Stephen Kozeniewski

The Perfectly Fine House by Stephen Kozeniewski & Wile E. Young

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Imagine living in a world where the dead remain side-by-side with the living–whether it’s animals or people, the dead remain tethered to the world and free to interact with it. This is the only world you’ve ever known–the way it’s always been. Imagine you find a house without any spectral presence–a place ghosts fear to tread–where any ghost unfortunate enough to cross a certain boundary is snuffed out. Would that place be as terrifying to you as a “haunted” location is to those of us in the more familiar world?

That is where this story begins, the discovery of a place that is not only devoid of spiritual entities but fatally harmful to them. Where it ends is far worse.

Kozeniewski and Young created a fantastic vision of a world in which things are quite different from our own, a society that is familiar enough to feel real yet so wildly different as to provide the reader with a sense of adventurous thrill as they learn how things work when the dead don’t leave us. We’re provided adequate time to explore this world before we’re forced to fear that it’s all going away, as whatever unknown force transformed the un-haunted house into a place of certain death for spirits begins to spread.

It’s a story of family, unanticipated romance, and the five stages of grief played out on a global scale…as humanity is forced to learn–for the first time–how to mourn the loss of those they loved in life. It’s a story of the sudden fear of mortality striking home everywhere, all at once…with devastating consequences. It’s all of those things, and so much more. There’s humor, there’s heart, and there is ample horror too.

The Ghoul Archipelago by Stephen Kozeniewski, narrated by Jennifer Fournier

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The Ghoul Archipelago takes us on quite the adventure. On the high seas, to the islands of Southeast Asia, we experience a region of the world unfamiliar to many of us. Kozeniewski populates his near-future vision of the exotic environment with smugglers, pirates, island tribes, missionary religious fanatics, a smug computer programmer and inventor, and, of course, zombies. We’ve witnessed zombies all over American and Europe, the cities of Asia, and the islands of the Caribbean. Stephen Kozeniewski takes us to a novel location where we can witness the collapse of civilization and the rise of the undead, somewhere it’s less apparent that the rest of the world is gone.
At the core of this story, we see the same sad commentary on human nature fans of the subgenre should be familiar with. No matter where we are in the world, it would appear that we’re always too preoccupied with petty squabbles and power plays to focus on the survival that should be the unifying goal under such dire circumstances. As depressing as it might be, the author probably isn’t far off from the truth of it all.
Skirting through a gauntlet of pirates on the payroll of a billionaire still fixated on profit, adherents of a Christian death cult, and a megalomaniacal naval commander are Henk Martigan and his crew of smugglers. Will anyone make it through Kozeniewski’s tale alive, or will monsters, both living and undead, grind all of the survivors into a meaty pulp of blood and viscera until only maggots thrive?
It’s not easy to create an original story of the zombie apocalypse, but The Ghoul Archipelago is precisely that. Reliant on three-dimensional, believable, and even sympathetic characters, Kozeniewski propels the reader through scattered viewpoints as the adventure becomes far more than just a zombie story.
Jennifer Fournier’s audiobook narration is excellent, especially when capturing shifts in cadence and accent from one character to another.