled at that thought. It was something his father once said, back in the days when Lee Hartnup was the assistant and his father was the funeral director and mortician. Old John Hartnup had been a poetic man. Humorless but given to metaphor and simile. It was he who had started calling the bodies in their cold room the “hollow men.” Well, hollow people, to be PC. People from whom the sacred wind of life had fled through whatever crack the pain had chipped into them.
And now Hartnup felt his own sacred wind trying to blow free. The wind—the breath—was the only heat left in him. A small ball of dying air in his lungs that had nowhere to go. There wasn’t enough left of his throat for Hartnup to exhale that breath. There would be no death rattle, which amused the professional in him. He knew that some other mortician would hear it when preparing his body.
Of course, it would not be a mortician right away. First it would be a coroner. He had, after all, been murdered.
If you could call it murder.
Hartnup watched the liquid darkness fill up the room.
Was it murder?
The man … his killer … could never be charged with murder.
Could he?
If so … how?
It was a puzzle.
Hartnup wanted to cry out for warmth, but of course he could not do that. Not with what was left of his throat.
It was a shame. He was sure that he could manage at least one really good scream. Like the ones in his dreams. Most of his dreams ended in a scream. That’s what usually woke him up in the night. It’s what finally drove his wife into leaving him. She could take the fact that he worked with the dead all day, and she was sympathetic to the fact that his work gave him nightmares. But after eight years she couldn’t take the interruptions to her sleep two or three times a week. First it was earplugs, then separate rooms, and finally separate lives.
He wondered what she would think about this.
Not just his death, but his murder.
He heard a noise and wanted to turn his head. Could not.
The muscles of his neck were torn. Teeth and nails. He couldn’t feel the wounds anymore. Even the coldness was fading. His body was a remote island, separated from his mind by a million miles.
The noise again. A clatter of metal, then the singsong of tools dropping to the tiled floor. Retractors and needles and other items. Things that he wouldn’t need any longer.
Things that would be used on him in a few days.
He wondered who would prepare his body for the box? Probably that schmuck Lester Sevoy over in Bordentown.
Another crash. Then a sound. Like footsteps, but wrong somehow. Awkward. Disjointed. Like a drunk trying to stagger slowly across a barroom floor.
Lee Hartnup knew that it wasn’t a drunk, though.
He didn’t have a name for what it was.
Well … that was not exactly true.
It was a hollow man.
The room was darker now. Shadows were closing around him like a body bag being zipped up with him inside.
A simile. Dad would have liked that one.
Hartnup felt his body shivering. He felt the vibration of it but not the actual sensation. It was hard to understand. He knew that his flesh was trembling because his vision was shaking, but he felt no puckering of goose bumps on his flesh, no actual intensification of cold as his skin tried to retreat from it. And yet the vibration was there. The shaking.
He wondered at it. It was so violent that for a moment he thought that his body was going into convulsions. But that would have affected his eyesight, and he could still see as normally as the darkness allowed.
His head lolled on his ruined throat and he marveled that there was enough structural integrity left in his neck muscles to move his head so violently.
Then all at once Lee Hartnup realized what was happening.
It wasn’t a wave of cold shivers. The cold, in fact, was nearly gone. It seemed to flee as the darkness grew. It wasn’t convulsions either. The movement was not caused by any muscular action or nervous flutter anywhere in his body. This was purely external.
He was being shaken.
No … “worried” was the word. The way a terrier worries a rat.
That’s what was happening.
And yet not … This wasn’t a hunting dog trying to break the neck of a rodent. No … This was something else. Even down there in the darkness, Hartnup realized how wrong it all was. He could not feel the teeth that clamped onto him. He was beyond the sensation of pressure or pain. All that was left to him was the savage movement of his body, and the uncontrollable lolling of his head as the hollow man bit at him and tore him to pieces.
The cold was gone now. The darkness closed over him, shutting out all light. Even the trembling vision faded into nothingness. Hartnup could feel himself die.
He knew that he was dead.
And that terrified him more than anything. More than the man on the gurney. More than when that man had opened his eyes. More than that first terrible bite. More than the cold and the darkness. More than the knowledge that he was being eaten.
He knew that he was dead.
He knew.
God almighty.
How could he be dead … and know? He should be a corpse. Just that. Empty of life, devoid of all awareness and sensation.
This was something he had never imagined, never dreamed. The wrongness of it howled in his head.
He waited in the darkness for the nothingness to come. It would be a release.
He waited.
He prayed.
He screamed in a voiceless voice.
But he did not become a corpse.
He became a hollow man instead.

 
Copyright © 2011 by Jonathan Maberry

Continues...
Excerpted from Dead of Night by Jonathan Maberry Copyright © 2011 by Jonathan Maberry. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4.5
( 51 )
Rating Distribution

5 Star

(27)

4 Star

(18)

3 Star

(2)

2 Star

(3)

1 Star

(1)

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See All Sort by: Showing 1 – 20 of 51 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted November 12, 2011

    All you expect from Maberry

    am a huge Maberry fan & haved loved everything I've read by him so far. Dead of Night does not dissapoint. Zombie lovers will be very pleased with this one. Dead of Night is a slightly different take on the Zombie creation. This time a doctor hoping to dish out the ultimate punishment to a sadistic serial killer is on the hook for causing this Zombie Apocolypse. These kinds of "scientist playing God" stories really scare me as I find them unbelievable but plausible that some stupid doctor or lab geek could one day come up with something to screw up the world.
    I also really enjoyed that at least at this point this is set to be a stand-alone novel instead of a series.
    Another great horror novel by Maberry that was everything I expected.

    5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted November 4, 2011

    more from this reviewer

    Who Will Be Eaten Next?

    I listened to this story as an AudioBook, narrated by William Dufris.

    Do not even think of opening this book if you are even the slightest bit squeamish. There is brain eating, rotting bodies, skin crawling, and worm-eating flesh. It will affect everyone men, women, and children, with equal gruesomeness.

    This book tells a story of one man's journey to revenge leading to biological experimentation gone bad and gives you a glimpse of what would happen if an unknown disease were to strike in some small town USA. Actually I think the experimental drug worked as it was designed to do, but not the way the good doctor had planned.

    This story had pulse pounding action to the very last word! I am going to have to add Jonathan Maberry to my favorite authors list because I just love his style. I absolutely loved the ending!

    The Narration Review
    William Dufris narrated this book. He has great character voices and you can always tell the difference in the characters when they speak. He put a lot of effort into making the emotions come to life. When he starts to describe some of the gruesome scenes you get the feeling he is actually looking at it and can hear the disgust building in his voice.

    ** Note **
    I received this audiobook as a Random Act of Kindness (RAK) from Darlene over at Darlene's Book Nook. If you haven't heard about RAKs for books, then feel free to click on the link up on my Alaskan Bookie Blog and visit the Book Soulmates website. It is an awesome way to share the love of reading!

    3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted November 30, 2011

    Fast paced and entertaining.

    A good entertaining book. Fast paced and lots of action. Similar in style to other books of his, only with a zombie theme.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted November 27, 2011

    Zombies, oh my!

    I've just started reading this, but already I love it! Can't wait to get further in it!

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted November 26, 2011

    Another great read by Mr. Maberry

    Great read, fast and keeps you interested! The ending leaves you to believe there may be a sequal. Hopefully there is, I would like to find out what happens to some of the surviving characters.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted November 23, 2011

    Best zombie book EVER!

    I believe this may be the best zombie book I have ever read. The characters are very believable. Jonathan Maberry created a novel that I will have to re-read again and again.

    I just hope the writes a sequel soon.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted October 26, 2011

    more from this reviewer

    Nonstop Action From Every Perspective

    I'm so glad I sought this book out. Dead of Night is a nonstop action story told from multiple perspectives so you get to see it all. The local police, the serial killer, the journalist, even a zombie give you their thoughts on what's going on and it all takes place over a day. I haven't read Maberry's work before (I know, what a shame) and if this is a sign of how he writes, I'm in for more! I was weary at first when I saw how the book was divided up into so many chapters, the longest ones still only being several pages long, but it worked for the storyline. Having this many characters showing us the story in such a short period of time could have been tedious, however it was anything but. The story does start out with a bang and just keeps on going, right up to the end. In one part I even got teary eyed - that's a first for me and a zombie read!

    ARC Reviewed by Jessica for Book Sake.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted October 23, 2011

    more from this reviewer

    The human element of a zombie plague

    Dead of Night was a new look at a zombie apocalypse. Maberry brings a realistic explanation of how zombies could be created by parasites. The military creating a bio-weapon that gets into the wrong hands, infecting a serial killer and then a small town & how the government would react to such a thing happening. The characters are well developed. As you read, you truly form an attachment to each one. You feel their despair as they are forced to kill people with faces they recognize, as they fight for their lives and not just against the zombies. You are even given a view of what it would be like to be turned into a zombie. For zombie purists, nothing was changed. They still lumber along, moaning, and the only way to kill them is to shoot them in the head. Only one slight change, they can spit black mucus infested with the parasites that can turn you. So not only must the people try not to get bit but they have to avoid getting blood or spit on them as well. Amidst the horror & reality of a zombie plague taking over, there is human emotion that will pull at your heart. The closer I got to the end, the faster I read, wanting to know what will come of the characters I grew to like so much. One of the best zombie books I have read!

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted September 16, 2011

    more from this reviewer

    Paying homage to George Romero, Jonathan Maberry writes an exciting zombie thriller

    At the penitentiary in Stebbins County, Pennsylvania, the prison doctor injects a serum into convicted serial killer Homer Gibbon just before his execution. The elixir is the ultimate cruel and unusual punishment as it will keep the psychopath's brain functioning and aware while his body rots away interred in the ground.

    Following the execution, at the Hartnup's Transition Estate, Doc Lee Hartnup is bitten by Gibbon's corpse. At the same time, local police officers Dez Fox and JT Hammond respond to a break-in at the funeral parlor. They flee from the dead coming at them.

    Meanwhile Dez's former boyfriend reporter Billy Trout investigates a report that Gibbon's body vanished. He soon runs into the dead ripping the living. He eludes the corpses and meets up with Dez and JT. The trio quickly concludes the reanimation disease is highly contagious and the therefore the government will deploy the National Guard to contain the bioengineered toxin with no regard to those alive inside the contamination zone.

    Paying homage to George Romero, Jonathan Maberry writes an exciting zombie thriller. The cause for the epidemic is stolen Cold War research used on the psychopath Gibbon. The lead protagonists possess different personalities as they conclude they are humanity's only hope. Although somewhat similar in blood and gore as the typical zombie thriller, Dead of Night provides freshness with a deep look at the psychological impact on the three heroes and other humans who know that no matter what actions they take inevitably there is no escape; perhaps not even death.

    Harriet Klausner

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted May 28, 2012

    Ok, to much explanation, not enough action

    Wont be reading the second book if there is one

    1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted November 4, 2011

    Recommend

    I have always enjoyed everything zombie, if you are like me you know there is the typical "getting run after" junk out there. This book is not one of them, i enjoyed the story and the thought Mr. Maberry put into it. If your a fan of good zombie stories this is the book to get. If you have never read a zombie story, this is a great one to break in with. Enjoy!

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 31, 2013

    Harriet Strikes Again

    You'd think I'd know by now to look for the writer's name before reading a review. Well, at least now I don't have to spend the money.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 25, 2013

    Hard to get into

    Once I got in to it, it was a good read and then I couldn't put it down. Just hard to get in to.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 22, 2012

    Amazing authur

    His dust and decay book was amazing i couldnt put it day

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  • Anonymous

    Posted October 18, 2012

    Good

    Good

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted September 9, 2012

    CHAOS....awesome!!

    Evilllllll.....slow going at first with all the background bios, but then it gets GOOD!!!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted July 31, 2012

    A solid little zombie romp

    This was my first Jonathan Maberry novel and I wasn't disappointed. He sets the entire story within the confines of a single day/night as a zombie plague sweeps through a small Pennsylvania town. I give the author props for offering a completely original reason for the living dead. (I won't' spoil it here, but suffice to say it's quite nasty!) The main characters are decently developed, and Maberry keeps the story rolling along by cutting back and forth between locations and situations. The end leaves things open for a sequel, which, quite honestly, I am interested in reading. The original carrier of the zombie plague is not your typical "victim" or living dead, and there is still much that can be done with him and the plague.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted July 2, 2012

    Mayberry can write; however, the book is so chocked full of extr

    Mayberry can write; however, the book is so chocked full of extraneous detailed descriptions and unneeded back-stories of minor characters that you never see again that it becomes a struggle to get through the story. Aside from that, the main characters spend most of the story out of character and are way too reminiscent of Lethal Weapon, except with a female lead. Mayberry can turn a mean phrase, and he's very vivid with his descriptions, but there was so much of both that it really turned me off. I couldn't finish the book, which is a shame.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted June 17, 2012

    more from this reviewer

    Unlike typical Zombie Books by OBS Staff member Rose Dead of N

    Unlike typical Zombie Books

    by OBS Staff member Rose

    Dead of Night, by New York Times bestselling and multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author Jonathan Maberry, is a rock solid zombie thriller that will change the way you view stories about the walking undead.

    The first chapter, which is all of six words long…“This is how the world ends.”…is poignantly simplistic. What follows next is anything but.

    Maberry, in his typical nail-biting ferocity, weaves an intricate tale of human suffering, anxiety, death, medical monstrosities and all out warfare, from a simple bite from a dead death row inmate, Homer Gibbons, who is set to be buried in the ground in a small town in Stebbins County, Pennsylvania.

    The first to be bitten is Doc Hartnup, a mortician at the local funeral home, and what makes his new acquired state different than your “normal” zombie is that he realizes he is mercilessly trapped in his own body and is aware of EVERYTHING. Maberry states he gave Harnup this voice to become a point-of-view character that allows us to see into the heart of the tragedy.

    Unlike the typical zombie fare that we are used to, Dead of Night deals with many other issues besides the looming threat of all the characters becoming something as simple as a McZombie meal. There is deadly mutating worm-like virus coursing through the blood of a fully functioning undead a death row inmate on the loose, whose only desire is to infect others, and it’s clear a full-blown epidemic has descended upon this rural Pennsylvania town.

    Having to deal with this newfound horror in Stebbins County is a plethora of interesting characters such as Desdemona Fox, a tough as nails cop, with a military background, who is described as “Genghis Khan with ample boobs”. She lands herself in the hot seat as a murder suspect when no one believes her story about what is happening in town. Billy Trout, Dez’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, whose nose for news leads him to track down the story behind Homer Gibbons and Doctor Herman Voker, the German scientist, the man behind the unspeakable cocktail of death bestowed upon Gibbons.

    What makes this novel special is if you replaced Maberry’s “zombies” with any other foreign entity the story works. Why? Because it is about the human condition when dealing with outside forces that are beyond our control. It is how people treat each other, try to save one another, or use each other for self-preservation.

    This is not to say horror fans will be disappointed. Au contraire, Dead of Night is the best type of zombie novel, for not only is it filled with suspense and horrific concoctions of death, it begs many questions such as …How do you describe what you see to others who doubt you? How do you contain the spread of disease? How do you stay alive? Whom can you trust? What is right and just and what is merciful? It is impossible to walk away from this book and not have felt something for every scenario and character presented to us.

    Take stories such as George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, to which Maberry dedicated the novel; mix it with the film Contagion, 28 Days Later and the series The Walking Dead and you have an idea of what to expect from Dead of Night.....

    Full review and more at openbooksociety dot com

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  • Posted June 12, 2012

    Excellent "Zombie" Story!!!

    This book was a really fast read. I have read many zombie/apocalypse books and this one is one of the better ones. It has a really good plot and the story moves along well. There is a love story intertwined to keep you interested beyond figuring out what the hell is going on and killing zombies. It would make a great movie! You feel for Dez even though she f's up her own life. The more you get into the book the more you fall for Trout and Dez. Its kind of scary because something like this could definitely happen. Maberry is a really down to earth writer and I have been hooked on his books for a while.

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