Zombie Fic: Jonathan Maberry’s Rot & Ruin series
In this zombie-infested world, teens must work...
Benny Imura and his friends try to find their way in a zombie-plagued world in the critically acclaimed Rot & Ruin series.
The zombie post- apocalypse book series Rot & Ruin is written by Jonathan Maberry, who has been named one of the Today’s Top Ten Horror Writers. And the series has won lots of awards. Like two Bram Stokers Awards for Best Young Adult Fiction. The Cybils Award. And even more than that.
“Not sure if you folks heard,” Maberry shared with folks on Facebook, “but Alcon Entertainment is developing my ROT & RUIN series for film. I’m working with a terrific team over there.”
As reported by Deadline, Alcon Entertainment acquired the rights purchased the media rights to all four installments from the series—starting with the first two books as movies.
Stated by the offices of Alcon Entertainment co-founders and co-CEOs Broderick Johnson and Andrew Kosove:
“Maberry has crafted a gripping, fast paced universe with a distinctive balance of YA and broad appeal that we are eager and excited to explore. Adapting this series gives us the opportunity to breathe new life into the zombie genre and allows us to expand upon an established franchise with clear staying power and appeal.”
Of course, Maberry keeps pretty busy with this kind of fiction in different kinds of media. Currently the editor of Weird Tales Magazine, Maberry has actually won even more awards for his work as an author and editor. He writes in several genres—along with horror, he also writes thrillers, science fiction, epic fantasy, and mysteries—for different age groups.
He also writes and edits for different formats, including anthology editor, comic book writer, executive producer, magazine feature writer, playwright, and writing teacher. He’s also president of the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers.
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The world of Rot & Ruin
In the zombie-infested, post-apocalyptic America—where Benny Imura lives—every teen must find a job by the time they turn 15 or get their rations cut in half.
Benny doesn’t want to apprentice as a zombie hunter with his boring older brother Tom. But he has no choice. He expects a tedious job whacking zoms for cash. What he gets is a vocation that will teach him what it means to be human…
Maberry told About the Authors TV:
“It was a chance for me to explore the dynamic that I went through as a kid. When we meet Benny, he’s not a likable kid. He has a very skewed worldview, he’s unfairly intolerant of his older brother, and he’s just not the kid who should be the star of the book.”
Maberry says he looked back at his own youth. Including some of the limits he had growing up.
“So, I wanted to explore that. Like, what happens when your worldview is shifted so hard that you can’t not see it anymore. Do you choose to not go there because it isn’t as much fun or isn’t what you want? Or do you choose to keep your eyes open?”
The author says at the point at which Benny first gets a view of what the world is really like he can't go back again.
“He has that moral center where he has to accept the truth. He winds up earning his right to be the protagonist.”
In the Rot & Ruin series, it’s a matter of death and life. All five books in the action-packed zombie series Booklist calls “an impressive mix of meaning and mayhem” are also available in a boxed set.
Rot & Ruin series
(click on a title for more info)
More about each Rot & Ruin book below…
Book1
Rot & Ruin (Rot & Ruin series #1)
In the zombie-infested, post-apocalyptic America where Benny Imura lives, every teenager must find a job by the time they turn fifteen or get their rations cut in half. Benny doesn't want to apprentice as a zombie hunter with his boring older brother Tom, but he has no choice. He expects a tedious job whacking zoms for cash, but what he gets is a vocation that will teach him what it means to be human.
“ROT & RUIN definitely owes a debt to westerns,” Maberry told The Secret Adventures of Writer Girl. “I grew up reading Louis L’Amour novels and watching John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies. I love that kind of rural drama, and so I built ROT & RUIN around that structure. It also works well with post-apocalyptic and dystopian themes.”
Rot & Ruin (Rot & Ruin series #1) available from:
Bookshop.org (which supports your local bookseller)
Libro.fm (audiobooks which support your local bookseller)
Book2
Dust & Decay (Rot & Ruin series #2)
Six months have passed since the terrifying battle with Charlie Pink-eye and the Motor City Hammer in the zombie-infested mountains of the Rot & Ruin. It’s also been six months since Benny Imura and Nix Riley saw something in the air that changed their lives. Now, after months of rigorous training with Benny’s zombie-hunter brother Tom, Benny and Nix are ready to leave their home forever and search for a better future. Lilah the Lost Girl and Benny’s best friend Lou Chong are going with them.
But before they even leave there is a shocking zombie attack in town, and as soon as they step into the Rot & Ruin they are pursued by the living dead, wild animals, insane murderers, and the horrors of Gameland—where teenagers are forced to fight for their lives in the zombie pits. Worst of all…could the evil Charlie Pink-eye still be alive?
In the great Rot & Ruin, everything wants to kill you. And not everyone in Benny’s small band of travelers will survive….
“When people ask me why I write about monsters, I tell them that I don’t,” Maberry told Writer’s Digest. “I write about people who confront monsters and find a way to defeat them. That’s a big difference.”
Dust & Decay (Rot & Ruin series #2) available from:
Bookshop.org (which supports your local bookseller)
Libro.fm (audiobooks which support your local bookseller)
Book3
Flesh & Bone (Rot & Ruin series #3)
Reeling from the devastation of Dust & Decay, Benny Imura and his friends plunge deep into the zombie-infested wastelands of the great Rot & Ruin. Benny, Nix, Lilah, and Chong journey through a fierce wilderness that was once America, searching for the jet they saw in the skies months ago. If that jet exists then humanity itself must have survived…somewhere. Finding it is their best hope for having a future and a life worth living.
But the Ruin is far more dangerous than any of them can imagine. Fierce animals hunt them. They come face to face with a death cult. And then there’s the zombies—swarms of them coming from the east, devouring everything in their paths. And these zoms are different. Faster, smarter, and infinitely more dangerous. Has the zombie plague mutated, or is there something far more sinister behind this new invasion of the living dead?
One thing Benny and his companions can’t afford to forget: In the great Rot & Ruin, everything wants to kill you…
“Except in very rare cases, zombie stories are not about zombies,” Maberry told Nightmare Magazine. "Zombie stories allow us to tell stories of people in real crisis, and it’s one of the reasons it’s so easy to use zombie stories as metaphors for anything else—I can’t imagine any fear not being able to be told as a zombie story. It’s also why the genre will never die. We’re not rehashing George Romero; George Romero told his story. Max Brooks told his story. Joe McKinney told his story. I tell my stories... and they’re all different."
Flesh & Bone (Rot & Ruin series #3) available from:
Bookshop.org (which supports your local bookseller)
Libro.fm (audiobooks which support your local bookseller)
Book4
Fire & Ash (Rot & Ruin series #4)
Benny Imura and his friends have found the jet and Sanctuary—but neither is what they expected. Instead of a refuge, Sanctuary is a hospice, and the soldiers who flew the plane seem to be little more than bureaucrats who have given up hope for civilization’s future.
With Chong hovering between life and death, clinging to his humanity by a thread, Benny makes a startling discovery: A scientist may have discovered a cure for the zombie plague. Desperate to save Chong, Benny and his friends mount a search and rescue mission.
But they’re not the only ones on the hunt. The reapers are after the cure too, and they want to use it turn all the zombies into superfast shock troops—and wipe humanity off the face of the earth.
“We’ve validated the zombie now,” Maberry told Daily Dragon Online. “And, to one degree or another, zoms are on everybody’s radar. Like those other monsters, zombie fiction henceforth will wax and wane with reader interest, but like vampires the zombie will come back to life each time a really good book hits the market.”
Fire & Ash (Rot & Ruin series #4) available from:
Libro.fm (audiobooks which support your local bookseller)
Book5
Bits & Pieces (Rot & Ruin series #5)
Return to the zombie apocalypse wasteland that is the Rot & Ruin in this short story collection from Jonathan Maberry.
Benny Imura’s zombie-infested adventures are well-chronicled in the gripping novels Rot & Ruin, Dust & Decay, Flesh & Bone, and Fire & Ash. But what else was happening while he was on his quest? Who were the others navigating the ravaged landscape full of zombies?
Bits & Pieces fills in the gaps about what we know about First Night, surviving the plague, and traveling the land of Rot & Ruin. Eleven all-new short stories from Nix’s journal and eleven previously published stories, including “Dead & Gone” and “Tooth & Nail,” are now together and in print for the first time, along with the first-ever script for the Rot & Ruin comic books.
“Zombie fiction, from modern standards, is really "ghoul" fiction,” Maberry told Strange Horizons. “The zombies we write about were first created by George A. Romero in Night of the Living Dead, and were mostly referred to as ‘ghouls’ or ‘those things.’ The label ‘zombie’ was attached only after the European release of the Romero films. Romero labeled them the ‘living dead,’ and they are corpses who have returned to a semblance of life and who are relentlessly compelled to attack living people and eat their flesh.”
Bits & Pieces (Rot & Ruin series #5) available from:
Libro.fm (audiobooks which support your local bookseller)
Book6
Broken Lands (Rot & Ruin #6)
Ever since her mother’s death, Gabriella “Gutsy” Gomez has spent her days flying under the radar. But when her mother’s undead body is returned to her doorstep from the grave and Gutsy witnesses a pack of ravagers digging up Los Muertos—her mother’s name for the undead—she realizes that life finds you no matter how hard you try to hide from it.
Meanwhile, Benny Imura and his gang set out on a journey to finish what Captain Joe Ledger started: they’re going to find a cure. After what they went through in the Rot and Ruin, they think they’ve seen it all, but as they venture into new and unexplored territory, they soon learn that the zombies they fought before were nothing compared to what they’ll face in the wild beyond the peace and safety of their fortified town.
Broken Lands (Rot & Ruin #6) available from:
Lost Road (Rot & Ruin #7)
Gabriella “Gusty” Gomez lost her mother—and now she’s losing her home.
Gutsy and her friends, along with Benny and his crew, have just survived a massive attack on New Alamo by the Night Army—a mix of mindless shambling los muertos and sentient half-zombie ravagers. She’s also reeling from the revelation that the residents of her town were the lab rats of the biological testing facility linked to creating the most dangerous zom, the Raggedy Man, who controls all of the living dead.
And the first raid was only a test. The real Night Army is coming, and this time, it’ll be a handful of survivors against seven billion zombies…
“Lost Roads picks up where Broken Lands ended,” Maberry told Paul Semel. “In the small town of New Alamo, which was—before the apocalypse—a detention center for undocumented immigrants. The main character believes that New Alamo is the only town of living people left in the world. Not only does she learn different, but she discovers an awful secret about the nature of that town…one that brings her and her friends in collision with enemies that are both undead and quite human.”
Lost Road (Rot & Ruin #7) available from:
graphicnovel
Warrior Smart (Rot & Ruin Graphic Novel)
Brand-new adventures set in the world of Rot & Ruin! We meet Benny, Nix, Lilah, and Chong as they travel through the Sierra Nevada mountains just one faltering step ahead of zombie hordes and one giant leap behind the plane flying through the sky that set them on their journey of discovery.
Warrior Smart (Rot & Ruin Graphic Novel) available from:
TV
Jonathan Maberry on writing the Rot & Ruin books
(Authors TV: Horror Edition)
Related links about the Rot & Ruin series
Interview with ‘Rot & Ruin’ author Jonathan Maberry (Henry Herz)
Rot & Ruin Series Page (Jonathan Maberry)
More from Jonathan Maberry online
Jonathan Maberry and 75+ more Horror Authors and Their Best Works
Zombie Q&A—Jonathan Maberry: “Zombie Stories Are Not About Zombies”
How Jonathan Maberry and Weird Tales are embracing modern readers
‘Classic Monsters Unleashed’ by Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, Owl Goingback, and more
Bite Me: Jonathan Maberry and more authors who write about werewolves
100 Supernatural Detective Series—including Jonathan Maberry’s Sam Hunter
Jonathan Maberry on how Bookshop.org supports your local bookstore
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