Excerpt from Necrodancer #teasertuesday

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along!

While you’re waiting for “Diversion” to be published (any day now—excerpt here!) you can enjoy my special birthday present to you—a free download of “Stand Alone“! But be sure to download it today, it is only free for a limited time.

One of my beta readers for “Tattooed Teardrops” is a young beginning author, and asked me to read her debut short story on Amazon, The NecroDancer (Deadful Life of Ella, Book 1), by Joanne Boyd. So I thought I would use it for my Teaser Tuesday post, and post a short review here.

I was smashing zombies like they were baseballs coming out of one of those automatic pitching machines, apologising each time.

Jab. ‘Sorry’. Whack. ‘Sorry’. Stab. ‘Sorry’.

I wasn’t hurting them, since they were already dead, but it still seemed… disrespectful.

The NecroDancer (Deadful Life of Ella, Book 1), Joanne Boyd

My Review:

Sure, there are lots of zombie books and stories out these days. It’s a growing niche. But those zombies all shuffle and moan. Joanne Boyd’s zombies dance. As in, ballet.

Teenage protagonist Ella is a medium reminiscent of Melinda Gordon in “Ghost Whisperer”. But with less baby doll lingerie and more spunk. In this short story (38 real pages), book 1 in a prospective series, she must confront a necromancer reanimating corpses as his own dance company.

It is a fun, light read, well-edited, with a jazzy cover, well-suited to your bus-ride home after a long day at the office. Watch for more of Ella’s adventures in the future.

On Amazon:

I honestly thought that being forced to go to the ballet with my Gran was the worst thing I’d ever had to do and that was BEFORE I knew that the dancers on stage were a bunch of reanimated corpses controlled by a psychotic necromancer named Albertino. 

THEN I had to go to his studio to find and destroy his talisman to save the trapped souls all by myself – since Gran is the only other medium I know and apparently she’s “too old to run around all day chasing talismans.” And the talisman in question? Sitting right on Albertino’s big fat finger. 

I haven’t even gotten to the worst part yet. 

What’s worse than a bunch of people watching dead ballerinas dance on stage and having no idea that anything is wrong? 

The fact that dancing is not the only thing they can do.