Zombie Bake-Off

from the back jacket:

ZBO — click the image for the full cover

“It’s time for the annual Recipe Days bake-off in Lubbock, Texas. Soccer moms and grandmothers gather to show off their family recipes, learn new secrets for the perfect shortcake, and perhaps earn a chance to be on the famous cooking show, How Would You Cook It, Then?

When the bake-off is crashed by a federation of pro wrestlers — including American Badass, Jersey Devil Jill, Tiny Giant, The Village Person, Jonah the Whale, the Hellbillies, and the fan favorite Xombie — all hell is set to break loose. Your heart beats faster as you anticipate who will come out on top in the ultimate showdown of the century: soccer moms or pro wrestlers. Anything can happen.

An infected batch of donuts has transformed most of the wrestlers into mindless brain-eaters and the doors of the convention center have been chained shut, leaving the survivors locked inside, forced to fend for themselves against the hungry dead.

Possessing the intensity of a shotgun to the face, Zombie Bake-Off is a stripped-down masterpiece of blood and doughnuts from celebrated author Stephen Graham Jones.”

from me:

I wrote this when I was hungry. I wrote this long before I was studying zombies. I wrote this in 2007. This is that story. I wrote this side-by-side with its screenplay. I love this cover. I was missing Demon Theory when I wrote this. I didn’t want to ever do Demon Theory again. I always wanted to be a racehorse namer. I found that being a pro-wrestler namer’s close enough. I used to live for wrestling on Friday nights. I wrote that story “Raphael” because I loved and still love wrestling. I kept picturing The Rock as Xombie, in here. And Andre as Tiny Giant, of course. I can’t stop looking at this cover. That Advocate pull completely cracks me up every time. This is already a movie in my head. Everybody come in, watch it with me.

University of Colorado zombie specialist Stephen Graham Jones shows how to put a fresh spin on a classic dish. The basic ingredients are a bunch of soccer moms attending a cooking show and a few dozen zombie-infected day-old doughnuts. Season with a group of very antisocial professional wrestlers. Shake continuously inside an auditorium along with a very determined show organizer. And then go wild eating brains — Denver Post

Stephen Graham Jones cleaves flowery narrative and leaves out complicated, unnecessary dialogue. What is left for the reader is Zombie Bake-Off, a combination of his love for a local arena, baked goods, and zombie stories. In a literary world now jam-packed with tales of love disguised with glittery vampires, shirtless werewolves hellbent on obtaining pricey real estate on the California coast, and Presidential monster slayers, Jones tells a simple tale of a zombie horde reigning terror on the few humans left inside a building, trapped, and forced to take a stand. The simplicity of this novel is a refreshing nod to the George Romero movies of old. – Mourning Goats

Zombie Bake-Off is fast, witty, original and ridiculously entertaining. Stephen Graham Jones has created an action-packed literary pastry that packs a sugar rush you just have to experience. — HorrorTalk