Release Day Spotlight: Odium - Claire C Riley

It's better to die by the gun than die by the dead.

Nina’s life was irrevocably changed when humanity’s dead began to rise. 

Now, she lives behind the walls. 

The barricaded cities, erected by the government to protect the remnants of civilization, have become a brutal dictatorship- causing the inhabitants within to starve, steal and claw for survival. Life behind the walls has become as terrifying as roaming the zombie-ridden landscape beyond.

Citizens trade what they can to gain food, water, and shelter. Nina has only one currency—her body and she is tired of submitting herself to the greedy hands of the self-proclaimed leaders. 

An opportunity to escape presents itself in the fate of a young girl named Emily-Rose. For the price of a stale piece of bread, she is set for banishment from the city, and most likely a horrific death at the hands of the deaders. Nina tells herself that it is sympathy and not self-preservation that makes her follow the young girl out of the walled metropolis, and into the overgrown world beyond. 

Unused to fighting the deaders, Nina tries to scrounge for her survival and against her better judgment, begins to care for Emily-Rose. However, when you have a bread-stealing liability providing your only back up, survival seems even tougher. Nina is forced to fight for their lives, and with every zombie slain, she becomes fiercer, faster – a grim reaper with her not-so-sharp butcher’s knife.

Along the path to a safe-haven that might not exist, Nina and Emily-Rose meet Mikey who introduces them to a new life they could not imagine, a life above the ground. However, this new world brings new dangers, and darker shadows than she knew.

Nina finds out that the deaders aren’t the only thing to fear beyond the wall. 

And that fear will not be ignored, or Forgotten. 

  

 

About the Author

Claire C Riley, is a mother first, a wife second, but a writer at heart.

Her first novel Limerence is a dark paranormal romance for ages 17+ Claire likes to break boundaries with her writing, incorporating an old school style of horror and romance. Sexy and dark. (Think Bram Stokers Dracula, but for the 21st century!)

Claire’s current novel is Odium. It is a dystopian post-apocalyptic zombie novel called- Odium, and it focuses on zombies, survival and how it would change us.

She has also written a short story, which is a prequel top Odium called Life Ever After. Nina’s story: Part one. It is in an anthology with some other great indie authors named Fusion. So if you enjoy Odium, go and pick up Fusion and get to know a little bit more about the main character.

She is currently working on the sequel to Limerence named Limerence II: Mia and a horror thriller novel titled Chance Encounters.

Claire is an avid reader of all genres, a book collector, general procrastinator and has a great zombie apocalypse plan in place thanks to a questionnaire she asked her readers to fill in for her.

 She can be stalked at any of the following.

   

 



Excerpt
On hands and knees, we search, rooting through body pieces and sludge. It seems at one point there were two people in here. Pinky must have turned at some point and eaten her little partner in crime. I shudder at the thought and pray they didn’t know each other. Though would that matter? Would it be any less horrifying being eaten alive by someone you didn’t know? Maybe, maybe not.

“I think I’ve got them, Nina.”

Emily is pulling out boxes from under the precarious pile in the corner. I’m sure at one point they must have been very neatly stacked and put away, but now they are just a huge mound of cardboard on one side of the car. She shifts a box out of the way and the contents spill out of the flimsy cardboard. 

Pots and pans clatter to the floor. They roll and crash into one another. One particularly pesky metal pan lid rolls under the car and out the other side before clattering loudly into the metal garage door. The entire wall of metal rattles, and the sound echoes around the small confines of the room.

We both freeze, staring at each other in horror as the noise bounces around us. I close my eyes and count to ten. Or I start to, but I only make it to four before something crashes into the other side of the garage door. The sound is quickly followed by a groan and another crash. It seems, much to my dismay, that we have visitors.

And I didn’t even have time to make up a guest room. Well damn!