So out of the blue, Patrick Wolohan of the Stomping Yeti blog, wrote a post outing the cover of the new book. Evidently, the image  had been uploaded to Amazon and I didn’t know it. Which means, I guess, that’s it time to start my Massive Global Marketing Campaign.

First up — what book am I talking about? Well, it’s called Raising Stony Mayhall, it’s coming out June 28, 2011, and the cover that Patrick found looks like this:

Ooh, spooky, yah?

Well, Patrick wanted to know what the book was about. Now, I’m terrible at pithy summaries — at least with my own stuff. I’ll be very curious to see how the Random House marketing people describe this one. But until then, here’s the long, unpithy summary:

It’s the story of John “Stony” Mayhall, the most polite dead boy in the world, who just may be the zombie messiah. Found by the side of an Iowa road soon after the great living dead outbreak of 1968, the undead infant is cared for in secret by Wanda Mayhall and her three daughters. Then the baby does the impossible: he begins to grow. And talk. And wonder things like, Am I the last of my kind? Can my bite really start another outbreak? And, Will I ever get to go to college?

Stony’s childhood ends, and his true education begins, the night he’s almost captured by the government and is rescued by the Living Dead Army. These LDs (the Z-word is so crude) aren’t the flesh-eating monsters he’s read about, and they want their (in)human rights. Stony goes on the lam, dodging government zombie hunters who want to send him to the secret prison called Deadtown. Along the way Stony becomes a kind of scientist of undeath, and he meets walking dead of all stripes: prophets who speak through Ouija boards, billionaire fishstick magnates, assassins made almost entirely of wood, and a lab animal who becomes for two minutes the world’s first undead chimp.

But the biggest threat to LDs and humans alike are the radical LDs who want to start the Big Bite–the second, and final, zombie outbreak. Stony, who has become a reluctant leader of the Living Dead Army, may be the only one who can stop them.

Oh, and one more thing. The reader learns on page one that Stony failed. The second outbreak spread over the globe, and the living survivors are confined to small, armed enclaves. But what Stony did succeed at was just as critical, and much, much stranger.

That’s it for now. Tomorrow, excerpts! Stop back for Chapters 1 and 2.