7 Things I Learned From Chuck Wendig: Double Dead

CAUTION: This post contains rough language. There is no BLEEP button. So if you are offended by colorful swears, you will be highly offended. If you happen to like being offended, hop over to Chuck Wendig’s blog, terrible minds, and you’ll find fodder for many hours of offensive pleasure.

#1: Double dead: adj. Meat that comes from an animal that has died from disease. Does not pass the necessary sanitary standards.

A Google search turned up the factoid that double dead meat is called “botcha” or sometimes “hot meat” in the Philipines.

Eww.

#2. Vampires are bad. Just ask them.

“You kidding me?” He laughed. “Sweet little girl, what did you think you were getting, exactly? You asked a wolf to protect the sheep. I’m equal parts serial killer and demon from Hell. I’m not, uhh–” He tried to think of something opposite of that, some polar example.

“Big Bird?”

“What the fuck is a Big Bird?”

#3. Zombies are very, very nasty. Can’t ask them, but you can smell them.

One of them–let’s just say it, he thought, it’s an undead motherfucking, smells-like-a-roadkilled-possum-stuffed-with-gorgonzola-cheese asshole zombie prick–lay against the ledge.

#4. Zombies bad, vampires worse, zombie-vampires = you are so screwed.

She bit down on his chest. Those teeth tore clean through the leather. He felt her tongue–rough like the wrong end of a cheese grater–stick deep into the wound. The bitch is drinking my blood, he thought.

#5. Insane Clown Posse might not be the best role models, especially if you value proper spelling.

YOU BEST BE DOWN WIT DA CLOWN

THUGLOW IS KING

NUTT IN UR PINK EYE

SATAN’S CAROUSEL

THUGLOW SHANK YOU VATO

#6. There are good reasons why gluttony is a deadly sin.

Then she sucked the tongue into her own mouth and started to chew. The cannibal’s French kiss, she thought, and felt a bubble of giddiness rise inside her.

The tongue was tough–not unusual, really. No fat on the tongue. All meat and muscle. Were you to cook it, you’d cook it long and low and slow, but now she did not have that luxury. She bit down hard–

And in the process, bit into her own cheek.

She tasted blood.

The tongue between her teeth–not hers, but his–wiggled.

#7. Self-sacrifice leads to redemption; sacrificing others leads to…

“Now maybe you know where this story is going, maybe you don’t, but like people used to say on the Internet when there was an Internet: spoiler warning, this is how the zombie apocalypse was born.”

Wonderfully written, wildly inventive, gruesome, gory and funny as hell, Double Dead has earned a spot in my list of favorite zombie novels.

Double Dead by Chuck Wendig, available on Amazon.

2 responses

  1. Oh my gawd! I think I will be very grossed out but I will scarf down the unusual creative prose like chocolate cake. Yum Yum!

  2. I showed the book to DD1 yesterday. Then she tried to walk out with it. Nuh uh! Little booger takes my books and then I never see them again. I put it on her Christmas list.

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