As of last night, robertrbest.com is now powered by Wordpress. As much as I love Blogspot and have used it for years, Wordpress offers more flexibility and better mobile posting. I’m posting this from my
phone right now, in fact.

Also, I need to thank Brad Zipprich, author and one of my Don’t Look In The Podcast co-hosts, for providing the hosting for the site. Thanks Brad!

And while I’m at it, belated congratulations to Rhiannon Frater for winning the Dead Letter Award for best novel!

Talk to you all later

Robb

Exciting news! Lakewood Memorial has been nominated in the “Best Zombie Book, Fiction” category in Mail Order Zombie’s Dead Letter Awards! Click here to cast your vote in many zombie-related categories, and please consider Lakewood Memorial for best novel!

As I referenced in a previous post, I was recently interviewed on the Funky Werepig show. The podcast version of the interview is now available here. Listen and let me know what you think!

The awesome folks over at Choate Road have a weekly Blogtalk show called The Funky Werepig. This coming Sunday 1/17/10 will be a Library Of The Living Dead-themed episode, featuring Dr Pus, Steven North, Rhiannon Frater and myself. I’m really looking forward to this. Should be a lot of fun! Check here for times and to tune in!

I recently had the honor of being interviewed by Corey over at The Midnight Podcast, the fantastic podcast devoted to everything zombie. We talk about Lakewood Memorial, zombies and many other things. A big thanks to Corey for having me on! You can listen to the interview here.

The awesome Choate Road website (also home to the equally awesome Funky Werepig web radio show) has posted a review of Lakewood Memorial. Here’s what Gregory L Hall had to say:

“Hey kids, do you like zombies? Enjoy zombie stories where a few survivors have to keep running from endless hordes of living dead? If you do, then you’ve come to the right place.

I don’t know much about Robert R Best but I can give an accurate guess or two. Best loves zombies. I mean he’s a true fan of everything that is zombie. And it shows in his writing. The first book of what is lined up as a trilogy; LAKEWOOD MEMORIAL is set in a hospital where the main character, a lowly nurse’s aide, has to save anyone who has survived being eaten alive by the ever growing waves of rotting corpses. To add that extra boost of angst, her two young children are at home with a babysitter who has also wound up as dinner.

Now she has to save a small group of patients and co-workers, get to her children and of course, keep herself alive all within 150 pages. Ah, good times.

Hey kids, do you like zombies? Enjoy zombie stories where a few survivors have to keep running from endless hordes of living dead? If you do, then you’ve come to the right place.

I don’t know much about Robert R Best but I can give an accurate guess or two. Best loves zombies. I mean he’s a true fan of everything that is zombie. And it shows in his writing. The first book of what is lined up as a trilogy; LAKEWOOD MEMORIAL is set in a hospital where the main character, a lowly nurse’s aide, has to save anyone who has survived being eaten alive by the ever growing waves of rotting corpses. To add that extra boost of angst, her two young children are at home with a babysitter who has also wound up as dinner.

Now she has to save a small group of patients and co-workers, get to her children and of course, keep herself alive all within 150 pages. Ah, good times.

Being honest and upfront, the book noticeably needs at least one more solid edit. No fault of Best but he is often caught with some sloppy paragraphs and repetitive chapter endings. At one point early in the book I actually wondered if yelling ‘Shit!’ was a universal cry when seeing a zombie or something Best did as a personal challenge to see how many times he could write that one word over and over at the beginning of almost every character’s dialogue and get away with it. Either way, it became an unfortunate distraction as the number grew.

A strong editor would have caught these however and that would have left only Best’s strengths. The first is his devout usage of classic zombies. The second is his great humor within his characters. And the third and by far his best talent is building tension. Let me just say right off the bat this was the most fun I had reading a book in quite awhile. It’s not deep. It’s not a Rubik’s Cube. It’s a fifteen minute roller coaster ride that you want to hop back on when you finish screaming.

Best has a definite knack for knowing all the great set-ups and curveballs. Every corner brings a new road block for the characters and just when you think they’ve figured it out, someone or something screws it up. Here’s a perfect example. The kids steal a car neither really knows how to drive. There are zombies everywhere. They reach a cross roads on the way to the hospital to get mom. One is the long way across a new bridge but that means more time exposed to attacks. The other is a much quicker and direct route…but it goes over the old bridge that’s actually been condemned. Guess which Best chooses?

Wrong. He picks both. They try the long route and zombies make them turn all the way around and go back to the only other choice, the old creepy bridge that’s about to collapse. This is the kind of beautiful terror Best gives the reader. And you can almost hear him giggling aloud.

Are there better written, more professionally edited books out there? Definitely. But for pure enjoyment and hardcore zombie scares, Robert R Best has me hooked and I’ll be picking up the other two in this trilogy to get more of the same.”

Thanks again to the wonderful people of Choate Road. You can read the original review, and many others, here.

Recently I had the great pleasure of talking to Mike over at the Cadaver Lab podcast. We discussed Lakewood Memorial and upcoming projects. The interview is available in Episode 44 available here. Thanks to Mike for having me on. Between this and my appearance on A Little Dead, this has been an awesome last few weeks. Thanks guys!

I was recently interviewed by McPierce for the awesome A Little Dead Podcast. My interview appears in Episode 21 available here. The episode also gave away a copy of Lakewood Memorial. Congratulations to the winner!

Our friend McPierce will be giving away a signed copy of Lakewood Memorial on the Halloween episode of his show, A Little Dead Podcast.

For rules and details, look here.

Thank you, McPierce, and I can’t wait to be on your show!

For those not in the know, I am also involved in a podcast called “Don’t Look In The Podcast.” Our spin-off show “Don’t Peek In The Podcast” is devoted to one-off interviews and reviews that don’t fit the format of DLIP. Laura, my wife and co-host, interviewed me for an episode of Don’t Peek and the interview is now available here. Enjoy!