The church waits in darkness. It looks abandoned, forgotten. It has no congregation, but it is not empty. Under its floor, in a pit dug long ago, lies a wooden crate that was never meant to be unearthed. But the church is finally being renovated and workmen have found the pit. How could they realize what they have done? How could they know the forces they’ve unleashed?

Father Pilazzo is overseeing the renovation of the old church. His dream is to see it restored to its former glory. But his dream is becoming a nightmare. He’s begun to see horrific visions, unholy images of death and warnings of terrors to come. And within the church forgotten men fight to survive against impossible demons, while sides are drawn for the ultimate battle …

In this sequel to the Stoker-winning The Rising (2003), Keene ingeniously asks, if human corpses can be reanimated, why not dead dogs, rats, sparrows, goldfish, etc.? His other innovation is the news that the zombie swarm is inhabited by demons who are angry at God for trying to exile them in the Void. They want to get revenge by killing everything on Earth, and they are numerous, clever and indestructible enough to accomplish the task. Opposing the demon-zombies are a few living survivors, chiefly an ex-hooker, a young father and his little boy. Finding no shelter elsewhere, they wind up in a fortified Manhattan skyscraper, commanded by an old millionaire who's certain he can outlast any attack. Keene does a fine job keeping the mechanics of the siege clear, while switching viewpoints among his large cast of characters. He's also inventive in imagining ways the human body can be disassembled, with vivid descriptions of torn flesh and spraying fluids. After a while, though, the relentless dread becomes tiresome. Reading this book is like being trapped in a long, gory, unwinnable video game. (June)
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"The Walking Dead" is (as the name somewhat implies) one of those zombie comics that have become so popular as of late. I've read a few of them, and I must say, this one is the best. The opening is actually startlingly similar to the film "28 Days Later" as our hero, a small-town cop, wakes up from a coma to find that the world has been overrun by zombies and everything he knew and loved is missing or outright destroyed. That similar starting point aside, after that the story takes on a really unique flavor for a zombie story. It's not so much about the zombies themselves, but about our hero, the ragtag group of survivors he joins, and how they try to rebuild after the cataclysm.

I first became aware of Clive Barker back in the late 1980's when a friend turned me onto his Books of Blood series. Barker was really unlike anyone at the time as we went right for the throat with a raw, visceral, and yes quite graphic style. Barker's had several of his stories turned into film but the most famous was the Hellraiser films. Barker actually directed the first film and wrote the screenplay. In the 90's Marvel Comics Epic line had a Hellraiser comic series and Checker Books has been doing a fantastic job of collecting these fantastic stories into trade paperback format. This is the third collection and includes fifteen stories from some of the top artists and writers in the world of comics including: Jan Strnad, John Bolton, Berni Wrightson, Scott Hampton, and many more. This massive trade also includes dozens of full page illustrations, darkly complementing the stories within.