MY LOADED GUN, MY LONELY HEART

This is Zombie noir done right. Night of the Living Dead meets Sam Spade, with a dash of To Have and Have Not thrown in for good measure. Martin Rose navigates the curves, melodic standards and complex gray areas of his genre with equal parts aplomb and a kind of retro muscular prose. Secret agents, conspiracy theories, broken hearts and lonely souls, the siren song of prescription drugs . . . In MY LOADED GUN, MY LONELY HEART readers are invited to discover life after undeath, where there are no happy endings.

Vitus Adamson has a second chance at life now that he’s no longer a zombie, but after killing his brother Jamie, Vitus lands in prison on murder charges. Jamie's death exposes secret government projects so deep in the black they cannot be seen—without Vitus, that is. Sprung from jail, the government hires Vitus to clean up Jamie’s mess, but tracking down his brother’s homemade monsters gone rogue is easier said than done. A convicted killer safely behind bars may not be so safe after all when it appears he is still committing murder through his victim’s dreams. High on Atroxipine (the drug that once kept him functioning among the living) and lapsing into addiction, Vitus’s grip on reality takes a nasty turn when his own dreams start slipping sideways. His problems multiply as he deals with his failed friendship with wheelchair-bound officer Geoff Lafferty, his wrecked romance with the town mortician Niko, government agents working for his father, sinister figures lurking in the shadows, and least of all, the complications of learning how to be human again. Martin Rose writes a range of fiction from the fantastic to the macabre. Recent short work appears in anthologies such as Urban Green Man and Handsome Devil. He is also the author of Bring Me Flesh, I’ll Bring Hell. He resides in Toms River, New Jersey.