I’ve discovered Steve Hockensmith. It’s kind of like Columbus discovering North America; been there a while with a whole population of folks, just took me a while to find it. The good thing is that I don’t have any plague blankets. The even better thing is that they probably wouldn’t work on Steve Hockensmith, considering the content of this story, Cadaver in Chief: A Special Report from the Dawn of the Zombie Apocalypse. Yeah, that’s because so many of the characters are already dead. There must be an idiom out there about throwing good plague after bad; I just can’t think of it.
I first heard about him from my good friend, who borrowed Mr. Hockensmith’s characters and playground for his own short story publication. Wow, that’s a lot of hyperlinks. Anyway, I’d never read him, but had a good reason to check it out. Then I looked on Amazon and found his books very reasonably priced for binge-reading on Kindle.
The story was very much in the current political zeitgeist, except for the zombie part (sort of). Here is one of the lines on page one of the Cadaver in Chief:
The President addressed persistent rumors that he was considering a suspension of this year’s national elections.
This was later followed by:
75 % of Conservatives Blame Liberals , Media for Zombie Plague
and
Even though the first zombie attacks were reported seven months after Republican Brick Bradley moved into the White House , nearly 90 % of … conservatives surveyed indicated that his Democratic predecessor was somehow responsible for the ensuing carnage .
Suffice it to say, the book is chockablock full of biting humor, whodunit storytelling, zombies, and social commentary that is all too real. Please do go read it.
B.S. Donovan 