Guest Post: Melissa Brown's Top Five books about Death and the Afterlife: Includes Giveaway

  

Melissa Brown is an American author that lives in Norwich, England. She is a teacher in ICT skills, English and creative writing. In 2014, she was shortlisted for the IdeasTap Inspires: Writers' Centre Norwich Writing Competition and longlisted for the Nottingham Writers' Club's inaugural National Short Story Competition. She was also a featured poet at the Norwich: City of Stories launch event, where she did a live reading of the poem 'The Library.' She enjoys films, books, comics, fangirling and subscription boxes. She blames her love of the written word on her hometown library and fanfiction. 

She lives with her partner, Kris, and her awesome cat, Hailey. 

 

 

 Melissa's Top Five Books About Death/ The Afterlife

 1. Warm Bodies/ The New Hunger by Isaac Marion

'R' is a zombie. He has no name, no memories and no pulse, but he has dreams. He is a little different from his fellow Dead.

 Amongst the ruins of an abandoned city, R meets a girl. Her name is Julie and she is the opposite of everything he knows - warm and bright and very much alive, she is a blast of colour in a dreary grey landscape. For reasons he can't understand, R chooses to save Julie instead of eating her, and a tense yet strangely tender relationship begins.

 This has never happened before. It breaks the rules and defies logic, but R is no longer content with life in the grave. He wants to breathe again, he wants to live, and Julie wants to help him. But their grim, rotting world won't be changed without a fight... 

2. Undead and Unwed by Mary Janice Davidson

It'a been a helluva week for Betsy Taylor. First, she loses her job. Then, to top things off, she's killed in a car accident. But what really bites (besides waking up in the morgue dressed in a pink suit and cheap shoes courtesy of her stepmother) is that she can't seem to stay dead. Every night she rises with a horrible craving for blood. She's not taking too well to a liquid diet.

 Worst of all, her new friends have the ridiculous idea that Betsy is the prophesied vampire queen, and they want her help in overthrowing the most obnoxious, power-hungry vampire in five centuries - a badly dressed Bela Lugosi wannabe, natch. Frankly, Betsy couldn't care less about vamp politics, but they have a powerful weapon of persuasion: designer shoes. How can any self-respecting girl say no? But a collection of Ferragamos isn't the only temptation for Betsy. It's just a lot safer than the scrumptious Sinclair - a seductive bloodsucker whose sexy gaze seems as dangerous as a stake through the heart... 

3.  Z-Chronicles - Girl, Running by Kris Holt (short stories) 

 Z. Among the most monstrous creations of our imaginations, the zombie terrifies with its capacity to pursue its prey unrelentingly, to run it down, exhaust it to surrender.

 In this title in the acclaimed Future Chronicles series of speculative fiction anthologies, fourteen authors confront that nightmare, that horrific mirror of ourselves turned base, soulless, and hungry. 

4. Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris 

Sookie Stackhouse is a small-time cocktail waitress in small-town Louisiana. She's quiet, keeps to herself, and doesn't get out much. Not because she's not pretty. She is. It's just that, well, Sookie has this sort of "disability." She can read minds. And that doesn't make her too dateable. And then along comes Bill. He's tall, dark, handsome - and Sookie can't 'hear' a word he's thinking. He's exactly the kind of guy she's been waiting for all her life.

 But Bill has a disability of his own: He's a vampire. Worse than that, hangs with a seriously creepy crowd, with a reputation for trouble - of the murderous kind. 

 And when one of Sookie's colleagues is killed, she begins to fear she'll be next ... 

 5. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

After the grisly murder of his entire family, a toddler wanders into a graveyard where the ghosts and other supernatural residents agree to raise him as one of their own. Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn't live in a sprawling graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor of the dead. 

There are dangers and adventures in the graveyard for a boy. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, then he will come under attack from the man Jack—who has already killed Bod's family . . .

TOUR WIDE GIVEAWAY

There is also a tour-wide giveaway!

The prizes are:

5 necklaces inspired by Becoming Death

2 copies of Becoming Death

This giveaway is open to UK participants ONLY.

a Rafflecopter giveaway