Still of Night

Jonathan Maberry

“Fat Girl with a Knife” © Jonathan Maberry Productions, LLC, was originally published in Slasher Girls and Monster Boys, edited by April Genevieve Tucholke; Dial Books, August 18, 2015.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-947654-34-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-947654-35-8 (ebook)

JournalStone rev. date: November 9, 2018

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018952027

Printed in the United States of America

Cover Art & Design: Robert Grom

Back Cover Design: Jess Landry

Ebook layout: Lori Michelle

Edited by Vincenzo Bilof

From Jonathan:

This is for Brian Keene—great writer, cultural influencer, world-class curmudgeon, good dad, true friend.

And, as always, for Sara Jo.

From Rachael:

For Matt, who inspires me to bring the worlds inside my head to life.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special and heartfelt thanks to Dana Fredsti for editing and generally putting out all kinds of fires. (You rock in so many ways!) And thanks to David Fitzgerald for utility infield work. Nice!

AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

There are some things you need to know. The first of which is that I love my life-impaired fellow citizens. We have some history. A lot of history, actually.

My first exposure to “zombies,” as we’ve come to know them in the current pop culture world, goes back to October 1968, when I snuck into the movies to see the world premiere of Night of the Living Dead. A truly landmark horror film. Prior to that, zombies were a kind of somnambulistic slave in old black-and-white movies about Haiti. They didn’t eat human flesh and they weren’t really dead. Just dead-ish.

Then George A. Romero gave us that movie. And, before anyone throws down this book in semantic frustration, yes, I know that Romero did not make a zombie film. Yes, I know that the word “zombie” was inaccurately applied to one of his later films. Yes, I know that George fought tooth and nail to remove that word (and completely failed in that attempt). And, yes, I know his movie was about living dead ghouls. All of that is on the table.

But . . . these monsters are what we now call zombies. Everyone calls them that. Even George gave up and began calling them that in his later years. So, yes, this is a zombie book. There are zombies in it. None of those zombies are from Haiti. Just so we know where we stand.