Product Description

The Dead rule the world. Cunning and intelligent, they have hunted humanity to the edge of extinction and enslaved it. Humans are bred like cattle in unspeakable conditions in prisoner camps set up by the dead to preserve their dwindling supply of living flesh to feed on. No land is free of the Dead's rotting grasp ... But on the waves of the ocean, one ship fights on for the future of the human race. On the run, stealing supplies from any port she can, the Queen and her crew struggle to survive until the day humanity can rise up in force and reclaim all that has been taken from them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1528475 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-09
• Released on: 2006-01-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 51 pages

Review
"Brown has a gift for narration, and his ability to paint both strange landscapes of alien worlds and common, everyday places alike put him at the top of his game." --J.W. Schnarr, Hugo Horror Newsletter

"Eric S. Brown delivers his grim worldview like a razor-fisted punch to the gut. Brown explores the darkness within us all and leaves you shivering with dread. The pages scream with pain and energy. Brown is well on his way to making a name for himself in dark fiction." --Scott Nicholson, author of The Manor

"Zombie fans looking for tight short horror fiction, look no further. Eric S. Brown is a master of the sucker punch, a dark dreamer with a promising future." --Steve Vernon, author of Long Horn, Big Shaggy

About the Author
Eric S. Brown is the author of the zombie novel/novellas The Queen and Cobble. He is also the author of the paperback collections Space Stations and Graveyards, Dying Days, Portals of Terror, Madmen's Dreams, and Waking Nightmares and 8 chapbooks. His short fiction has been published over 300 times in markets like The Book of Dark Wisdom, Story House, The Eternal Night, Alien Skin, and The Edge among others. He is 31 years old and lives in NC with his wife Shanna and son Merrick.

Customer Reviews

WHAT THE #%*@#%+!!!!!!!!!!!!
First the story is pretty good,BUT the book cost $15.00 with shipping and is ONLY 50 PAGES long!!!That`s right I said FIFTY pages long!!! So your paying about 20 cents for each page you read!!! Paying $15.00 dollars for a book that only takes 2 hours to read is WAY to MUCH!!!! I know ERIC S. BROWN is known for his short stories, but this is way to much to pay for this book!!! This story should be in a collection of stories like his other books or His other book "COBBLE"(Which is GREAT) should be combined with "The Queen". Both stories would be worth $15.00 together. Anyway if you go to ERIC S.BROWN The Queen.com you can buy the E-Book for $4.95 and download it. The Queen is a GREAT read for $4.95 ,but is a RIPPOFF at $15.00.

not bad... but short
Worth a read, not bad but insanely short. I wish he would have had enough in his head to take it 'all the way' and write the rest of the story, but sometimes a short story is all that comes out.

Short, poorly edited, but interesting
This is how short this book is: I started reading it during the second quarter of a Monday night football game that was boring and was finished with it about 2 minutes into the fourth quarter.
For those who have read Cobble, another short story hidden under the guise of an actual book by Eric Brown, you already know the universe. The dead walk and many of them talk. In Cobble, there were less intelligent dead as I recall (but I read it maybe a year ago so I am a bit foggy) vs. this miniscule tale. Perhaps Cobble was just mentioned in this story as a tie in, because if the undead were as intelligent as they are here, there would be no chance that the island population of Cobble would have survived.
The one real novelty of this story is the camps that have been created to breed the living for the dead as a sustainable food source. Other than that, the 49 sparse pages barely have any chance to give you much of anything.
Unfortunately, it is abundantly clear that opposed to cobble, Mr. Brown did not seek out the assistance of a good editor and it shows. Lots of typos and run on sentences, misplaced commas and a few continuity errors.
The story was interesting because it was a novel concept, but the word "novel" is very inappropriate. Eric Brown freely admitted in either the intro or post script of Cobble that he is a short story writer and that Cobble was his first foray into actually attempting a novel. Well, I would not call Cobble a novel--it is more like a novella at best. The Queen is definitely a short story: 49 pages and the print size convinced me that it could have fit into a tome half the size. The story definitely should have been put into a compilation of his short stories instead of in a single volume. But I am a zombie afficianado so I had the desire to read the story even though $7 was too much to pay for it.
So, with all that said, for a short story, if you can see past the editing errors, it is a briskly entertaining tale of undead follies. No time to get attached to any of the characters. Two main ones, one of which is a house wife that is fairly believable while the other, in one paragraph, relates what amounts to a fairly improbable history that is casually offered up and accepted by the other characters. As for the other characters, there is little depth to them and there are perhaps three or four that are mentioned by name with little else to give you much to go on.
I give this story three stars as a short story-nothing special and no surprises here. I feel that Eric could have made the story a little bit more compelling and put a bit more meat on its bones. That and maybe proofread it at least one or two more times before producing it and it could have been improved immensely. But being what it is, only the most diehard zombie fans will feel the need to add this to their collection.
P.S. This review is almost as long as the story itself ; )