I’m very happy to host author Valerie Grosjean as she releases her debut novel, UNDYING. I met Valerie at the Big Sur Writing Workshop I attended in March, which I wrote about here. We were in a critique group together, and I really liked the premise of her YA zombie romance. Now, seven months and many hours of blood, sweat, and brains later, UNDYING has arrived! I’m so excited to read it – I hope you will be, too.
This is a story of love . . . and zombies.
When eighteen-year-old college freshman Christian discovers his dormitory is crawling with the living dead, he knows he has a problem. But once he learns the whole country is overrun by the flesh-eating horde, he must race to protect what matters to him most.
Sixteen-year-old Iris, the girl he loves, is stranded eighty miles away, alone and completely unaware of the gruesome threat surrounding her.
Christian’s plan is to evade the zombies, drive the distance to rescue Iris, and get them both to his family farm—where there are guns, fuel, and everything else they’ll need to survive. His mission seems simple: Get the girl, get to the farm, and stay alive.
Things get complicated when Christian is forced to make an unthinkable choice between Iris and his family. Someone he loves must die, and he must decide.
Author Bio:
Valerie Grosjean grew up on a Nebraska farm. After college, she married and moved to Northern California, where she lives with her husband and their two young children. Her obsession with zombie movies inspired UNDYING, her first novel and the beginning of the Undying series.
Buy UNDYING:
Kindle edition
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Follow Valerie Grosjean online:
author website
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Excerpt of UNDYING :
Chapter 1
“Christian! I’m glad I caught you. Are you coming home tomorrow?”
As if she didn’t already know what I’d say—I came home from college every weekend. This weekend, though, I’d decided to finally tell Iris how I felt about her.
“Yeah, of course, as long as the snow tonight doesn’t turn into a full-on blizzard and block all the roads.” I was grateful we were talking on the phone instead of face-to-face. If her blue-gray eyes had locked onto me, she would’ve instantly known something was up. “What are you doing tonight?”
“I’m going to the movies with a bunch of girls from the soccer team and then I’m spending the night at Rachel’s.”
I joked, “Let me guess. You’re seeing Love and Consequence.”
“Why do you say that?” Her voice rose, and I moved the phone a safe distance from my ear. “You just assume we’re going to a chick flick?”
Smiling, I pressed, “So what are you seeing then?”
The line went quiet for a second. “Love and Consequence. It got a 93 percent ‘fresh’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes.”
Laughing eased the tension. I teased, “You don’t want to see Minions of Death?”
“Gross. The blood, the guts, the reanimation? No.” Her tone was thick with disgust. “What are you up to tonight?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I answered flatly. “I’m going to bed as soon as we’re off the phone.”
“At ten o’clock on a Friday night?”
“I want to get home to the farm early tomorrow to see Dad,” I replied. “Plus, Adam went to a concert.”
“What’s the roomie seeing?” she asked.
“No one you’ve heard of, some college band, Tragic something. I just want to make sure I’m asleep before he gets home. I know he’ll come back with some random girl, and they’ll end up making out on the living room couch.”
“Eww!” Iris exclaimed. “Why can’t he at least do that stuff in the privacy of his own room? Isn’t that the whole point of having an apartment-style dorm with two separate bedrooms?”
“Yes. Yes, it is, but Adam hasn’t cleaned his pit of a room lately, and that’s what he does.”
“He’s such a filthy player,” she empathized, her tone laced with feminine disapproval.
“If I go to bed now and fully crash out, I can sleep through anything.” I assured her. Steeling myself, I shifted the conversation. “So what are you doing tomorrow?” My pulse quickened. “Do you want to have lunch?”
“Of course! How about Amigos?” She suggested my favorite Mexican restaurant.
“Nah.” I wanted to declare my love somewhere nicer than a fast-food joint. “How about the new Italian place downtown?”
“Well, I haven’t tried it yet.” She sounded hesitant. “I hear it’s kind of pricey.”
“I’ll treat,” I offered. “Come on—let’s try it.”
“Okay,” she agreed. “But I can’t believe you actually turned down Amigos. Are you feeling alright?”
Actually, my stomach was flip-flopping as I contemplated what I hoped would be our first real date. I pictured her sitting across from me, twirling her long, blonde hair as she decided what to order. As we finished, sharing a dessert, her eyes would widen in surprise when I asked if she’d be my girlfriend. Then, hopefully, her lips would spread into a wide smile, parting to form that perfect word—“yes.”
“I’m fine.” I spoke a little too fast, realizing I’d taken too long to answer her question.
Sounding distracted, Iris didn’t seem to notice. “Okay. Well I’ve got to go. I need to leave for the theater. The movie starts in fifteen minutes.” In a lighter voice, she gave me her usual sendoff. “Love ya, bye.”
“See you tomorrow.” The phone went silent as the call disconnected. “I love you,” I confessed to the empty line.
After setting the alarm for seven, I raised the shades on my window, but saw no sign of the snow to come in the light of the courtyard. I turned the ringer on my cell phone to silent, climbed up to my lofted bed, and burrowed beneath my thick down comforter.
Covering my eyes with the dark T-shirt I used to achieve the perfect blackout, I willed myself to fall asleep before Adam came home with his skank of the week. Thoughts of Iris—fears and insecurities, excitement and anticipation—swirled within my head, keeping me awake. Fighting to push them aside, I vowed to stop thinking about her, at least until morning.
Tomorrow I would finally tell Iris how I felt. Tomorrow, if all went well, my best friend, the girl I’d secretly loved for so long, would be my girlfriend.
I faded out with a smile on my face.
I awoke to screaming—the high-pitched shrieks of a girl.
Tearing away the T-shirt that covered my eyes, I blinked rapidly, trying to adjust to the blinding light blaring through my window. Still half asleep, I wondered why it was so bright—then I realized it must be way later than 7 a.m., when my alarm should’ve gone off. Shoving my comforter aside, I half-climbed, half-fell down the rungs on the side of my loft.
Then a deeper, masculine voice bellowed in pain, and I heard the door connecting our room to the main hallway slam shut. As I bolted from my bedroom to see what was happening, I saw my roommate hurrying from the door in the opposite direction, toward his room.
“Adam, what’s going on out there?” I asked as I rushed through the kitchen, making my way to our front door.
Another frantic shriek cut through the air.
Without waiting for his reply, I sprinted the remaining distance to the door, grabbed the knob, and began to twist.
Barreling in from my right, Adam tackled me, ripping the doorknob from my hand and plowing my body into the hard, thinly carpeted floor.
“What are you doing?” I shoved him off my chest, stood, and reached again for the door connecting our dorm room to the hallway. “Save the takedowns for practice. This is not the time for a surprise wrestling match. Didn’t you hear the screaming? I’m going out there.”
“Christian, stop!” Scrambling to his knees, Adam wrapped his arms around my thighs and heaved himself forward.
My legs taken out beneath me, I threw my hands up to meet the floor and narrowly avoided a face plant. When I rolled over, Adam was already standing over me. He extended a hand.
I shot him my nastiest scowl, but I took the offering, gripping his wrist. As he helped me up, I noticed what could only be a bite mark, right above where I was holding. Deep purple bruising surrounded red gashes in the clear shape of human teeth on his forearm.
I’d never seen a bite like that in my life.
The marks on Adam’s arm looked like they’d been made by an adult, clamping down as hard as possible. They looked way too severe to have been a prank or an accident.
Seeing me gape, Adam explained, “I saw you go for the door, I just freaked, and I had to stop you.” He shoved his injured forearm under my nose. “I got this from Kelly—”
“The little blonde at the end of the hall?” I asked in disbelief, pointing in the direction of her room.
“I’d call her a ginger, but yeah. I went out to see what the screaming was about, and she charged me with this weird, intense look in her eyes. When I said her name, it was like she didn’t hear. She jumped me from a dead sprint—it would’ve knocked me over if she didn’t weigh ninety-some pounds—and then she freaking bit me,” he said, bringing his bleeding forearm closer, so I could smell the tinny scent of blood and see the weeping indent of each individual tooth.
If the wicked bite hadn’t been right in my face, I would’ve been sure Adam was just messing with me. Even with this proof, his story was so unbelievable that I stood silenced by shock.
Getting no response from me, he continued, “While she attacked me, I noticed the door to her room. It was open. Her roommate Beth was on the floor, she wasn’t moving, and there was all this blood around her. It looked like Kelly had been eating her.”
“Are you out of your mind?” I questioned. “Kelly? Kelly who waves hi to me in the hallway and lets me copy her Biology notes? I don’t think so.”
“It’s true. I swear,” he asserted. “She’s got to be tripping on bath salts or meth or something. Let’s just call the police like I was about to do before you distracted me.” He glared accusingly and leaned a well-muscled arm across the doorframe to bar my exit.
“Fine.” I relented. “I’ll call, but then I’m going out there.” Spinning, I raced toward the living room. I took the receiver from the cordless phone and tried to turn it on, but there was no dial tone.
Dropping the phone, I flicked the light switch on the wall beside me. Nothing. The only light was coming through the floor-to-ceiling window in the connected living room.
I thought of the cell phone in my bedroom, but my gut twisted as I remembered Beth, hurt and at the mercy of a girl whose mind had clearly been fried by drugs.
Returning to the door, I told Adam, “We’ll call the police later, but first we have to help Beth.”
“Are you kidding!?” He waved his wounded arm back and forth in front me as if I hadn’t already seen it. “I’m not going out there. I need to get this bandaged.”
“It can wait a minute,” I said. “You’re not going to die from that bite, and Beth needs us now. Don’t wuss out on me. You’re a two-hundred-pound wrestler, Kelly is a tiny girl, and I’m going with you. Between the two of us, we can take her down.”
“All right,” he agreed, “but she’s not getting another taste of this bod. I’ll bring something to smack her with if she gets snappy.” He swung an invisible bat, arms flexed, to demonstrate. “The rules against hitting a girl don’t apply to bath-salt zombies.”
“I don’t know if I’d hit a girl, even if she was a lady cannibal,” I retorted, “but whatever it takes to get you out there, man.”
“Easy for you to say. You aren’t the one with teeth marks,” he pointed out. “I’m not going until I’m armed. Hold up a sec.”
Adam stared at the ceiling for a long moment of intense concentration, pondering what he could use as a weapon. When he brought his eyes back down to mine, he raised his hand to chin level, signaling with his index finger for me to wait.
He took a slow step backward to be sure I wasn’t going to move before he was ready. Then he did a quick 180 and made a mad dash for the storage closet. Rushing inside, he noisily ripped the lightweight vacuum stick off its charging stand.
The vacuum head came swinging through the closet door, followed by Adam, who was clutching the handle in one fist. Then his other hand gripped down beside the first to cock the device like a baseball bat before the pitch.
“Let’s do this,” he declared, striding forward with grim determination.
I reached for the doorknob but hesitated. “Adam, since you’re the one brandishing the vacuum, why don’t you lead the way?” Mentally, I wasn’t prepared to hit a girl, but I wasn’t excited to earn a bite mark like Adam’s, either.
Emboldened by his makeshift weapon, he nodded and pushed past me. Opening the door, he burst into the hallway with his vacuum at the ready, like he expected Kelly to instantly jump out and attack him.
I followed, halfway expecting the same thing, but was greeted by an empty corridor. A quick scan into the dimness, lit by the beams streaming from the living room window behind me, revealed nothing amiss besides the power outage. Things seemed normal, other than the lack of lighting from the fluorescent fixtures on the ceiling, but then I caught sight of Adam. His face was turned to the side and his eyes held a look of horror.
Following his gaze, I saw the light spilling from the open room at the end of the hallway. On the floor just inside the door, the still outline of a girl was illuminated by the beams that must’ve been coming through the living room window in her dorm.
Beth was surrounded by pools of her own blood. Her shirt was shredded from the middle of her rib cage to her lower abdomen. All the skin on her stomach was missing, leaving an uneven surface of exposed intestines, partially obscured by leaking blood and bodily fluids.
Any hesitation evaporated. Without waiting for Adam, I tore down the hall.
As I came closer, I could see that the craters on her stomach were bite marks, where fat hunks of flesh had been removed.
Adam was right.
Kelly had been devouring her.
About S.K. Falls:
