Author’s Note
I’ve always wanted to delve into the fantasy genre. In fact, through most of my life I assumed that if I ever became an author, I would write fantasy. My earliest novels (the ones that will never see the light of day) were about groups of warriors setting off to save the world from demonic forces, and epic battles fought with wizards and dragons. To this day, I still adore that genre, even though I’ve written exclusively horror.
As I write this, it’s October of 2014, about three years to the day from when I started writing the novella that would become the start of my career as an author. That novella, Deadlocked, was inspired by the breast cancer my mother was fighting at the time. If you’ve read those books, and the Author’s Notes in them, then you know all about how the storyline was designed to mimic a battle with cancer, and the creeping sense of doom and demise that it can inspire. It can be a harrowing journey to battle a disease like cancer, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. After struggling through chemotherapy and radiation treatment, my mother finally beat her cancer.
The Deadlocked series helped to change my life, allowing me to quit my job and write full time, let alone achieve my lifelong ambition of being an author. What started as a cathartic exercise to deal with the emotions my mother’s cancer created had turned into a life-changing and fulfilling experience. It was on April 2nd of this year when I finally finished that series with Deadlocked 8, and it felt like I was closing a major chapter of my life.
It’s funny how life works, and how sometimes those chapters just refuse to shut.
This year, my mother-in-law lost her battle with bone cancer. It had been a tough fight, and one she didn’t give up on easily, but a few months ago I found myself standing at her bedside in a hospice, holding her hand as she took her final breath. As has often been said, and I’ll repeat, “Fuck cancer.”
After the funeral, my family and I headed back to Colorado from Indiana, our hearts heavy and our minds taxed, eager to get home and use my mother-in-law’s passing as a reminder that life is fleeting and to enjoy every minute we can. It was on this trip that we received a call about my own mother, and how her cancer had returned.
Triple negative.
Those are two words anyone familiar with breast cancer doesn’t want to hear. My mother was plunged right back into a battle for her life, and I found myself again struggling with the same emotions that had inspired my first series.
What worked once… right? Time to write about death and zombies some more.
But this time I didn’t want to focus on death looming over people, chasing them down. Instead, I thought about how when a loved one is dying, all you want to do is reach out and heal them – take away that pain and get them back on their feet. We all know that we’re going to die, but that doesn’t make us want to believe it. If there was something… anything we could do to stop it from happening to those we love, we’d do it. That’s where the original idea for this new series came from. The power that Saffi and The Scholar has, to bring back the dead, is something that I think a lot of us wish we had. Yet there are so many things that can go wrong, many of which I want to delve into in future books in this series.
Among the Dead and Dying melds some of my favorite things about the fantasy genre with the zombie apocalypse. I wanted to combine these two genres in a way that would help this series be unique among the horde (pun intended), and craft a world that feels familiar yet entirely new.
This first book is designed to give an introduction to the world, as well as the characters. It brings the major players together, and sets the main story in motion. The Scholar is planning his destruction of The Five Walls, and Saffi has learned why she’s so important to the struggle. Will she decide to follow Ebon’s advice and flee to the isles, or will she refuse to abandon the Kingdom of Golden Rock to The Scholar’s planned slaughter? If she decides to stay and fight, how will she protect people who would never trust her?
You’re just going to have to wait to find out!
Before I go, I want to plead with you that if you liked this book, please take a moment to write a review for it. You can’t fathom just how important those reviews are to an independent author like myself. They mean the difference between success as an author and utter failure, and I appreciate every single one of you who writes a review.
Lastly, if you’d like to keep up to date on my work, then subscribe to the A.R. Wise newsletter by sending me an email at
[email protected] with the title: AR Wise Mailing List. Also, you can find me at the AR Wise fanpage on Facebook, where I like to go and mumble incoherently after a night of drinking and writing.
Other Books by A.R. Wise
Deadlocked Series
Deadlocked 1
Deadlocked 2
Deadlocked 3
Deadlocked 4
Deadlocked 5 – Aftermath
Deadlocked 6 – Uprising
Deadlocked 7 – Legacies
Deadlocked 8 – Sons of Reagan
Deadlocked Broken Pieces Collection Books 1-3
The Widowsfield Trilogy
314
314 Book 2
314 Book 3
Daughter of Bathory
Sex, Drugs, and Dead Things
Sample of Deadlocked