Exclusive Cover Reveal for The Last Weekend: A Novel of Zombies, Booze, and Power Tools
On January 5th of next year, Night Shade Books is releasing Nick Mamatas’ The Last Weekend: A Novel of Zombies, Booze, and Power Tools, a San Francisco-based zombie novel in which dark humor and tongue-in-cheek self-awareness breathe new life into the end of the world. Today we’re pleased to exclusively reveal the book’s cover art.
Mamatas takes a high-powered drill to the lurching, groaning conventions of zombie dystopias and conspiracy thrillers, sparing no cliché about tortured artists, alcoholic “genius,” noir action heroes, survivalist dogma, or starry-eyed California dreaming. Starting in booze-soaked but clear-eyed cynicism and ending in gloriously uncozy catastrophe, The Last Weekend: A Novel of Zombies, Booze, and Power Tools is merciless, uncomfortably perceptive, and bleakly hilarious. It is a darkly satirical stand-alone zombie novel, which distinguishes itself from traditional zombie book heroes (soldiers, born leaders) with an apocalyptic San Francisco left to the bohemians, drunks, and loners. Fans of horror and dystopian fiction will relish this humorous, daring drama that deals with the complexity of human nature amidst chaos. Sometimes the best coping mechanism in an apocalypse is a stiff drink and a good book.
Synopsis:
Vasilis “Billy” Kostopolos is a Bay Area Rust Belt refugee, failed sci-fi writer, successful barfly, and, since the exceptionally American zombie apocalypse, an accomplished “driller” of reanimated corpses. There aren’t many sane, well-adjusted human beings left in San Francisco, but facing the end of the world, Billy’s found his vocation trepanning the undead, peddling his one and only published short story, and drinking himself to death.
Things don’t stay static for long. Billy discovers that both his girlfriends turn out to be homicidal revolutionaries. He collides with a gang of Berkeley scientists gone berserk. Finally, the long awaited “Big One” shakes the foundation of San Francisco to its core, and the crumbled remains of City Hall can no longer hide the awful secret lurking deep in the basement. Can Billy unearth the truth behind America’s demise and San Francisco’s survival—and will he destroy what little’s left of it in the process? Is he legend, the last man, or just another sucker on the vine?
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