Welcome to The Great Undead War Blog Tour! My thanks to Stuart for having me on today.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s installment at All Things Urban Fantasy, my name’s Joseph Nassise and I’m celebrating the release of my new novel from HarperVoyager, By the Blood of Heroes, which is the first book in the Great Undead War series that combines an alternate World War One with steampunk and zombies. I’ll be touring all month talking a bit about the book and the writing process I went through to create it. In today’s post I want to focus on a topic that’s near and dear to all our hearts…
Zombies.
Er…well…shamblers, actually. That, at least is what the men in the trenches of this alternate World War I call them. Shamblers. For the odd, lurching gait that they use as they clamber through the barbed wire of no man’s land in search of living flesh.
You see, somewhere back in the early days of the Great Undead War (back when it was just the War), the German high command ordered its scientists to come up with a battlefield weapon that would break the stalemate on the Western Front. They tried machine guns. They tried tanks. They tried massive war dirigibles. But in the end, it wasn’t anything concrete that gave them the edge they were looking for, but rather something so ephemeral that it could slip through the fingers with barely a touch at all.
Gas.
Corpse gas, to be specific.
Unlike chlorine or mustard gas that attacked the living, corpse gas attacked the bodies of the dead, raising them to new life in the service of the Kaiser. The vast majority of these newly arisen troops came back as shamblers – slow, dim-witted, with just enough intelligence to follow some simple orders delivered as electrical shocks through their control collars.
Every now and again, however, one of the newly risen came back with not only their senses intact, but with their intelligence and physical capabilities greatly enhanced. The Allies called them Revenants and thanked God that they were few and far between. Even one revenant, like the German ace Manfred von Richthofen, was bad enough. But a plague of thousands of them? That would be unthinkable.
Lately, however, word is starting to leak across Allied lines that the experiments are continuing. That the German high command has been mucking about with the gas, that there are worse things to come.
It is 1921 and the future is far from assured…
Join me for what Library Journal calls “a treat for zombie and horror fans, military fiction aficionados, history buffs, and steampunk lovers alike†– By the Blood of Heroes!
