Ex-Heroes (Ex-Heroes Series #1)

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Overview

Stealth. Gorgon. Regenerator. Cerberus. Zzzap. The Mighty Dragon. They were heroes, using their superhuman abilities to make Los Angeles a better place.
 
Then the plague of living death spread around the globe. Billions died, civilization fell, and the city of angels was left a desolate zombie wasteland. 
 
Now, a year later, the Mighty Dragon and his ...

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1934861286 This item is brand new - current printing. Please allow 4 - 14 business days for Standard shipping, within the US. Thank you for supporting our small, family-owned ... business! Read more Show Less

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Ex-Heroes (Ex-Heroes Series #1)

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Overview

Stealth. Gorgon. Regenerator. Cerberus. Zzzap. The Mighty Dragon. They were heroes, using their superhuman abilities to make Los Angeles a better place.
 
Then the plague of living death spread around the globe. Billions died, civilization fell, and the city of angels was left a desolate zombie wasteland. 
 
Now, a year later, the Mighty Dragon and his companions protect a last few thousand survivors in their film-studio-turned-fortress, the Mount. Scarred and traumatized by the horrors they’ve endured, the heroes fight the armies of ravenous ex-humans at their citadel’s gates, lead teams out to scavenge for supplies—and struggle to be the symbols of strength and hope the survivors so desperately need.
 
But the hungry ex-humans aren’t the only threats the heroes face. Former allies, their powers and psyches hideously twisted, lurk in the city’s ruins. And just a few miles away, another group is slowly amassing power . . . led by an enemy with the most terrifying ability of all. 

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Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

In the years before the plague of the living dead, Stealth, Gorgon, and the other superheroes had guarded Los Angeles, keeping the sprawling city safe from criminals. Those days are forever gone. Now, with billions dead and zombies swarming almost everywhere, these mighty protectors are reduced to protecting the few remaining survivors in a makeshift fortress that was once a film studio. Peter Clines' debut trade paperback and NOOK Book original possesses a sure-handed cinematic feel.

From The Critics
"I loved this pop culture-infused tale of shamed superheroes struggling to survive a zombie apocalypse in the ruins of Hollywood. It's The Avengers meets The Walking Dead with a large order of epic served on the side."
—Ernest Cline, New York Times bestselling author of Ready Player One
 
"Zombies? Check. Superheroes? Check. Awesome? Check. Ex-Heroes has it all. You’re in for a treat!"
—Mira Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Feed

“A novel that will take you on a wild and heart-warming ride...[A] creative zombie story, with in-depth characters, and filled with humor, action, and gruesome fight scenes…the final clash made my heart race in ways seldom accomplished by a book.”
—Wired.com

Chuck McKenzie
If ever there was a novel that I'd give just about anything to see turned into a movie, EX-HEROES would be it.
Chuck McKenzie
If ever there was a novel that I'd give just about anything to see turned into a movie, EX-HEROES would be it.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781934861288
  • Publisher: Permuted Press
  • Publication date: 2/26/2010
  • Pages: 274
  • Product dimensions: 9.01 (w) x 5.98 (h) x 0.61 (d)

Meet the Author

Peter Clines

PETER CLINES has published several pieces of short fiction and countless articles on the film and television industry. He currently lives and writes somewhere in southern California. Ex-Heroes is his first novel.

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Interviews & Essays

A Conversation with Peter Clines

Author of EX-HEROES

You grew up in Stephen King territory in Maine, yes? Did that make you into a zombie fan at an early age?


Well, I was at the southern edges of Mr. King's fallout zone. It's a little town called Cape Neddick, a little tourist place on the coast, and someone told me once that the population was ten times bigger in the summer than in the winter. And to be honest, I was terrified of everything as a kid. Land of the Lost gave me nightmares. Heck, there was an episode of Fantasy Island that gave me nightmares. I was right there when King's career really exploded, but his books terrified me. I finally worked up my courage to read one of his short stories, “The Boogeyman,” when I was twelve or so, and to this day I can't sleep with the closet door open. The original Ghost Rider comics were my first tentative steps into horror, and even some of those freaked me out. My love of the genre really blossomed in college.

Have you always wanted to be a writer?


Well, to quote George Carlin, not in the womb, but right after that . . . yeah.
I can remember making scenes with my Star Wars figures and adjusting them all each night as their story progressed. In third grade I hand-wrote a “novel” that I called Lizard Men from the Center of the Earth, which was about . . . well, guess. Once I discovered my mom's old Smith-Corona typewriter it was all over. I spent all my free time writing comic books and some truly awful Boba Fett fan fiction before there was such a term. I even made some early attempts at novels. One of the great tragedies of American literature is that our garage flooded in high school and all of that was destroyed.
(It's not really a tragedy . . .)

It sounds like you were—no offense—kind of a comic geek when you were a kid?


When I was a kid, yeah. And a teenager. And a college student. To be honest, writing comic books was my big goal when I was little. My first rejection letters are from Jim Shooter—then Marvel's editor in chief—because I would send him some of those (in retrospect) really God-awful stories every other month. With cover art. This is back when I was maybe ten or eleven. He was amazingly polite to a stupid kid. On one level, Ex-Heroes was my chance to finally write the kind of heroes I grew up with.

Do you have a favorite superhero?


I'm a long-time Spider-Man fan. I started collecting The Amazing Spider-Man when I was about nine or ten and kept with it for years. I've got one of those big longboxes just filled with issues. I finally got so frustrated, though, with Marvel's big “Civil War” promotion, and especially how they resolved it. When Spider-Man made a deal with the devil to erase half his life, including his wife and best friend . . . well, I was done.

It sounds like you're not really interested in comics now, though. What do you think about mainstream comics these days?


Tough question. I am a bit disillusioned with the big two comic publishers. To be clear, I don't think there's a problem with using the medium of comics to tell more dramatic, adult-themed stories. The Sandman, The Walking Dead, Unknown Soldier—these are all fantastic stories by great writers. My problem is when this sort of storytelling gets pushed onto characters like Spider-Man or Superman or Captain America, because “dramatic” becomes shorthand for “really messed up.” I think it detracts from these classic characters to push them into molds they weren't meant to fill, and those stories tend to just come across as pointless melodrama. Characters have six-page soliloquies about the nature of heroism rather than just doing something heroic. I've seen people try to do “realistic” stories with the Hulk . . . a character who got his powers by standing next to a nuclear bomb when it went off. These elements can be a nice polish on a story, but there's also a point where they have no business being used. I don't think it's a coincidence that the industry has been struggling so much since this type of storytelling became the norm.

When you moved to California you ended up working in the film industry for almost fifteen years. What kind of work did you do there?


I was a property master—the person who deals with hand props—on a lot of television shows and movies. I worked on a lot of cult things like one of the Beastmaster movies, Veronica Mars, and a bunch of lesser-known stuff. I'm actually the murderer in Psycho Beach Party for most of the movie. I prop-mastered Helen Mirren's directorial debut, and she told me I looked like the type of person who should be sitting on the porch of a southern plantation writing novels.
Also, I was writing scripts on the side. People looked at some of my feature scripts and television episodes, and I made the final round in a bunch of screenplay contests. All this industry experience led to a job writing articles for Creative Screenwriting magazine, which I did for several years. I interviewed George Romero, Kevin Smith, Sylvester Stallone, Orci & Kurtzman, and dozens and dozens of other writers and directors.

So how did all of this come together to form Ex-Heroes?


Ex-Heroes was some random stuff I'd been thinking about for ages, and also kind of a response to a superhero-zombie miniseries I read. I started thinking about how I would've done the story, and that might've been the end of it, except a few months later my girlfriend and I got a place together. I unpacked some boxes I'd been lugging around and found a couple of sketchbooks filled with superheroes I'd made up as a kid. They were all standard comic book archetypes, and I realized if I updated and polished them a bit (and gender-swapped two or three of them), a lot of them would slot into that story I wanted to tell. So I ended up writing and rewriting this book between magazine interviews and reviews all that summer, usually nervous and worried because I was turning down assignments to work on a novel.
So that's where Ex-Heroes came from—born of nerd-rage, childhood creativity, and some blind panic.

Gender-swapped characters?


Yeah. Oddly enough, when I was eleven I didn't really see the point of female superheroes. Who'd want to see women in spandex beating up bad guys and being kick-ass? That's just silly, right? So in all those old sketches Cerberus was a man, Banzai was a man. So was Night Stalker, the character I renamed Stealth.

If you could have any superpower, what would it be?


I don't know. If I could actually pick? I guess we've all wanted to fly at one point or another. I remember being obsessed with super-speed at one point as a kid. Maybe teleportation. Yeah, I hate traffic, so teleportation would be fantastic.

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Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4.5
( 95 )
Rating Distribution

5 Star

(52)

4 Star

(28)

3 Star

(9)

2 Star

(2)

1 Star

(4)

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See All Sort by: Showing 1 – 20 of 95 Customer Reviews

  • Posted May 1, 2010

    I Also Recommend:

    The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

    I didn't want to put it down and now that I have finished reading EX-HEROES, I want to read the sequel!

    Having spent the last few years reading mostly non-fiction, this was the best escape from reality that I have had in a long time. I found the characters as compelling and fascinating as I remember the X-Men being during the Claremont years. Superheroes and zombies have not been a big draw for me since my teen years, but I loved this book and could not put it down. The way the story unfolds is gripping. This book also broached a topic I am very interested in, how do people respond in the face of disaster. Clines handled this beautifully with the complexity of his characters conflicts. As soon as I finished reading the last page, I was ready to pick up the sequel. I hope there will be a sequel!

    4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 16, 2012

    Great mashup of superheroes and zombies. What's not to like?

    This is a really fun read. I recommend it along with the sequel Ex-Patriots which I'm currently reading.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted October 19, 2011

    Entertaining Reading

    I am a fan of the zombie genre and this novel adds a nice new twist. I was a little skeptical at first but quickly changed my mind as Clines developed the characters and their assorted histories. You might think the super hero factor seems out of place but I was amazed at how well the two genres blended together to form a cohesive story. I would definitely recommend reading this novel.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 3, 2012

    Great book

    Will be buying the sequal

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 24, 2012

    Zombie Apocalypse? Yes, please.

    I have been out of the reading routine for far too long, and I am so glad I picked this title by Peter Clines to make my return to reading again. I absolutely loved this book. For me, it has everything in a book that I like. Heroism, zombies, post-apocalyptic setting, and even a hint of romance. I recommend this title to anyone remotely interested in SF/Fantasy. An easy read that I found exremely hard to put down. Can't wait to read the sequel!

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted January 17, 2012

    Awesome!!!

    Skeptical before I read, but now I am a believer. Great twist on the zombie genre that might be getting a bit over played.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 12, 2012

    Great read.

    Normally the whole zombie thing is not something that interests me. This is my first book about zombies to be honest. When I saw it was about super heroes and zombies my interest was peaked, and by no means did this book disappoint. If you like super heroes, zombies, and/or both this is a great book. Characters felt real, back stories were great and no useless bs to bog down the story. Only complaint I it is to short.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted March 28, 2013

    Incredibly cool and unique book

    This book really caught me off guard. It doesn't seem like a genre mashup for superheroes and zombie would work in any other context than in a fanboys mind, but somehow Peter Clines makes it work. Others have noted that the writing doesn't lend itself to very clear action sequences, but I only found it distracting on a few occasions. Overall the book is definitely worth the read, if only to see how a Watchmen-meets-Walking Dead story enjoyably plays out.

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  • Posted March 15, 2013

    This book combines two of my favorite things: zombies and super-

    This book combines two of my favorite things: zombies and super-heroes.  The story was interesting and the characters were well-developed.  There are several pop culture references that made me laugh.  I'd recommend it to anyone that would like to get lost in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles.

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  • Posted November 30, 2012

    A wonderfully fun and thoroughly enjoyable read. One thing that

    A wonderfully fun and thoroughly enjoyable read. One thing that I really liked were the chapters that not only gave you the backgrounds (read 'origins') of the various super powered characters but gave an insight into the early days of the plague that brought civilization to its knees and (eventually) the origin of the plague. The book is overall very well written and plotted with only a very small number of editing (grammar etc) errors. The story moves very fluidly and quickly as is appropriate for the superhero genre. The hint of a beginning of a romance is a nice touch.
    I have to admit; I really was unsure how a superhero/zombie mash-up would work. But it does. Looking forward to reading the sequel, Ex-Patriots. Peter Clines would definitely seem to be an author to keep an eye on.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted September 2, 2012

    Awesome!

    This book was incredible. Great characters, great story, great writing. Think...."Xmen" meets "Dawn of the Dead"...but better. I had a hard time putting this down at night to go to bed. Luckily there is a sequel...so the story will continue awhile longer.

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  • Posted July 2, 2012

    A must read for comic book and or zombie nerds

    My little brother does not read fiction. Ever. So I was shocked when he told me that not only did he read this book, but that he couldn't put it down,and immediately bought the books coming after it. So, I'm adding this to the reluctant readers list. I bought it immediately, and it was worth it. This was a well thought out, and interesting take on the zombie apocalypse theme. It made Marvel Zombies look shoddy and poorly thought out. This is right up the alley for anyone who likes monster mash ups, super heroes, etc.

    My only complaint is that the constantly shifting narration can get confusing if you put the book down and come back.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted May 25, 2012

    Superheros plus Zombies. It's like Chocolate plus Peanut Butter.

    I'm not a huge fan of zombies or the horror genre in general. But I do enjoy superheroes. So the combination of the two in this book turned into one of those "you got chocolate on my peanut butter; this is awesome!" moments. The only thing that kept me from giving it a full five star rating was a major plot element that I figured out as soon as something happens in the story that the main characters didn't seem to entertain as a possibility until just before the end. That and the flashbacks. I think they could have been woven into the story better. There's no connection between the flashbacks and what's going on in the story. They're like extras someone unlocks in a video game. You've unlocked this new character, here's a chapter about what their life was like during the start of the zombie apocalypse. Over all, I really enjoyed this book, and will be adding the sequel to my reading list shortly.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted May 18, 2012

    good read

    Super heroes vs. zombies...best of both worlds, well written. I enjoyed it very much. Waiting for the next in the series.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted May 6, 2012

    Highly Recommended - you must check it out!!

    This book can be the best tv series or movie ever.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted March 21, 2012

    So good

    I was so impressed by this book- and surprised! Not really a comic book fan or 'into' super heros like Spiderman or Superman; these heros were amazing. Very well developed characters, great backstory, edge of your seat action, and good old zombie gore. The story flips between 'then' and 'now' and also between the heros each chapter so you get a true picture on how they all got there. Keeps you flipping the pages! There is so much crap zombie fiction and I am excited to find this author to add to my short list of great authors with Mark Tufo and James Bryan.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted March 9, 2012

    action

    Lots of action with a variety of heroes. I will continue to read the series.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 2, 2012

    Good Book

    I didn't know how I would feel about this book, but it was pretty good. There are a few things that I didn't like, but the things that I did like outweighed the dislikes.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted January 7, 2012

    Great read

    Is it a bit of fan-service to combine two concepts like super heroes and zombies into one narrative? Possibly. Does it make for a great read? Absolutely. Great concepts, great conflicts, and a wonderful climax that I think allowed the story to pivot to a new level. Excellent work.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 5, 2012

    One of the best zombie novels to come out of a flooded genre.

    Despite having a few convoluted dialogue sequences and a cast of characters that is sometimes overwhelming, Ex-Heroes proves that it can stand head-and-shoulders above the rest in a genre flooded with subpar current intetpretations. And who would have guessed it could do so by telling a compelling superheros-with-flaws storyline.

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