Late last week, we got a promotional mailing from St. Martin's Press that stood out from the usual daily assortment of ARCs and finished books—a cardboard box made up to look like a first aid kit, onto which had been scrawled a warning: "Nothing in this box can help you. No doctor can save you. Your chances of survival are ZERO." Pop the box open, and there's a galley for Jonathan Maberry's Patient Zero, a novel about a counterterrorist operative who finds himself up against the threat of a biological weapon that could create a zombie insurgency. (Well, "insurgency" might not be the right word, since it implies a bit more forethought than we suspect the zombie hordes are capable of, but anyway.)

We would have simply chuckled at the cute PR gimmick and tossed the box in the recycling bin, were it not for the fact that we distinctly remembered that just the week before, St. Martin's had sent us an advance copy of David Moody's novel Hater, which is about a mysterious epidemic in which people turn psychotic and violent without warning—and is scheduled to arrive in bookstores about a month before Patient Zero. At first we thought there might be one especially morbid editor over at SMP, but it turns out that Michael Homler inherited Patient Zero from Jason Pinter, who bought the novel before he left publishing to write full-time, while John Schoenfelder picked up Hater after the success Moody had achieved selling a self-published edition online. It's still a hefty one-two punch of horrific violence, though, and both authors are already committed to deliver sequels... and, sure, we know that plenty of people have been on the lookout for the next hot zombie novel in the years since World War Z and Monster Island... but it's getting to be a bit much even for our Raimi-honed sensibilties. At this rate, we're going to have to move that book about the library cat up to the front of our to-read list just to cleanse our mental palate.