As you may be aware, my blog has been teeming with zombies. Now, they’ve taken to the high seas and Sylva and her friends are in for a stormy voyage.
Read my review and enjoy the glimpse inside this adventure. I don’t think you’ll be worrying about seasickness!
Win the book. Win a Kindle Fire. Keep reading to find out how.
Title: The Confessions of Sylva Slasher
Author: Ace Antonio Hall
Published: April 14th, 2013
Publisher: Montag Press
Page Count: 273 pages
Genre: YA Horror
Recommended Age: 12+
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My Review
So here’s the skinny. Sylva is a necromancer and along with her friends, they raise the dead so loved ones can say goodbye and they also help in criminal cases.
The raising on their party cruise doesn’t quite go as expected. Soon the ship is overrun with slathering zombies and the gore fest begins.
It just so happens this is the two-year anniversary for the death of Sylva’s boyfriend Brandon.
Imagine her surprise when she discovers he’s very much alive.
How could I resist another zombie story. Seems like I’ve been reading a lot of them and am always surprised at how much I enjoy them. The Confessions of Sylva Slasher joins that rank.
There’s no easing into it with this book. The first chapter gave me chill bumps.
Then the next chapter takes you back several hours earlier. I just knew something was going to go wrong with the raising, but the author rocked me back in my seat when he let loose that shocker. Sure didn’t see it coming.
And that’s the way it is all through this book.
Sylva finds out her dead boyfriend isn’t, she’s up to her eyeballs in zombies, and a weird being that moves so fast she can only glimpse a black blur and a bushy tail had me wondering who, if any, might survive the cruise.
I couldn’t imagine being trapped on a ship with all this going on. There’s nowhere to run, no rescue waiting on the other end of your 911 call. It’s all up to you whether you live or die.
The unexpected curve balls the author threw at me had me wondering how there could be a happy ending. I’m not going to tell you whether it was or not, I’m just going to say it was good, real good.
I’ve never been on a cruise and I’m now rethinking that desire. The apocalypse is coming, don’t ya know.
4 STARS
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A couple of fun things.
Scene:
Crusher unsheathed the blade in his scabbard. It looked like a fourteen-inch cleaver.
“Damn, that’s big” I said.
“That’s what she said,” Crusher replied.
Name of the company Sylva works for:
The Silver Kisses Aerial Ash Scattering Company
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Synopsis
A spring break trip on a cruise presents a new problem for Sylva. Passengers on the ship turn into flesh-eating zombies, unlike the harmless ones she’s used to raising from the dead. She and her friends are trapped on the Pacific Ocean, and their only escape comes from a guy Sylva had a crush on she thought was dead, named Brandon. Sylva doesn’t normally hold grudges, but when someone plays with her heart they have to pay. However, with the fate of the human race on the line, Brandon convinces Sylva to join him in a secret mission, yet she can’t shake the feeling that he’s hiding something.
It didn’t take long for her suspicions to hold true when it’s revealed that Brandon has been romantically involved with the very enemy he now wants her to destroy. This villainous female would rather kill Brandon than let Sylva have a chance to patch things up between them. Sylva is not the kind of girl to walk away from love without a fight, but with a strange virus threatening extinction of human life, she shoves her own feelings in her back pocket to face her greatest nightmare, and that nightmare starts with something that is eerily growing right inside of her own mind and body.
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | GoodReads
Be sure to grab some Sylva Slasher merchandise!
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An exciting excerpt
“A treat for Buffy fans–but 100% Ace Antonio Hall‘s own twisted vision. Breathes new life into the living dead; run, don’t shamble to get a copy.” —Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of Red Planet Blues
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The deadheads slithered, scraped, and shuffled closer and closer. There must have been more than twenty of them ready to tear me apart like hungry wolves. The stench of old rot surrounded me like poison vapors. A chorus of low moans, high whines, and wispy breaths oozed hymnals of my persecution into my ears.
Judgment day. I laid at the altar of the dead waiting to be sacrificed to whoever won ownership of my soul, fear or fearlessness.
I’m not afraid.
Their mangled, distorted faces came into view. How could eyes be so distant, yet so full of hunger? It seemed like they were looking past me—through me into another dimension. Or maybe they could already see which organs they wanted to devour. Their moans found a common craving for death, but their minds were lost somewhere in those useless bodies that kept creeping closer and closer to me, bending and turning in awkward movements. From the ground looking up, they lurched over me like oversized lumps of tumorous blobs, drooling with their mouths agape on their sagging grotesque faces.
I lied. I am afraid.
Pure terror crawled into my ears, listening to their sliding and scraping—more and more deadheads appeared, crowding around me, stretching their necks, and spilling those long vacant looks all over me. They filled my blurry vision with various shapes of disheveled hair and blended shades of disfigured bodies.
The horror of my eyes being torn from my face and viscera clenched between their teeth as they gnawed on my bones and licked the fluids from the insides of my body from their lips became too much to bare.
Something ticked on the ground like an animal approached, its claws pecking as it crept cautiously.
Kla-tick. Kla-tick. Kla-tick. Kla-tick.
It came toward me from a distance. Each step grew louder, bigger. I inhaled, realizing that for some time, I had been holding my breath, frozen with fear. Could it be? No, not now—not now. With my head too stiff to turn and my back broken, I locked my tearful blurry vision on a hazy full moon that seemed to shine a spotlight of death upon me. I spat out a tiny whisper. It’s time to die, again.
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About Ace Antonio-Hall
Ace Antonio-Hall was first published in 1998 in an AdelphiUniversity publication called Luna, with a short story titled “1936.” After earning his BFA degree from Long IslandUniversity, he taught middle-school English for over ten years.
He now lives in southern California, and was the Vice President of the Greater Los Angeles Writers Society (2009-2011), and still holds an executive position in the organization which gives him a huge platform to market, sell, and promote his work through the many conferences, meetings and book fairs that GLAWS holds each month. He is also a member of LASFS and the International Thriller Writers.
His first novel, a coming-of-age YA zombie story, The Confessions of Sylva Slasher, was released April 2013 by Montag Press. It is part of a series with the next book Skateboard Xombies, expected for release early next year.
About the writing life, he says: “I harmlessly dream in Technicolor nightmares, watch a ton of horror flicks, eat more donuts than I should, and refuse to stop reading Spider-Man. All of those combined give me a sweet tooth to write about the suite life of zombies.”
Ace’s true labor of love is writing fast-paced fiction with character-driven plots featuring female protagonists. He continues to write short stories and build on the world of teen necromancer Sylva Slasher as she reigns as Princess of the Undead.
You can find out more about Ace, including his music and screen acting credits, and his involvement with the HollywoodActors Academy as part-owner, Acting Coach and Creative Director, at the IMDb Biography web site.
Amazon Author Page | Twitter | Facebook | GoodReads | Website | Blog
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There are two tour wide giveaways. Prizes include the following:
Giveaway # 1
- A Kindle copy of The Confessions of Sylva Slasher
- Giveaway is: International
Click on the rafflecopter below to enter.
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Giveaway # 2 (eBook Purchase Required)
- A Kindle Fire HD featuring 7″ display and Wi-Fi
- Giveaway is: US Only
Click on the rafflecopter below to enter.
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Busy, busy, busy. So many delicious reads! Some I’ve read and will be posting my reviews soon.
