Yes, I will continue to use the “Gerund Stony Mayhall” titles. It’s either that or zombie puns. What’s that you say? Gerunds are fine? Okay then.

Today Raising Stony Mayhall reaches book stores near you. Hopefully. Given the state of book stores, that’s not a given. Support those local shops, people!  (And then leave comments on Amazon for your favorite authors.)

Getting Stony Mayhall (for free)

But if you’re cheap like me and always on the lookout for free books, here’s your chance. The wonderful Mindy Klasky let me write a guest post on her blog today, as part of her Inside Track series. My post is about “the undead elephant in the room” — why the world doesn’t need another zombie novel, and why I felt I had to write one anyway.Anyone who comments is entered in a drawing to win a free copy of Stony.

Reviewing Stony…. oh, you get the idea

A quick note about some reviews. I already blogged about the Publishers Weekly review, but a couple more reviews came in recently that were not only positive, but perceptive, what you’d call the Good Good Review. (There are also good bad reviews, in which the critic doesn’t  like the book, but the review is well reasoned, and bad bad reviews, in which the critic hates the book for the wrong reasons, and its cousin, the good bad review, in which the reviewer likes it for the wrong reasons. I forget the name of the author which articulated this reviewing matrix, but it’s handy to keep in mind.)

Gary K. Wolfe in Locus Magazine had a nicely written piece in which he points out several things that I was hoping people would get from the novel, and he  ends his review with this:

Despite some notably grotesque touches, such as a zombie philosopher named The Lump who survives with only a fragment of a body, Raising Stony Mayhall is almost restrained in is lack of splatter mayhem and movie-quote set pieces. Instead, what Gregory has written is an odd kind of heroic family romance, in which the occasional limb may fall off, but the love is convincing real.

And Christopher Shearer over at HorrorWorld, had this to say:

Like his award-winning previous novels, Pandemonium and The Devil’s Alphabet, Raising Stony Mayhall is a simply written yet complex novel that is sure to linger in the thoughts of its readers long after the book is finished and set aside. And sure to garner Gregory a slew of new readers, win him some more awards, and raise the bar for all zombie and speculative literature to come. Full review.