Saturday Nightmares Assaults Central NJ Jun 3-5th

HEY KIDS!! Do you LOVE your horror sumthin’ fierce? Are you lookin’ for a place to mingle amongst your fellow fiends and you bask in the warm, green glow of famous zombies and assorted masters of horror? WELL SATURDAY NIGHTMARES IS THE PLACE FOR YOU!! This June 3-5^th, The Sheraton Meadowlands Hotel in East Rutherford, NJ goes to HELL.. and plays hosts horror’s elite including the great Martin Landau, Tippi Hedren, Sid Haig, Julian Sands and Doug Bradley alongside the casts of Dawn of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead and many, many more! For a full lineup hit https://saturdaynightmares.com !! The convention also includes a band of deviants that will send you screaming into the night if you lock eyes with them. It’s your buddies at Dread Central.com!! (and Idle Hands..since it's meee) Dread will be on hand Saturday the 4^th and Sunday the 5^th to load you up with free swag from only the finest of horror projects we mouth off about daily on your most favorite of web sites. If that’s not enough for you unrelenting meatbags, we’ll also be holding hourly contests to win even better gear! This year’s promotional partners include…

Shout Factory: The ONLY company able to make Gamera and the Mystery Science Theater crew play nice with each other. The fine fiends at the Factory have sent a nice stack of DVD's for prizes. Get your copy of Galaxy of Terror signed by Sid Haig and ask him about giant alien rapist slugs!

Magnolia: Providing only the most insane collection of movie titles for the masses. Magnolia is sending a stack of posters from current releases like Troll Hunter and Rubber (the story of a killer tire!) as well as some DVDs for prizes.

Quirk Books: Those warped geniuses behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies! Quirk generously dumped 2 boxes of books in my lap for prizes as well as some awesome posters you'll be able to scoop up.

After Dark: Always sure to bring you 8 Films to DIE For. Their posters will be on the table for you to snatch while selections from their DVD collections will be tossed into our hourly contests.

SEGA: Who recently infused your Wii with Conduit 2 and will soon possess your Kinect! For all my geeks in the house, SEGA sent us the last of their exclusive WONDERCON Thor and Loki posters as well as limited edition Conduit 2 figures for the contests! These were only released in Australia, so if you are a furious gamer, be on the lookout!

Dark Horse: They’ll show you their Tim Burton goodies if you show them yours! (this is gonna get weird..I can tell). We'll be displaying 2 pieces from their large scale Tim Burton Tragic Toys for Boys & Girls series.

Warner Brothers: That movie company who service every sort of geek under the sun. I actually have no idea what the good ole WB is sending, but I hope it looks like rolls of awesome posters!

Activision: Who will make that Call of the Dead for you and won’t reverse the charges. Come grab a free contest ticket and hope your number is up..to win a limited edition Call of the Dead poster!!

HBO: With the triumphant return of your favorite southern fried Vamps. HBO want you to celebrate the new season of True Blood with us so look for some limited edition teaser posters on the tables.

IMAX: Who pose the question; What is better than Pirates of the Caribbean in 3D? Pirates of the Caribbean in IMAX 3D on a screen bigger than your house!!! The movie is in theaters now, but we'll keep the party going with some posters & other pirate booty.

Adrenaline PR: Rocking your brains out since the days of Gozer the Gozerian! Again...no clue what our friends in metal are sending over, but I'm sure it will ROCK.

Want some free stuff while rubbing elbows the with nightmare elite? Get your ass to Saturday Nightmares!! We’ll see you there!

Behold... The Meowmorphosis

Quirk has made a name for themselves by taking literary classics and adding a little something strange...essentially...making them more powerful and thought provoking than they ever were before. Before Quirk, someone would say Pride and Predjudice and you'd immediately start yawning. Add the words "and Zombies" and suddenly all your friends are awake again and are demanding a movie version so they don't have to read the book. AMAZING!! Now Quirk takes us on the trail of something...different...





In the Meowmorphosis, you'll meet Gregor Samsa, a humble young man who works as a fabric salesman to support his parents and sister. Gregor’s quiet life goes strangely awry when he wakes up one morning late for work and finds that, inexplicably, he is now a man-sized baby kitten. Midway through Quirk’s new edition, Gregor escapes into the streets of Prague, where he stumbles into an alarming landscape populated by creepy characters who’ve wandered in from some of Kafka’s other most famous stories. That's right, The Meowmorphosis is a mash-up with the rest of Kafka’s literary life.

Never before has a cat’s tale been so poignant, strange, and horrifyingly funny. Head to the store May 10th and pick up your copy! There are still stores that sell these paper things, right?

Prepare for UNDEAD TREKKIES!!

Zombies. Huh. What are they good for? Hollywood seems to lack the skills to release quality undead cinema, so a little upstart company called Quirk Books has to step in and show them how its done while simultaneously taunting us with awesome trailers for movies that don't exist. But all hope is not lost! The trailer is for a book!! You can READ and let your imagination take flight to a place where chubby Captain Picards flee in terror from the unspeakable horror of a ZOMBIE OUTBREAK!!! Ahhh. Books rule.

From the publisher of the New York Times best seller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, comes a new kind of mash-up… Night of the Living Trekkies by Kevin Anderson and Sam Stall. Just as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies blended monster mayhem with the world of regency romance, Night of the Living Trekkies (Quirk Books, Sept. 7, $14.95) mixes a zombie apocalypse with the enduring pop-culture phenomenon of sci-fi fandom in this exciting original novel.

Jim Pike was the world’s biggest Star Trek fan—until two tours of duty in Afghanistan destroyed his faith in the human race. Now he sleepwalks through life as the assistant manager of a small hotel in downtown Houston. But when hundreds of Trekkies arrive in his lobby for a science fiction convention, Jim finds himself surrounded by costumed Klingons, Vulcans, and Ferengi—plus a strange virus that transforms its carriers into savage, flesh-eating zombies!

As bloody corpses stumble to life and the planet teeters on the brink of apocalypse, Jim must deliver a ragtag crew of fanboys and fangirls to safety. Dressed in homemade uniforms and armed with prop phasers, their prime directive is to survive. But how long can they last in the ultimate no-win scenario?

Fast, funny, and loaded with countless references to Star Trek, geek culture, and science-fiction conventions (just wait until the gorgeous Princess Leia lookalike crashes the party), Night of the Living Trekkies already has Web sites, such as io9, TrekToday, MediaBistro, and SciFiWire, abuzz. It’s the final frontier of zombie mash-ups and will appeal to anyone who enjoys science fiction, horror, or the Comic Con scene!

Night of the Living Trekkies is apparently out now, though this is the first we are hearing of it. To celebrate the release, Quirk have put out a brand new trailer to make us wish this were, at the very least, a short film. Live Long and Eat brains!!

Interview: Author Steve Hockensmith Talks Dawn of the Dreadfuls, Civilized Horror and Bible Upgrades

With more than one million copies in print, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was the surprise publishing phenomenon of 2009. A best seller on three continents, PPZ has been translated into 17 languages and optioned to become a film starring Natalie Portman.

In this terrifying and hilarious prequel, we witness the genesis of the zombie plague in early-nineteenth-century England. We watch Elizabeth Bennet evolve from a naïve young teenager into a savage slayer of the undead. We laugh as she begins her first clumsy training with nunchucks and katana swords and cry when her first blush with romance goes tragically awry. Written by acclaimed novelist (and Edgar Award nominee) Steve Hockensmith, PPZII invites Austen fans to step back into Regency England, Land of the Undead! Now, Idle Hands takes a few moments to get to know the man behind the madness...

Idle Hands: How do you come to the perfect balance of classic courtesy, sensibility and the undead?

Steve Hockensmith: One of the things I love about the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies concept is that there is no perfect balance. The very premise combines things that are inherently unbalanced. It’s an elephant and a mouse on a teeter-totter. The result: comedy!

IH: Do you believe it is more important to be graphic to shock a reader or build tension to genuinely scare them? ..Or is this a moot point if the objective is to strike a humorous yet bloody tone like a great B horror movie?

SH: I think both kinds of scare have their place and work best when used together. Remember that elephant and that mouse on the teeter-totter? Well, shock-scares and dread-shivers are more like an elephant and a rhinoceros. They complement each other. A book or movie that’s all in-your-face shocks gets to be pretty boring eventually, in my opinion, and something that’s all mood and atmosphere is frustrating if it doesn’t pay off in a visceral way. Zombie stories probably lend themselves more to the graphic shocks, but I hope Dawn of the Dreadfuls has a well-nourished rhino to balance out that elephant.

IH: Where do you find inspiration? What horror movies create scenes you've kept with you?

SH: The two scariest things I’ve ever seen in movies are so simple it utterly destroys them to describe them...but what the heck, let’s blow ‘em up. For me, the spookiest image in The Exorcist isn’t Linda Blair in a fright wig. It’s when Father Karras dreams about his dead mother. He sees her watching him from across a busy street, then she turns and slowly walks down into a subway station. I mean, does that sound scary at all? But the way it’s shot and edited, it perfectly captures (A) the helplessness you feel when you’re trapped in an unpleasant dream and (B) the mysterious and terrifying finality of death. It’s chilling in the deepest way possible. In Dawn of the Dreadfuls, I pay homage to both that and the twins in The Shining (the moment when the kid almost runs into them on his Big Wheel is my fave movie scare #2) with a minor, throwaway bit most readers won’t even catch. What’s much more noticeable -- by design -- are the homages to George Romero. Extra bonus Fun Fact: The grand finale zombie battle was inspired by the 1964 war movie Zulu!

IH: What parts of the Bible would be best served by a horror overhaul?

SH: My friend, some parts of the Bible need no horror overhaul at all, because they’re already pretty horrific. You’ve got human sacrifice, rape, fratricide, stoning, locusts, rivers of blood (way before The Shining), baby-killing angels, women turned into pillars of salt, the murder of 99.9% of mankind by an angry god, a prophet’s head on a plate and a dude nailed to a tree. Last House on the Left has nothing on the Good Book.

IH: Do you think Macbeth and Hamlet would team up to fight Aliens, Killer Robots or Monsters?

SH: Let’s just pause to Hollywoodize this for a moment. First off, we’d need some diversity. Sure, Macbeth’s Scottish and Hamlet’s a Dane, but their both white guys, and that just won’t fly in the current marketplace. So either we flip one of the characters -- I kind of like the idea of “Black Hamlet” -- or we pull in another character altogether. Since Hamlet’s a bit of a whiny wuss, let’s bring in a man of action, like Macbeth. So now we’ve got Macbeth and Othello, the Elizabethan Gibson and Glover. As for what they should fight, I say let the focus group make the call.

Thanks to Steve Hockensmith and Quirk Books! For more info on any Quirk Books, hit up http://irreference.com/. Dawn of the Dreadfuls is in stores NOW.

Dawn of the Dreadfuls Trailer to Bloody Up Your Morning

On March 23rd comes the much anticipated prequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies!

In this terrifying and hilarious prequel, we witness the genesis of the zombie plague in early-nineteenth-century England. We watch Elizabeth Bennet evolve from a naïve young teenager into a savage slayer of the undead. We laugh as she begins her first clumsy training with nunchucks and katana swords and cry when her first blush with romance goes tragically awry. Written by acclaimed novelist (and Edgar Award nominee) Steve Hockensmith, PPZII invites Austen fans to step back into Regency England, Land of the Undead!

Quirk Books Presents Android Karenina

From the fine folks who brought you Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters comes..something completely different! Coming June 8th, 2010...

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters coauthor Ben H. Winters is back with an all-new collaborator, legendary Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, and the result is Android Karenina: an enhanced edition of the classic love story set in a strange new world of robots, cyborgs, and interplanetary travel.

As in the original novel, our story follows two relationships: the tragic adulterous romance of Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky, and the much more hopeful marriage of Nikolai Levin and Kitty Shcherbatskaya. These four, yearning for true love, live in a steampunk-inspired 19th century of mechanical butlers, extraterrestrial-worshiping cults, and airborne debutante balls. Their passions alone would be enough to consume them—but when a secret cabal of radical scientific revolutionaries launches an attack on Russian high society’s high-tech lifestyle, our heroes must fight back with all their courage, all their gadgets, and all the power of a sleek new cyborg model like nothing the world has ever seen.

Filled with the same blend of romance, drama, and fantasy that made the first two Quirk Classics New York Times best sellers, Android Karenina brings this celebrated series into the exciting world of science fiction.