Sickness is ravaging America, driving the infected to savagery.
Petty criminal Ben Silensky is determined to get his girlfriend Carlita and son Kyle free of the quarantined city they live in, enough so to risk a foolhardy crime and then to team up with Carlita's equally desperate cop cousin Nando. Once they're out, Nando is certain they'll find a place in the open prison where his uncle works, unbeknownst to him already become a survivalist colony named Funland under the management of entrepreneurial convict Plan John.
In Funland itself, guard Doyle Johnson is shocked when his ex-wife abandons his son Austin into his care. Fearing the vulnerable position he's been placed in, he recruits the help of Katherine Aaronovich, the former prison's doctor. But Aaronovich's traumatic past has left her with vulnerabilities of her own, along with radical theories on the nature of the epidemic that will place all their lives in jeopardy.
As the last vestiges of civilisation crumble, Funland may prove to be the safest or the most dangerous of places, depending on who comes out on top - and what can't be held together will inevitably be torn apart.
FLAME TREE PRESS is the new fiction imprint of Flame Tree Publishing. Launched in 2018 the list brings together brilliant new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices.
David Tallerman is the author of crime drama The Bad Neighbour with Flame Tree Press. His other publications consist of the YA fantasy series The Black River Chronicles, which began in late 2016 with Level One and continued in 2017 with The Ursvaal Exchange, the Tales of Easie Damasco series - consisting of Giant Thief, Crown Thief and Prince Thief - and the novella Patchwerk. His comics work includes the absurdist steampunk graphic novel Endangered Weapon B: Mechanimal Science (with artist Bob Molesworth).
David's short fiction has appeared in around eighty markets, including Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. A number of his best dark fantasy and horror stories were gathered together in his debut collection
The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories.
A lifelong fan of cinema, and particularly of Japanese cinema and animation, film has always been a significant influence on David's writing; though his inspirations also extend to comic books, genre fiction, and a degree in English Literature that led to an MA on the topic of seventeenth-century witchcraft. His previous career as an IT Technician took him all across the country, but he currently resides in West Yorkshire, on the opposite side of the county of his birth. In his spare time, and in between movies, he likes to hike around the local countryside, a hobby that has also taken him to wild spots throughout England and beyond.
David can be found online at davidtallerman.blogspot.co.uk and davidtallerman.co.uk.
