Teaser Tuesday: “That Wicked Apple”

So this week I was reading That Wicked Apple, the second in a long series of short books by Rob E. Boley in which the characters from classic fairy tales such as Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, etc., have to deal with a zombie apocalypse. Because of course they do.

The blurb refers to this as “a scary tale of Snow White and even more zombies”, and while I wouldn’t say the “scary” part is especially accurate, the “even more zombies” part most definitely is. It’s not really a spoiler to reveal that the main zombie—the Patient Zero, if you will—of this particular zombie apocalypse is Snow White herself, who, after biting the cursed apple, fell into her usual lengthy swoon, but after being awakened by Prince Charming’s kiss, she came back wrong. Very, very wrong. This happens in the first chapter of the first book, so, like I said, not a spoiler. By this point in the second book, Snow has turned pretty much everyone in the vicinity into a zombie* except for a few of the seven dwarves, a couple of soldiers, and some other fortunate bystanders; and, as often happens during zombie apocalypses, the survivors are trying to barricade themselves in a building to keep out the undead horrors.

Villagers growl and hiss, grabbing through the wood with splintered hands. An old man thrashes against the wall, and Grouchy stabs him through the heart. The old spud hits the ground, twitching. Its wrinkled eyes go from crimson red to rotten blue. It moans as another Horror tramples it. All the while, Grouchy feels the Prince’s cursed eye watching his every move.

“Gotta say,” Grouchy says. “Ain’t thrilled your ugly mug’s the last thing I’ll see.”

“Likely as not, the last thing you’ll see will be one of these cretins biting your face off. I’m just saying. If you’re lucky, it’ll be your girl Snow.”

The astute reader will note that the dwarf in the above Teaser is named “Grouchy”, not “Grumpy”. That’s because, in this series, all of the dwarf names have been slightly offset from their names in that famous animated movie, no doubt for copyright reasons, as the dwarves had no names in the original (and, crucially, long-since-in-the-public-domain) fairy tale; but of course you can’t have a movie or a book where seven major characters are just being called “Hey You!” The names from the movie are, as you may recall, the following:

• Doc
• Sneezy
• Grumpy
• Happy
• Bashful
• Sleepy
• Dopey

The corresponding names from this book are:

• Bones
• Coughy
• Grouchy
• Merry
• Blushful
• Snoozy
• Dim

So you can see what Rob Boley did there.

I feel like I should warn the prospective reader that these books keep ending on cliffhangers**, so you either keep going or you don’t find out the fates of the characters. Although the first two books are all about Snow White and the Seven However Many Are Left At This Point Dwarves, it looks the next one will bring Red Riding Hood into the action, followed by (as previously noted) various other public-domain fairy tale characters. The books are short and not very expensive and propulsive enough to keep reading, so I went ahead and picked up the lot of them (nine in all), but you might want to start with the first one and see what you think before you plunk down $30 for the rest of them***.

* Oh, and these are fast zombies, so it’s kind of an especially desperate 28 Days Later meets Return of the Living Dead kind of situation.
** I, of course, would never do such a thing.
*** By the way, it appears that the author freely puts spoilers into the synopses of later volumes, so you might want to avoid looking at those too closely.