So when we last everyone’s favorite and most famous gunner, Avery Cates, in the Digital Plague, he was on his knees and smiling. Hoping that this was the end, and that the universe would just put the bullet in his head and let him rest. I mean he had already survived an uprising from cybernetic monks, being patient number zero for a world killing nano robotic plague, and of course the seemingly endless stream of System Security Force cops trying to take down public enemy number one. You know what? I would be smiling too.

OK folks, I have been a little busy, well, not really busy but more like really, really lazy. And the last few things that I have written were pretty standard, and lacking an essential “Ericness,” but with this interview with author Jeff Somers, I think that I have somewhat recaptured, with the help of the masterful author himself, the spirit that I started out my career at Flames Rising with.

So, if you don’t know who Jeff Somers is, or have never read the Avery Cates novels (The Electric Church, The Digital Plague or The Eternal Prison) then you, dear reader haven’t been reading the right Science Fiction. So without further delay I present to you the hilarious and informative interview with Jeff Somers, whose most recent novel “The Terminal State,” will hit bookstores in paperback this upcoming August.

So about a month ago, when I was looking for something to read that didn’t concern itself with hordes of zombies and or the living dead in the big box book retailer I happened to glance over at the Sci-Fi section and see this wonderfully packaged series of books by author Jeff Somers, they had a smart design and yeah as shallow as it sounds, I look for that sort of thing when I purchase a book. Because you can at times- judge a book by its cover. Presentation is over half the product, and yeah, OK, I have been burned before by the way something has so handily caught my eye on the shelf.

Seeing that it was put out by Orbit books, who also put out Feed by Mira Grant, one of my 2010 top picks for Zombie reading, I was intrigued enough to purchase The Electric Church.

When I was in college there were a few things that I actually studied, apart from where the closest coffee shop was and where I could get a fresh pack of smokes.( authors note: don’t start kiddies, blah, blah, blah) Anyway- I also studied journalism and what, at the time, the institution called “mass communications.” Which is a really pathetic way to say that I studied the news, the media, and how it was all changing, so way, way back in the fall of 98 I was sitting in this really drab room in a really drab building and thought to myself, what am I doing? I missed my original opportunity and I can say that until as of late I have yet to make back up the ground I have lost since. But what I do remember from those years was that Journalism is and should always be the pursuit of one thing and one thing only: The truth. Which brings me to the original point of this review, a bold new horror novel from Orbit Books: Feed by Mira Grant.