AFTER THE CURE: Dierdre Gould

MARCH 25^TH GIVEAWAY

Woo hoo! Do we have some zombies for you! Today is Zombie Day on Danse Macabre! Disease, pestilence, and a cannibalistic future either as eater or eatee!

Our wham bam of a story is brought to you courtesy of fantabulous author Dierdre Gould and it’s called AFTER THE CURE. She’s written one heck of a tale. It’ll keep you up for weeks and having you nailing the door shut! The best is that it’s #FREE to anyone who wants it! 

Download your copy by using Coupon No. AR36B 

The deal lasts until April 25th!!! Yowza!!! 

If you don’t, the zombies will get you! I mean it!

Deirdre has been super nice and written you Danse Macabrer's a great blog. It gives a little background on how she comes up with her stories!

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BEFORE IT WAS COOL

I was a zombie addict before it was cool.  Okay, that’s not true.   But that’s only because zombies have always been cool.  I love them in all their various states: undead, alive, slow, fast, the result of a voodoo ritual or an airborne virus.  I can’t get enough of them.  They are the ultimate bad guy because they are so versatile.   In fact, the character of the zombie has been stretched so far and become so dehumanized that they are practically a natural disaster these days. 

It’s really not anyone’s fault, the world and its stories change.  A few years ago, about halfway through another really great zombie book, I realized that they just weren’t scary to me anymore.  And I realized that it was because although the plots and characters changed, nothing ever got resolved.  Life in the zombie apocalypse never changed.  It was just a constant trudge from one sanctuary to the next, generation after generation.  Which, I guess, is obviously the point, that you are never safe.  But it made me wonder.  What if, suddenly, one day, you were safe? 

Why didn’t any of these books have a solution?  Why weren’t the zombies ever eradicated or (since most of the books I’ve read start with a disease of some sort) weren’t they cured?  In some cases, it’s obvious.  If the zombies are dead already, then a cure isn’t going to work.  If the disease was a virus, then the best you could do is create a vaccine to stop more people from turning into a zombie.  But what if it were bacterial?  What if the zombies were alive, just crazed?  And what if someone found a cure? 

And what if the zombies, when they were cured, could remember everything they had done while they were sick?

That was something I wanted to read.  What happens when the apocalypse is over?  We have real versions of it all around us.  People that have killed each other in criminal acts or in wars, or just in everyday tragic accidents- they have to live in the same country, sometimes the same town- sometimes even the same house as those they victimized.  What if the whole world were that way?  How do we go on after we’ve witnessed or done terrible things or had them done to us?  What if everybody you met, everyone you talked to, traded with, worked with, even slept with, was a killer?  A murderer?

In After the Cure, there’s someone to shift blame onto.   Whether he’s guilty or not, I’ll let the reader decide.  But it doesn’t absolve the very personal atrocities the characters live with.  It doesn’t excuse the choices that they make.  And to me, that very human element of guilt, of doing terrible things to survive to other human beings, of trying to put the pieces back together in a hopelessly broken world is what’s truly scary about zombies.  

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AFTER THE CURE

Eight years ago the December Plague swept through the human population of earth. The Infected were driven mad by the disease, becoming violent and cannibalistic, killing even those closest to them without hesitation. 

Six years ago, the tiny surviving community of Immune humans found a cure, and the Infected began to wake up and realize what they'd done. And what had been done to them. 

Over time, society began to rebuild itself. Now it is ready to judge those responsible for the Plague. Nella Rider, the court psychologist and Frank Courtlen a defense attorney are trying to establish the truth. But more depends on it than they know. They race to find the answers they need before the fragile remains of humanity vanish for good.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A severe addiction to Post-apocalyptic literature combined with a lifetime of a very rural existence, first in central Maine and now in northern Idaho naturally led to both of Deirdre's novels: The Jade Seed and After the Cure.

Deirdre's education in anthropology and peace and conflict studies prompted the central idea for After the Cure: How do people live with each other after doing horrendous things to each other? How do societies put themselves together or continue to exist after terrible wars? What is day to day existence like when such violence exists within living memory? Though fiction can never come close to the reality of living with atrocity, it can help us ask important questions about our world and our treatment of each other.

Since living in the woods makes it all too easy to imagine being one of the last people left in the world, After the Cure is only the first novel of several that will take place in a post-apocalyptic, "post-zombie" world.