Book Feature: Rot and Ruin by Jonathan Maberry

The Saturday feature is back! For this week, we are very honored to have both the author, Jonathan Maberry, and his equally fabulous book in our blog. I know a lot of you have been dying to read this book. So do we! We keep on seeing copies of Rot and Ruin in our bookstores but we can't seem to get our hands on a copy! Check out this week's feature!

Title: Rot and Ruin (Benny Imura #1)
Author: Jonathan Maberry
Pages: 352
Buy the book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Summary:

In the zombie-infested, post-apocalyptic America where Benny Imura lives, every teenager must find a job by the time they turn fifteen or get their rations cut in half. Benny doesn't want to apprentice as a zombie hunter with his boring older brother Tom, but he has no choice. He expects a tedious job whacking zoms for cash, but what he gets is a vocation that will teach him what it means to be human.

First line: "Benny Imura couldn’t hold a job, so he took to killing."

Excerpt:

“If I want to talk about you joining the family business, are you going to chew my head off? Again?”
Benny stared venomous death at Tom and said, very clearly and distinctly, “I. Don’t. Want. To. Work. In. The.Family. Business.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘no,’ then.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little late now to try and get me all excited about it? I asked you a zillion times to—”
“You asked me to take you out on kills.”
“Right! And every time I did you—”
Tom cut him off. “There’s a lot more to what I do, Benny.”
“Yeah, there probably is, and maybe I would have thought the rest was something I could deal with, but you never let me see the cool stuff.”
“There’s nothing ‘cool’ about killing,” Tom said sharply.
“There is when you’re talking about killing zoms!” Benny fired back.
That stalled the conversation. Tom stalked out of the room and banged around the kitchen for a while, and Benny threw himself down on the couch.
Tom and Benny never talked about zombies. They had every reason to, but they never did. Benny couldn’t understand it. He hated zoms. Everyone hated them, though with Benny it was a white-hot consuming hatred that went back to his very first memory. Because it was his first memory—a nightmare image that was there every night when he closed his eyes. It was an image that was seared into him, even though it was something he had seen as a tiny child.
Dad and Mom.

Click HERE if you want to read the 21-page excerpt Jonathan was kind enough to provide.

About the author:

JONATHAN MABERRY is a New York Times best-selling and multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author, magazine feature writer, playwright, content creator and writing teacher/lecturer. His books have been sold to more than a dozen countries.

His novels include the Pine Deep Trilogy: GHOST ROAD BLUES (Pinnacle books; winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel in 2006), DEAD MAN’S SONG (2007) and BAD MOON RISING (2008); the Joe Ledger series of action thrillers from St. Martin’s Griffin: PATIENT ZERO (2009, which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Best Novel Award and is in development for TV by Sony Pictures), THE DRAGON FACTORY (2010; now available), THE KING OF PLAGUES (March 2011), THE OTHERS (March 2012), VISITORS (2013); THE WOLFMAN (NY Times bestseller from Tor, based on the Universal Pictures film starring Benecio Del Toro, Emily Blunt and Sir Anthony Hopkins); the Benny Imura series of Young Adult dystopian zombie thrillers from Simon & Schuster: ROT & RUIN (Sept 2010) and DUST & DECAY (2011); and the forthcoming zombie thriller DEAD OF NIGHT (June 2011)

Jonathan has been a popular writing teacher and career counselor for writers for the last two decades. He teaches a highly regard series of classes and workshops including Write Your Novel in Nine Months, Revise & Sell, Experimental Writing for Teens, and others. Many of his students have gone on to publish in short and novel-length fiction, magazine feature writing, nonfiction books, TV, film, and comics.

Visit his website at www.jonathanmaberry.com or find him on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GoodReads, Library Thing, Shelfari and Plaxo.