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Tag Archives: undead

Fabulous Bodies: A Review

Poppy Stringer is an influencer, shaping the views of followers around the world from a decadent Palm Beach home. Every day, she’s pitching makeup and skincare routine tips, fashion advice, and more, frequently accompanied by the sounds of her favorite musician, Eddie Michaels. As a fellow queer creator, Eddie’s music was always incredibly powerful for Poppy, and she’s been a fan ever since her childhood in a group home.

Poppy has a night job, too. When her daughter Marlo is asleep, she packs a fake ID and heads out in a refrigerated truck, finding corpses at local funeral homes that no one is going to miss. She poses as an organ donor retrieval specialist and then sells the bodies to various groups. It’s just a body, after all, and the money’s good. It’s enough to help provide for the extravagant lifestyle that she has grown accustomed to.

When Eddie Michaels is killed by a drunk driver, Poppy’s life is irrevocably changed. She’s offered five million dollars to retrieve his body for a mystery client, with 10% paid up front. More than enough money to get out of the corpse game for good. More than enough for Marlo to be set for life. Short notice notwithstanding, she’s on her way. The pick up goes smoothly enough. If anything, it’s easier than most, without even having to deal with extra people in the process. However, mid-transit, a literal bump in the road sends Eddie’s body out the back of the truck and into the night. When Poppy gets out to look for him, she finds that he’s not quite as dead as the rest of the world had thought. In fact, he’s up and singing and dancing and… asking her for help? Well, when the corpse of your favorite music idol hops up and puts on a show for you, then asks you to drive him around for the evening, what’s a girl to do?

Thus begins the weirdest night of Poppy’s life, playing chauffeur to Eddie in the weirdest riff on Weekend At Bernie’s outside of the current US Senate. Poppy’s got a lot of questions. How is Eddie up and walking? What is he trying to accomplish the night after he supposedly died? Why get her involved in the first place? It’s a long time yet until the sun comes up, and she’s got a long way to go.

If there’s one horror writer whose work I’ve consistently sought out over the last few years, it’s Chuck Tingle. Fabulous Bodies is a delightful and terrifying look at modern culture, influencers, and celebrity. Tingle’s blend of shocking and endearing weaves a masterful path of destruction across Palm Beach.

Fabulous Bodies came out back on July 7th. Go check it out. My utmost thanks, as always, to Tor and to NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for a fair review.

Zombie Apocalypse (aka Bandwagon Day)

I woke up a few days ago and I found this in my twitter feed. Now I like good zombie fiction as much as anybody else (and probably a hell of a lot more than some of you), but the topic is one that I’d tried to avoid mainly due to the over-saturation of modern popular culture. Well, that and I’ve worked in retail over Christmas, so I’m pretty certain I’ve already had some first-hand experience with fending off zombies. NO! BACK! YOU CAN’T HAVE MY BRAIN! HAVE THIS DELICIOUS HOMELESS MAN WHO HAS BEEN CAMPED IN FRONT OF THE STORE ALL WINTER INSTEAD!

The zombie craze has been going strong for several years now, and I am pleased to say that I think the vampire sex fantasies are dying off slowly, as exposure to light generally shows how stupid that concept is. (Disclaimer: I have read the Twilight books, and once I was done, I found myself wondering if I hadn’t briefly been turned into a zombie… I got better once someone handed me a copy of A Game of Thrones, and I am fully convinced that this is a legitimate cure. If nothing else, you can use the hardcover editions for bludgeoning weapons and a layer of the paperbacks as a sort of lightweight but still nearly bulletproof armor. Thank you for saving me, George.) Not that vampire stuff can’t be done well. Bram Stoker’s Dracula give me chills, three readings later, and Anne Rice had a great thing going with her earlier work. Or there’s always the Sookie Stackhouse books. You might know them as those stories that Stephanie Meyer completely ripped off when she wrote Twilight, or like A Game of Thrones, you might know of the story from the sexy HBO adaptation (I’m still waiting for the HBO version of my own life to kick in).

This isn’t to say that the zombie fiction isn’t just as ridiculous as the vampire fiction. Far from it. However, it is technically a little more plausible, especially given recent events. People are even catering to the zombie apocalypse with “anti-zombie” ammunition, bladed and blunt weapons, and fortresses. Zombies are in our video games, our movies, our books, and even our news articles. Combine pop culture’s love of this kind of shit with the fact that some people are legitimately convinced that the world’s going to end because a calendar carved in stone around 2600 years ago is running out of room (oh, hey, look, my calendar printed on paper is going to end this year too, I wonder if that means that the world really WILL end…) and people start to get a little twitchy. I must admit, though, that I am curious as to how a civilization that has supposedly predicted the end of the world couldn’t have foretold their inevitable downfall… I mean, it’s not like anyone who’s ever predicted the end of the world has ever been wrong. Wait, what? You mean they’ve ALL been wrong? Oh man, I need to rethink my strategy… But I digress. In all seriousness, the zombie apocalypse could be a lot of fun. There are some great depictions of it. I just can’t help thinking that any disease or thing like that might likely just kill everyone rather than creating living dead. You can blame my recent reading of Margaret Atwood for this.

Anyway, I should get some sleep. Zombies are making me sleepy. What’s that sitting beside me, you ask? Nothing, nothing, just a little shotgun in the event that you start moaning and craving brains in the near future. Can’t be too careful.