In 2003, Brian Keene’s The Rising revived horror literature’s dormant obsession with zombies. In 2007, Keene’s Dead Sea knocked that obsession on its ass.

Deadite Press is proud to present this Author’s Preferred version of Keene’s over-the-top cult classic, which includes never-before-published material!

Click here to order in paperback. (Digital editions coming soon).

A note regarding the new material:  Dead Sea was originally published in 2007 in paperback and hardcover (by Dorchester Publishing and Delirium Books, respectively). This special ‘Author’s Preferred’ edition of Dead Sea contains material that was not included in the previous versions. Some material was originally cut from the book due to length requirements (most publishers have a required word count, and authors are often asked to make cuts from their manuscript to meet those requirements). None of the missing material was particularly earth-shattering, but I liked it, and I wanted to include it this edition.

In truth, you probably won’t even notice much of the added material, but for those who want to know, in this new edition, the
relationship between Lamar, Tasha, and Malik is expanded upon, as is the budding romantic relationship between Chief Maxey and Carol at the end. This new edition also provided me with a chance to fix a rather glaring continuity error from the original edition—the matter of Lamar’s backpack. In the original edition, Lamar packs a backpack full of food, water, and gear before fleeing his home. Yet, when he arrives on the Spratling, he no longer has it, nor is it ever mentioned again. A number of readers have pointed this out over the years, and it’s been fixed for this new version. I also took advantage of the opportunity and cleaned a few typos here and there that had somehow crept into the original published editions.

This afterword also allows me to address something else readers have asked about over the years. Despite the cameo appearance of
Frankie (Mitch’s son’s heroin-addicted girlfriend), Dead Sea does not take place in the same universe as my novels The Rising and City of the Dead. Yes, Frankie is a main character in both of those books, but this is not that Frankie.

Long-time readers know by now that all of my work—everything I’ve ever written—is loosely-connected in an overall story-arc sometimes referred to as the Labyrinth Mythos. The main premise of this mythos is that there are different worlds and different realities. On one of those worlds, Earth might be destroyed by zombies. On another, it might be giant worms. On a third, it might
be a hungry, sentient darkness that eradicates mankind. So, while Frankie does indeed appear in this book, she is the Frankie of Dead Sea’s Earth, rather than the Frankie of the Earth from The Rising and City of the Dead. I’m glad I finally got an opportunity to clear that up.