They thought they had escaped.- The Eternal Undead (In the Time of the Dead, #3) by David Monette

The battle for Washington DC is behind them, and the last remnants of the human race have fled from their undead enemies to a remote Caribbean island where they try to salvage what is left of humanity. But even here, the zombies have come.

Description: 

Published: October 1st, 2015

Cover Artist: David Monette

They thought they had escaped.

The battle for Washington DC is behind them, and the last remnants of the human race have fled from their undead enemies to a remote Caribbean island where they try to salvage what is left of humanity. But even here, the zombies have come. Led by the architect of the holocaust, an invading army wreaks havoc trying to acquire the one thing that can stop them, and the one thing a small contingent of soldiers knows they must never get. 

Join with Sasha, Terrance, Virgil, and the little girl, Max, in an all or nothing gamble as they fight down the road to either salvation or horrible defeat in the thrilling conclusion of this series. 

GUEST POST

Character Development

Greetings everyone! My name is David Monette and I am an author and an illustrator. Basically, this means that I get to write novels and create illustrations for both the interior of the books and the covers. Today I’d like to discuss how I came up with the personalities for the main characters in the three books of the “In the Time of the Dead” trilogy which starts with “The Zombie Axiom,” followed by “The Warring Dead,” and finishing with the currently released, “The Eternal Undead.” 

It started pretty simply. At the time I came up with the idea for writing the first book, I was teaching an introduction to the humanities class at my local college. The class was pretty neat because it not only was about the individual disciplines of the humanities (literature, theater, cinema, etc…) but it also went into the themes that influence the arts, things like love, death and life affirmation, religion, morality, and happiness. 

And there it was. As I was discussing happiness and the ancient Greek philosophies that attempt to define that emotion, I realized that I could use them to embody the personalities of the four main characters in the series. There was a hedonist character, one who sees pleasure as the ultimate form of happiness, an Epicurean, one who sees the avoidance of pain and moderation of pleasure as the way to attain happiness, a stoic, who sees pain as being a necessary part of life that has to be dealt with inwardly through the use of one’s will, and an Aristotelian who sees happiness as being the purpose of life, not just a single moment of pleasure, but living and having a good life. 

So, as you read the series take a good look at the four main characters and try to see which of them embodies which philosophy of happiness! 

EXCERPT

TOUR SCHEDULE

As the day slipped away far off to the west, the darkness of the jungle became a living thing. Knit together by the slow creep of lengthening shadows, it grew by degrees into a massive being, shapeless and black. For nourishment it ate the weak or the unlucky. In return it exhaled moist heat and a cavalcade of sound, the sound of thousands of separate voices, large and small, all coming together to meet the ear in a constant sheet of noise. Those who were responsible for the making of this chaotic ballad were invisible to the naked eye of man. This was so not just because of the darkness, but because most of the performers—the frogs, birds, and insects—were hidden within the surrounding vegetation, frightened of being killed by their neighbors, either eaten, or as was the case with the troop of humans quietly slipping along a trail, flattened under a boot. 

For one of the six members of this troop of humans, such an act would have been celebrated with a certain degree of relish. Terrance hated the sound of the jungle at night. There were not many things in his life that he gave away for free, but in his hatred he was quite generous. He hated the bleats, the croaks and hoots, and he hated the creatures that made the noise. He hated the darkness and the fact that he had to wear a pair of thermal goggles to plumb its depths. He hated the heat, and the plants, and the bugs. He hated the head-to-toe leather suit he wore… and most of all he hated the reason he had to wear the suit, the reason he was out in the jungle at night in the first place. He hated the zombies. Or more accurately, he feared the zombies and he hated them for that fear. 

His terror of these beasts was not unfounded. Since the first day of the apocalypse when a host of diabolical necromancers eradicated most of the human population on earth and then raised the dead as zombies, the resulting creatures could, with a single bite, turn any living person into one of them. Terrance had seen it done before. It was not pretty. The resilient leather he wore formed a fairly reliable barrier between a bite and death, so day or night, no matter how hot it was, whenever he or anyone else left the barricades surrounding the city of St George’s on a patrol, they wore the protective clothing. The safety it provided far outweighed the bladders of water they needed to carry or the periodic “cool downs” they had to perform while nestled in the boughs of a tree.

Either way, Terrance hated it all. 

In fact, he was so busy nursing his various hatreds that he barely noticed when Danger, the woman on point, suddenly raised her fist head-high and froze.

The fire team immediately came to a stop.

Terrance’s finger slipped from outside the trigger guard of his MP5SD sub-machinegun to curl around the curve of the trigger. The contact made him feel safer, more in control.

Around the task force the sound of the jungle withered and slowly died.

The point person opened her fist, laid the flat palm parallel to the ground, and took a knee.

Seeing this, Lieutenant Burgis, the officer in command, looked back and motioned those behind to follow suit.

They crouched and in the dark waited.

There was something out there. 

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About the author:

David Monette was born and raised in the cold rural hinterlands of upstate New York. As a typical kid in a typical community, life for him was pretty... typical. He liked to draw creatures and contraptions but as the second born of four sons, such ability was merely a convenient way of standing out from the crowd. As he inexpertly stumbled through high school, his talent for capturing the images in his head onto paper was noticed and encouraged by both teachers and family members. 

Without any other idea of what to do with himself after graduation, besides a vague idea of doing something art oriented, he decided to attend Mohawk Valley Community College where he received his associate's degree in Advertising Design and Production. Acting on excellent advice from his teachers at this institution, he went on to Syracuse University where he learned a great deal about art and eventually wound up with a bachelor's degree in Illustration. 

With a disturbingly large amount of student debt and a decent portfolio, he learned what it was to be a starving artist. Namely, he found that artists don't starve; they simply pick up an endless series of part time work to pay the rent while continuing to plug away at their true passion. This was essentially what he did until he received his first illustration job and from that point on, he didn't look back. As an illustrator, his highly detailed fantasy and science fiction work has appeared in many books, magazines, board games, and collectible card games for such varied publishers as Dell Publishing, Wizards of the Coast, and Atlas Games. Initially, he had completed these diverse projects utilizing oil and acrylic paints as well as pen and inks. 

As digital technology continued to improve, however, he decided it was time to tackle the arduous task of mastering the computer and eventually figured out a way to adapt his style to a digital format. With this knowledge and experience, he went back to school and received his master's degree in Illustration from the University of Hartford. While there, his instructors reviewed his written work and had strongly suggested that he combine his writing ability with his talent as an illustrator to chart his own path. 

And hence, an author was born.

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