I had such fun with the first book, Paradise Rot. And I’m thrilled to share the second book, Once Again, With Blood.
Lots of laughs and adventure await. But beware. You might get more than you bargained for!
Once Again, With Blood
The Island Trilogy
Book 2
Larry Weiner
Genre: Horror/Dark Comedy
Publisher: Forsaken
Imprint of Booktrope
ISBN: 2940150858305
Number of pages: 220
Cover Artist: Larry Weiner
Book Description:
“We’re getting the band back together!”
For Kyle Brightman, bipolar advertising-industry burnout, this is good news and bad news. Good, because he’ll get to see his zombie-killing friends again, and be reunited with Cate, the zombie he loves (yeah, yeah, I know, read PARADISE ROT and you’ll get it). Bad, because having to blast his way through battalions of bloodless corpses took a brutal toll on Kyle’s already fragile psyche. But duty, and booty, calls. And soon Kyle finds himself on another tropical island, duped again into creating an ad campaign to lure unsuspecting Middle Americans into the greedy mouth of ancient madness. This time, it’s vampires. But with the help of a) his comrades-in-ass-kicking; b) the love of a good (cold) woman; c) the enduring power of Herb Alpert; and d) the awesomeness that is Charo, Kyle just might find a way to save thousands of lives. And what little’s left of his sanity.
Splattered with folklore, dripping with history, ONCE AGAIN, WITH BLOOD, Larry Weiner’s sequel to the uproarious comic romp PARADISE ROT, is what you get if Jimmy Buffett, Carl Hiaasen, Sarah Silverman and Hunter S. Thompson took turns pummeling Anne Rice with a cricket bat.
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Here’s a ‘bite’ from Chapter One. I didn’t include the whole chapter as my post would be way too long. But this will give you a tasty morsel!
“YOU’RE A NEWBIE. I MEAN, LOOK AT YOU. That look of terror. I’ve seen it before.
Of course, it was during a zombie invasion, but still. Whoops! That last sentence freaked you out. S’okay. Let’s focus.
“First, you’re doing it wrong. All wrong. You gotta calm down or you’re not gonna survive it. I’m about to make your life easier. I’m babbling right now because I’ve had a slight psychotic break. Not really a break, more a sabbatical from reality. It’s okay, they’ll give me a new drug cocktail plus some Law & Order, and I’ll be back in action.
“Back to you. Here’s the way it works. Used to be that when you got a patient in who was out of his mind, whether from psychosis or crank or whatever, you’d strap him down with his arms at his sides and cart him off. Problem was, these tortured souls would pull on the restraints so hard, it’d dislocate their shoulders, and then the real howling would start—not to mention the potential litigation. Now, since they’re in pain, they’re gonna smack their heads on the gurney repeatedly. Let ‘em. It’s a padded gurney. They’ll end up with a terrific headache. I suppose you can give yourself a mild concussion. Anyway, it’s the shoulders that were the problem. So someone, and I don’t know who, but someone, maybe a yoga instructor or a cop, came up with the idea of strapping the crazies one hand up by the side of the head, one down by the hip. Did they demonstrate that to you? They should, along with the Fleet enemas. Try some of that shit, chief. See what I did there? Focus. One hand over the head, the other by the side. Now you’re talking incapacitation. Right? Such a simple solution. Almost elegant.
“So listen, you’re the new guy and seem reasonably intelligent so I wanna give you some tools to utilize while working the psych ward. Here they are. First, let them masturbate excessively.
They’re burning off angst and energy and if you stop them they’ll do shit like stab each other in the eye with a plastic knife. There are not a lot of ways to blow off some steam in a psych ward. In fact, you might want to suggest they pass out hand lotion with toothpaste. You see a lot of awkward gaits around here—part of the reason is because they’re walking around with chafed cocks. Next, obsessively watching a TV show does not a crazy person make. It’s the repetition and predictability of the characters that provide comfort. A patient feeling safe is one who won’t try to hang himself off a doorknob. Lastly, tell everyone, regardless of how fucked up they are, that things are going to be okay and they’re gonna get through this. Even the thrice-admitted homeless paranoid schizophrenic meth addict. You tell ‘em they’re gonna be A-OK. Even if you know that it’s bullshit. It’ll make things go a lot smoother and you’ll breathe a little humanity into an otherwise inhumane situation.
“Remember, your job is to get ‘em back on their feet and get them the hell out of Dodge. That’s it. I’m sure you have questions, but it’s been a long day for me and I could really use some Law & Order SVU. It’ll help with the coming down. They’ve gotta process my paperwork. It’s gonna take a while before they even get to me. Law & Order. It’ll be on TNT, Bravo, and USA. Possibly on NBC. There are a few constants in the universe. One of them being that at any given time an episode of Law & Order is running somewhere on Earth. The lounge is off to your left. Why don’t we go hang out in there for a while? Don’t put me next to someone with their hands jammed down their pants. I’m in no mood for that shit. Watching that is like pissing out my soul. You’ll see.”
The orderly, a young man with thick horn-rimmed glasses, stood over Kyle Brightman, a little unsure of how to proceed. Kyle was right. The young orderly was in fact into his third day on the psych ward and had not yet mastered the skills for telling which patients had lost their way versus which patients were the truly batshit among them. Kyle seemed near normal, though he was brought in for beating a tourist couple at Pike Place Market with a twenty-fivepound salmon. The tourists, Scandinavians, had cut into a line that Kyle had been in for ten minutes. When Kyle let them know there was a line, the Scandinavians waved Kyle off.
But how could the Scandinavians know that Kyle Brightman had seen some things this past year, things they wouldn’t believe, and had just come out of a broken relationship that smashed his heart into a million pieces? True, he instigated it by running away, but still. He looked like just another Seattleite, not someone who had survived a zombie war in the Caribbean and a subsequent relationship with a zombie woman. There were a great many things they didn’t know about Kyle, chief among them that there were moments when he knew he was about to do the wrong thing but felt compelled to do it anyway. So, they cut in line and Kyle grabbed the first thing he saw, a gigantic Copper River salmon, and commenced beating the Scandinavian tourists with it. The rest was all screams and a bin of mussels thrown at the bewildered Scandinavians when the salmon fell apart. It was meltdownville after that, and, once again, Kyle found himself at St. Eligius, fifth-floor psych ward.
It had been little over a year since his last visit.
After the paperwork, Kyle was shown to his room, where he found his clean pajamas on the bed. The bed next to him was empty and still made. Kyle had hoped he would have the room to himself. The last time, he ended up with Oscar Pilson, ex-military, ex-Halliburton mercenary and eventually a good friend who now shared a life in the Caribbean sunshine with the woman-with-no-name and her talking Chihuahua. The very sunshine he had abandoned to come back to the Northwest and lose his shit once again. Just like Cate said he would.
At the time he said Cate was full of it, but in the back of his mind a tiny voice had said, “We’ll see you soon.”
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Paradise Rot
The Island Trilogy
Book One
by Larry Weiner
My Review
Welcome to tropical paradise. Welcome to The Isle of St. Agrippina. White sandy beaches. Delicious blended drinks. And island cuisine.
But beware. All is not as it seems. And you just might wind up on the menu.
You see, this long abandoned and now reopened and freshly renovated resort is run by zombies. Not the good ones, if there is such a thing, but the hungry ones. And their brains are working just fine. You’ll see.
Kyle, an advertising exec, should have known it was too good to be true. In fact, he did. Who would hire someone straight from the loony bin? But that didn’t stop him from using the plane ticket and jetting to a tropical paradise.
Right from the get go, things are weird. And they keep getting weirder.
What’s with the slow moving people with their perfect over-white teeth, spray on tans, and practiced pronunciation.
Who is the lady in the woods who likes to conk you over the head and drag you to a bar in the jungle tended buy some weird guy.
And did he really see a chihuahua with it’s butt on wheels, and did it actually speak?
I would have given this book 5 Stars just for the ingenuity. But I also laughed out loud, loved the eccentric mish mash of characters, and couldn’t get enough.
Looking for some fun with zombies. Give this one a try. And the next book, Once More, With Blood, is available now so you won’t have to wait for more fun.
5 Stars
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Book Description:
Kyle Brightman—late of the advertising industry and soon-to-be-late of the 5th floor psych ward—has a job offer he can’t refuse. A new resort in the Caribbean is looking for an art director.
Kyle soon finds himself on the Isle of St. Agrippina working alongside a beautiful copywriter with an icy handshake. Questions arise: Why does the resort management team sport spray-on tans in the Bahamas? How can the resort offer such cheap vacation packages? What does one do with vats of Astroglide?
To get the answers, Kyle must first navigate a series of wildly unpredictable events with a cast of even more wildly unpredictable characters, including a seductress jungle assassin, her partially paralyzed talking Chihuahua, an Ivy League Rastafarian seaplane captain, Kyle’s ex-psych ward roommate, a former Haliburton mercenary, and a French tavern owner with a fondness for goats, all set to the greatest hits of the 70’s. Pablo Cruise never felt so right.
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About the Author:
Larry Weiner is the author of PARADISE ROT (BOOK ONE), ONCE AGAIN, WITH BLOOD (BOOK TWO) and the forthcoming HINDU SEX ALIENS (BOOK THREE) that make up the Island Trilogy. Larry earned a degree in film from CSULA and was an award-winning art director. He lives on an island in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, two kids and a gaggle of animals. He plays bass and thus has poor hearing.
Website / Twitter / Facebook / Goodreads
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Until the next time….
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