V Wars #3
Written by Jonathan Maberry
Illustrated by Alan Robinson
Colored by Jay Fotos
Lettered by Robbie Robbins
Covers by Ryan Brown and Kevin Eastman
IDW Publishing
Release Date: June 18, 2014
Cover Price: $3.99

Can one man change the ideals of two warring factions? In IDW’s V Wars #3, written by Jonathan Maberry with illustrations from Alan Robinson, the humans and the vampires continue their bloody onslaught against each other.

Taurus Harper, a soldier whose entire platoon is slaughtered by an anarchist V-Cell, is recruited to the V-8 squad – the elite military force known for taking out vampire threats quickly and efficiently. As Professor Swann gets to know Taurus, he is overwhelmed by the man’s genuine humanity and understanding that not everything about the V-War is black and white; however, Taurus himself may not be all that he seems.

2011 was a big year for doorstopper-sized fantasy novels, particularly A Dance of Dragons by George R.R. Martin, which is a whopping 1,040 pages. It sold 298,000 copies on its first day alone, which included 170,000 hardcovers, 110,000 eBooks, and 18,000 audiobooks, proving that although ebook sales are catching up, print is still ahead for big releases like this.

Another major series that got a hugely anticipated sequel came in the form of Patrick Rothfuss’ The Wise Man’s Fear, which continues the events of The Name of the Wind and propels Kvothe into an even more compelling situations. Canadian horror also got a few notable entries with Enter, Night and Dead of Winter, both historical fiction novels and both superbly written. Small and mid-sized presses continue to produce some of the best genre fiction out there, and this year proved no exception.

Here’s my picks for the Top 10 Fantasy and Horror Books of 2011.

Zombie CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead
Paperback
Written by Jonathan Maberry
Citadel Press
Release date: September 1, 2008

It’s a good time to be a zombie, or at least a lover of all things zombie-related. Max Brooks recently had two best sellers about the undead hordes, The Zombie Survival Guide (a sort of “worst case scenario” book for dealing with the ghoulish undead) and World War Z (an oral history of the coming war against the zombie hordes.) Call To Duty: World At War had a special game play mode after the credits rolled, where suddenly you have to fight your way through hordes of carnivorous Nazi undead in order to extend your miserable life. Zombies from the Third Reich also appear in Dead Snow, a selection at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival in which a group of Scandinavian kids who accidentally awaken Wehrmacht and SS zombie hordes in the Nordic snow. We will even soon be treated to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a classic Regency zombie romance re-write of a Jane Austen classic by Seth Grahame-Smith.

To all this zombie gold, we must add Zombie CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead by Jonathan Maberry. Taking something of an opposite tack from Max Brooks’ work, Maberry starts by asking “What would a real zombie outbreak look like?” and then goes to find answers from real pathologists and criminologists who are interested in the subject. Along the way, he provides frequent little detours into zombie-related subjects like the roots of the modern zombie phenomenon, lists of key zombie films, differences between zombie film genres, the zombie in art and illustration, and quotes from fellow zombie-philes in the arts and sciences.