The Host (2013)
Independence Day (1996)
Into the Forest (2015)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 and 1978 remake)
It Comes At Night (2017)
Johnny Mnemonic (1995)
Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)
The Last Man on Earth (1964)
The Last Survivors (2014)
Left Behind (2000)
Legion (2010)
Logan's Run (1976)
Mad Max (1979)
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)
Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
Mad Max 4: Fury Road (2015)
Malevil (1981)
The Maze Runner (Series, 2014-18)
Melancholia (2011)
Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn (1983)
Miracle Mile (1988)
The Mist (2007)
Monsters (2010)
The New Barbarians (1984)
No Blade of Grass (1970)
Oblivion (2013)
The Omega Man (1971)
On the Beach (1959)
Open Grave (2013)
Outbreak (1995)
Pacific Rim (2013)
The People Who Own the Dark (1976)
Phase IV (1974)
Plague (1979)
Planet of the Apes series (1968-73)
The Postman (1997)
The Quiet Earth (1985)
A Quiet Place (2018)
Quintet (1979)
Raiders of Atlantis (1983)
The Rapture (1991)
Rats: Night of Terror (1984)
Ravagers (1979)
Right At Your Door (2006)
The Road (2009)
The Seventh Sign (1988)
Skyline (2010)
Snowpiercer (2013)
Soylent Green (1973)
Stake Land (2010)
Steel Dawn (1987)
The Survivalist (2015)
Take Shelter (2011)
Tank Girl (1995)
Testament (1983)
This Is Not a Test (1962)
This Is the End (2013)
Threads (TV, 1984)
Tomorrow, When the War Began (2010)
The Trigger Effect (1996)
Turkey Shoot (1982)
The Ultimate Warrior (1975)
Vanishing on 7th Street (2010)
War of the Worlds (1953)
Warrior of the Lost World (1983)
Warriors of the Wasteland (1983)
Waterworld (1995)
Without Warning (TV, 1994)
The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959)
The World’s End (2013)
Z for Zachariah (2015)
Zardoz (1974)
TELEVISION
The 100 (TV, 2014-present)
Cordon (TV, 2016)
The Day After (TV movie, 1983)
The Day of the Triffids (TV miniseries, 1981)
Doomsday Preppers (TV series, 2012-2014)
The Handmaid’s Tale (TV, 2017-present)
Heatwave! (TV, 1974)
Jericho (TV series, 2006-2008)
The Last Ship (TV, 2014-present)
Planet of the Apes (TV series, 1974)
The Stand (TV miniseries, 1994)
The Strain (TV series, 2014-2017)
Survivors (TV series, 2008-2010)
Where Have All the People Gone? (TV movie, 1974)
ZOMBIE READING AND WATCH LIST
To write great survival horror, you need to watch and read a variety of zombie books, film, and TV. As with the post-apocalyptic list, not all of these are classics, but all have something interesting to offer.
Autumn by David Moody (2010)
The Awakening by M.A. Robbins (Series, 2018)
Book of the Dead, edited by John Skipp/Craig Spector (1990)
The Boy on the Bridge by M.R. Carey (2017)
Cell by Stephen King (2006)
Dawn of the Dead by George A. Romero (1979)
Day by Day Armageddon by J.L. Bourne (2009)
Deathbringer by Bryan Smith (2006)
Extinction Horizon by Nicholas Sansbury Smith (Series, 2017)
Feed by Mira Grant (2010)
The First Days by Rhiannon Frater (2011)
The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan (2009)
Flu by Wayne Simmons (2012)
The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey (2014)
The Last Town by Stephen Knight (2017)
Monster Island by David Wellington (2004)
My Life as a White Trash Zombie by Diana Rowland (2011)
Night of the Living Dead by John Russo (1974)
Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry (2009)
Plague of the Dead by Z. A. Recht (Series, 2006-2018)
Please Remain Calm by Courtney Summers (2015)
The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell (2010)
Slow Burn by Bobby Adair (Series, 2013-2016)
Slowly We Rot by Bryan Smith (2015)
Still Dead: Book of the Dead 2, edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector (1992)
Star Wars: Death Troopers by Joe Schrieber (2009)
Star Wars: Red Harvest by Joe Schrieber (2011)
This Is Not a Test by Courtney Summers (2012)
The Troop by Nick Cutter (2014)
The Walking Dead by Jay Bonansinga (Series, 2011-present)
World War Z by Max Brooks (2006)
Zombie Fallout by Mark Tufo (Series, 2014-present)
The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks (2003)
ZOMBIE MOVIES
28 Days Later (2002)
28 Weeks Later (2007)
The Battery (2012)
Battle Girl: The Living Dead in Tokyo Bay (1991)
The Beyond (1981)
Bio Zombie (1998)
Boy Eats Girl (2005)
Braindead (1990, aka Dead Alive)
Burial Ground (1981)
Cargo (2017)
Cemetery Man (1994, aka Dellamorte Dellamore)
Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972)
City of the Living Dead (1980)
Colin (2008)
Collapse (2014)
Contracted (2013)
Contracted: Phase 2 (2013)
Dawn of the Dead (1978/2004)
Day of the Dead (1985)
The Dead (2010)
The Dead 2: India (2013)
Dead Air (2009)
Dead Heat (1988)
Dead Heist (2007)
Dead Men Walking (2005)
Dead Shack (2017)
Dead Snow (2009)
Deadgirl (2008)
Diary of the Dead (2007)
Extinction (2015)
Fido (2006)
Flight of the Living Dead (2007)
Freaks of Nature (2015)
The Girl with All the Gifts (2016)
Go Goa Gone (2013)
Hell of the Living Dead (1980)
Highschool of the Dead (Anime Series, 2010)
The Horde (2009)
Horror Express (1972)
It Stains the Sands Red (2016)
Juan of the Dead (2011)
Junk (2000)
Land of the Dead (2005)
Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974)
Life After Beth (2014)
Maggie (2015)
My Boyfriend’s Back (1993)
The Night Eats the World (2018)
Night of the Creeps (1986)
Night of the Living Dead (1968/1990)
Nightmare City (1980)
Pontypool (2008)
Quarantine (2008, American remake of [REC])
Quarantine 2 (2011)
Rammbock: Berlin Undead (2010)
[REC] (2007)
[REC]2 (2009)
Return of the Blind Dead (1973)
Return of the Living Dead (1985)
Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988)
Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993)
The Returned (2014)
The
Rezort (2015)
Seoul Station (Anime, 2016)
Severed: Forest of the Dead (2005)
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Stacy: Attack of the Schoolgirl Zombies (2001)
Survival of the Dead (2009)
Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972)
Train to Busan (2016)
Versus (2000)
Warm Bodies (2013)
What We Become (2015)
World War Z (2013)
Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead (2014)
Zombi 2 (1979, aka Zombie)
Zombieland (2009)
INFECTED “VIRUS MANIAC” MOVIES
Matango (1963, aka Attack of the Mushroom People)
I Drink Your Blood (1970)
The Crazies (1973 and 2010 remake)
Who Can Kill a Child? (1976)
Blue Sunshine (1977)
Rabid (1977)
The Grapes of Death (1978)
Cannibal Apocalypse (1980)
The Children (1980)
Nightmare City (1980)
Night of the Comet (1984)
Warning Sign (1985)
Primal Rage (1988)
Grindhouse/Planet Terror (1997)
28 Days Later (2002)
Cabin Fever (2002)
The Happening (2008)
Mutants (2009)
Night of the Comet (1984)
The Signal (2008)
Pontypool (2009)
State of Emergency (2011)
Come Out and Play (2012)
Cooties (2014)
Hidden (2015)
The Girl With All the Gifts (2016)
Viral (2016)
The Cured (2017)
Mayhem (2017)
Mom and Dad (2017)
TELEVISION (SCRIPTED)
Dead Set (TV series, 2008)
Fear Itself (TV, 2008, “New Year’s Day” episode)
Fear the Walking Dead (TV, 2015-present)
In the Flesh (TV, 2013-14)
iZombie (TV series, 2015-present)
The Walking Dead (TV series, 2010-present)
Z Nation (TV series, 2014-present)
TELEVISION (PSEUDO-DOCUMENTARIES)
Deadliest Warrior, Season Three, Episode 10, Series Finale: “Vampires vs. Zombies” (TV, 2011)
Surviving Zombies (TV, 2012)
The Truth Behind Zombies (TV, 2011)
Zombies: A Living History (TV, 2011)
AUTHOR RESOURCES
HOW TO WRITE AND MARKET BOOKS THAT SELL
When you’re writing your first book, you think nothing is harder. And that’s true, in the moment. But afterward, you realize marketing your book is even harder! The whole point of my writing advice guides is to streamline your writing process, making everything faster, easier, and more importantly, better.
But what if I told you I knew people who could help you streamline your book marketing to make it faster, easier, and smarter?
K-LYTICS
K-lytics tells you what genres are hot, right down to how many copies the hottest books are selling and how much money they earn. It helps you niche down within genres to find out which sells better: vampires or werewolves, elves or dragons, space marines or genetic engineering, etc.
Here are just some of the reports available:
Children’s Books
Teen and Young Adult Fiction
Short Reads & Short Stories
Mystery, Thriller, and Suspense
Cozy Mystery
Science Fiction and Fantasy
Post-Apocalyptic and Dystopian
Urban Fantasy
LitRPG
Romance
Clean Romance
Gothic Romance
Paranormal Romance
Historical Romance
K-lytics does this with convenient monthly reports, based on the latest Kindle sales data. You can buy a monthly subscription or purchase individual genre reports if you’re on a budget. Check out the genre reports now!
KDP ROCKET
KDP Rocket is another great resource. Rather than prepared, predetermined reports, Rocket lets you run custom searches on categories, keywords, authors, and titles to see which make the most money (and the least).
It also helps you create AMS ads (those sponsored search results you see on Amazon could be your book!). Get more info on Rocket and signup for their FREE AMS Ads video course.
* Note these are affiliate links. I use, endorse, and recommend both products, but am required to mention I am paid a commission if you buy either product after clicking these links.
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WRITING DYNAMITE STORY HOOKS
INTRODUCTION AND FIRST CHAPTER PREVIEW
“Your first line sells the book. Your last line sells the next book.”
— MICKEY SPILLANE, AUTHOR OF KISS ME DEADLY
THE NUMBER ONE WAY to open a genre book is with action, but be careful how you set it up. You can't jump into a fight scene before you introduce your hero. No one knows him, so no one cares what happens to him. So how do you do it?
Announce the action is taking place and place the enemy close, but not too close. This allows you to get your hero's reaction to the danger, providing valuable insight into who they are, where they are, and what they are up to when the action occurs:
Logen plunged through the trees, bare feet slipping and sliding on the wet earth, the slush, the wet pine needles, breath rasping in his chest, blood thumping in his head.
— JOE ABERCOMBIE, THE BLADE ITSELF
This is a prime example of how to open in media res (Latin for “in the middle of things”). Who is Logen? We know he's in a forest, struggling to escape, but from what? Let's see how bestselling grimdark fantasy author Joe Abercrombie handles it in his complete opening paragraph:
Logen plunged through the trees, bare feet slipping and sliding on the wet earth, the slush, the wet pine needles, breath rasping in his chest, blood thumping in his head. He stumbled and sprawled onto his side, nearly cut his chest open on his own axe, lay there panting, peering through the shadow forest.
We learn Logen has an axe, so whatever he's running from is more than he and his weapon can handle. We also pay off the potential danger of his “bare feet slipping and sliding” from the first sentence by making Logen fall in the second. That lets us know Logen is not invincible, nor is he immune to fear or accidents.
Abercrombie has efficiently humanized his hero right from the start by showing, not telling. If he'd simply told us Logen was afraid, that would have been lazy writing. Instead, he shows us through internal and external sensory details. The fast, choppy style conveys panic. As a result, readers can empathize with Logen. The only problem is, we don't know much about him. That's where the second paragraph comes in:
The Dogman had been with him until a moment before, he was sure, but there wasn't any sign of him now. As for the others, there was no telling. Some leader, getting split up from the boys like that. He should've been trying to get back, but the Shanka were all around. He could feel them moving between the trees, his nose was full of the smell of them. Sounded as if there was some shouting somewhere on his left, fighting maybe. Logen crept slowly to his feet, trying to stay quiet. A twig snapped and he whipped around.
This second paragraph tells us everything else we need to know: Logen is the leader of a band of fighting men, and he has not willingly abandoned them, but been split off during a retreat from a superior force. This deepens reader empathy. The hero is not a coward, simply unlucky. Everyone can relate to that.
In the next few paragraphs, Logen is attacked by two of the Shanka and we see how well he fights. But the author does not let this happen be
fore we get a sense of who his hero and his allies are, where they are, and what's going on. That is critical to the success of not only the book, but the author, and why he received reviews like, “You'd never guess that The Blade Itself is Joe Abercrombie's first novel. He writes like a natural.”
The Blade Itself opens with the hero already in motion and the bad guys hot on his tail.
Here’s another example, this time from a science fiction perspective:
Death came for him through the trees.
— STEVE PERRY, THE MAN WHO NEVER MISSED
You can’t get better than that. In a single, powerful sentence, we know the hero is in a forest and in terrible danger. From there, the author fills us in on what the danger is:
It came in the form of a tactical squad, four people walking three-and-one, the point followed by the tight concave arc; the optimum number in the safest configuration. It was often said the Confed’s military was always training to fight the last war and it was true enough, only there had been enough last wars to give them sand or cold or jungle troops as needed. These four were jungle-trained, they wore class-one shiftsuits with viral/molecular computers able to match backgrounds within a quarter second; they carried .177 Parkers, short and brutal carbines which held five hundred rounds of explosive ammo—one man could put down a half-meter-thick tree with two waves of his weapon on automatic. The quad carried heat sensors, com-implants, Doppler gear and personal sidearms; they were the deadliest and best-equipped soldiers the Confed could field and they were good. They moved through the cool rain forest quietly and efficiently, alert for any signs of the Shanda Scum. If something moved, they were going to spike it, hard.
From the second paragraph, we know this is a sci-fi story, we know the “evil empire” is called the Confed, and they have been at war a long time. We also get a sense of the technology available to them and who they are hunting for (rebel scum). All good stuff, but we still don’t know who the hero is. That’s fine, because Steve Perry skillfully provides that information in the third paragraph:
Khadaji felt the fear in himself, the familiar coldness in the pit of his belly, an old and unwelcome tenant. He had learned to live with it, it was necessary, but he was never comfortable when it came to this. He took a deeper breath and pressed his back harder against the rough bark of the sumwin tree. He practiced invisibility. The tree was three meters thick, they couldn’t see him, and even without his confounder gear their directional doppler and heat sensors wouldn’t read through that much solid wood. He listened as they moved past him. The soft ferns brushed against the shiftsuits of the quad; the humus of a thousand years made yet softer sounds under their slippers as they walked, but Khadaji knew exactly where they were when he stepped away from the tree.
Writing Apocalypse and Survival Page 14
