Red Afterworld

All Dayton Monday wanted was to make a difference in this world. But the world isn’t what it used to be. Global nuclear war has already begun. The world is in chaos. The water supply of major amusement parks has been tainted with LSD by terrorists. But Dayton’s neighbor, Toad, promises that if he joins his male biker fraternity, the Brotherhood of the Black Heroes, he can help make the world a better place. Through his laborious initiation, he discovers the frightening truth about the Black Heroes: they represent all male vampires, and he is about to become one of them. Vampires are reckless and don’t know sex or love, are addicted to household cleaners and endless supplies of red meat and blood, and despise females of their kind. Just before the world ends, the Second Coming happens, but the returning savior is not what everyone expected: it is Sam Hall, a man hung for murder in the Old West, who died for the world’s sins. That said, crosses no longer protect against them. Now, any image of the Sam Hall hanging tree will do. And then the nukes arrive. What a way to end the world. After the nukes hit, Dayton finds himself one of the few survivors, wandering the wasteland of the Arizona desert where survival seems to be the only meaning of life under an endless red-tainted sky….. until he discovers a strange portal that leads to the barrel pond in the backyard patio of his home at a time just before his initiation, a new hope of saving the world, and true love. Author's note: “Symbolism is only potent when it is given meaning.” --NG RED AFTERWORLD is an important story for me, infused with a multitude of important personal influences and themes. It’s where the name Black Bed Sheet comes from and incorporates my grade school delusion that I was a vampire myself, and my own initiation over eighteen years ago into The Ancient & Honorable Order of E. Clampus Vitus, a fraternity of rowdy & charitable drinking men sprung from the Gold Rush days. It’s inspired by Johnny Cash and Harold Camping (the evangelist who proclaimed the Second Coming a couple years ago and whom my parents are still devoted to). It’s also a response to the mental anarchy that’s been going on in my head for years about how vampires are increasingly portrayed and marketed as dashing romantic teen lovers. In RED AFTERWORLD, they are in many ways a reinvention…..male and female vampires have despised each other and been feuding ever since the “Countess Bathory Incident” where Bathory was betrayed by the Black Hero of Hungary, Count Ferency Nadasdy (an event from which sprung all modern vampires and essentially a true story). They know no romance, sex, or real happiness. I particularly love the female vampire characters, members of a defunct feminist band called Blamia Kiss, and they kick ass, especially Tricks Matrix. In fact, I think RED AFTERWORLD kicks ass. I think it’s like nothing you’ve ever read, and you’ll never think about vampires the same way again.

About the Author

Nicholas Grabowsky’s novels of horror/fantasy, both as himself, as Nicholas Randers, and as Marsena Shane, have generated worldwide acclaim for over two decades and praised by many of today’s most popular horror gurus in the literary world. He began his career in traditional publishing houses with brisk sellers in mass market paperback horror, and the last ten years have seen him hailed by many as a mentor and advocate to the smaller presses, which has become to him a passion. His body of work includes the award-winning macabre aliens-among-us epic The Everborn, The Rag Man, Pray Serpent’s Prey, Halloween IV (and its special edition), Diverse Tales, Reads & Reviews and The Wicked Haze, Sweet Dreams Lady Moon, numerous anthologies and magazine articles, with projects extending to screenplays, poetry, songs, film, and a wide variety of short fiction and nonfiction since the 1980’s. He’s a veteran special guest at numerous genre conventions and makes appearances and signings across the United States. He has been in the limelight as a radical gospel preacher right out of high school and in the following years a rock vocalist, teacher, lecturer and activist, editor, publisher and founder of the Sacramento-based Diverse Media small press, which has recently blossomed into the subdivisions of Black Bed Sheet Books, which publishes exemplary literature (fiction & non), and Black Bed Sheet Productions, which produces independent film.