Excerpt: Necronomicompendium: The Undead Manual of Style

“We were once so feared, once so respected and romanticized! How did it come to this?” Lack of functional salivary glands prevented a literal spitting at the thought, so he was having to settle for launching each word, each syllable from his mouth with enough force and enough of a bitter edge that he hoped against hope that they would find the heart of the miserable little wretch responsible and pierce her hackneyed little heart.

A semi-circle of sympathetic eyes gazed inward at him as he paced the plush carpet of his mansion in upstate New York, some from normal eye height, some from seemingly just above the grain of the carpet itself, some from the neighborhood of the exposed rafters, and not all in matched pairs. The rant had been going on for nearly three hours now, and time constraints being what they were, a few of his constituents were beginning to nervously check their watches. But on he went, oblivious to subtle body language in his furor.

“The zombies don’t get this kind of treatment! The zombies are treated like royalty! Every new story that comes out about them they get a little faster, a little smarter, a little more deadly. George Romero will probably have them flying by 2015!”

“Now Edwin,” the business casual clad woman to the left of his empty seat at the edge of the arc interjected, “we cannot fault the zombies for hiring a better PR firm than we did after things with Anne went south.”

“Aaand toooo beee faaaiiirrr,” growled an equally well dressed man further down the line that smelled vaguely of wet earth and cabbage, “ourrr immmage wasss verrry ssstagnant forrrr severrral decadesss afffterrr the ‘60ssss.”

“Yes, but you never SPARKLED!” Edwin screamed, invoking what he felt had been the ultimate insult. “You never sparkled, and you’ve never had to eat a baby out of someone’s naughty bits!”

“Nnnow jusssst beeecause I’ve neverrrr had to doesnnn’t meannn I havennn’t.”

“That’s not the point! That’s in your particular idiom! That’s character building! Where in vampire literature and lore do you see that?!”

“Perrrhaps arrround Vlad--”

“Oh don’t bring him up, he wasn’t even a real vampire! Just a nutball with a lot of spikes and too much free time who gets entirely too much credit. But at least he had the right idea!”