Here are the first three minutes from In The Flesh, a 3-night Zombie Event premiering Thursday June 6 at 10pm/9c on BBC America.

IN THE FLESH follows zombie teenager Kieren Walker (Luke Newberry) and his reintegration back into both the local community and the heart of his family.

After his suicide four years ago, his friends and family thought they’d never see Kieren again. But shortly after his funeral, thousands rose from the dead; and after months of rehabilitation and medication, the zombies — now known as PDS (Partially Deceased Syndrome) sufferers — are gradually being returned to their homes.

When Kieran arrives, he is forced to confront his family, the community that rejected him and haunting flashbacks of what he did in his untreated state.

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Amazon has the cover art and synopsis of the upcoming children’s book Zombie Baseball Beatdown by Paolo Bacigalupi.

Here’s the synopsis:
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This is the best thing I’ve seen all week.

“There’s too many different peanuts…looking sad.”
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Adam Baker is the author of Outpost, Juggernaut and , coming later this year, Terminus. He has worked as a gravedigger, a mortuary attendant, a short order cook in a New York diner, and fixed slot machines in an Atlantic City casino. He was also a close neighbour of the notorious British serial killer Fred West. He is currently employed as a cinema projectionist in England. You can learn more about Adam from his wesbite, and you can follow him of Favenook and Twitter (as @AdamBakerAuthor)

Someone, (I forget who) once said that life is like a raucous cocktail party during which all those present try hard not to notice a sniper is picking off the guests one by one.

If there is a single black threat that runs through our waking hours, a skin-crawling dread we suppress during the bustle of our workaday lives, it is the knowledge that death is roaring towards us like an oncoming train. This knowledge hits big-time when you reach middle age and learn via social media that the first of your school friends, one of those smiling cherubic faces in your old class picture, has fallen to illness.
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Guy Hasson is an SF author and a filmmaker. His latest books are Secret Thoughts by Apex Books and The Emoticon Generation by Infinity Plus. His 45-minute epic SF film, The Indestructibles, which he wrote and directed, will be released on the web in a few weeks, and his start-up New Worlds Comics will go live in July.

Death is not the end. Ask any zombie. Or check with your neighborhood vampire.

And yet the English language has been criminally lax in coping with the supremely real situations that science fiction and fantasy have been aware of for years. There are so many situations that deal with various versions of death as well as situations that arise afterwards, and yet there are no words specifically designed to describe these situations. One can only ask: Where’s Saffire? And why is he letting death stop him from rectifying this problem?

English has only given us the word ‘predecease’ which surely you’ve used countless times before. While others may mangle the language by saying ‘the son died before the father’ we all know the correct phrase is ‘the son predeceased the father’.

This article is meant to at least begin to put right the lack of death in the English language by offering eight new essential words, just like ‘predecease‘, about the subject we all love to love:

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In The Flesh is a new BBC3 series set after a zombie uprising, where treated zombies are rehabilitated back into society:

In The Flesh is an exciting new three-part drama for BBC Three that tells the story of zombie teenager Kieren Walker (Luke Newberry) and his reintegration back into both the local community and the heart of his family.

Watch the trailer after the jump.
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From the mosaic novel Zombie Apocalypse! Fightback comes a story from Neil Gaiman — “Down Among the Dead Men” — delivered for your immediate enjoyment in this handy animated video.

Some nice artwork here by Les Edwards.

Enjoy!

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[Do you have an idea for a future Mind Meld? Let us know!]

We asked this week’s panelists…

Here’s what they said…

Zombies are a useful monster. In creative terms, they serve a few different purposes. First, they are the well-known metaphor generator that allows every writer to explore a different moral, social, societal, philosophical or psychological issue via an entertaining vehicle. This has a long, long tradition in storytelling. Ask Homer. Ask Aesop.

Second, zombies represent a single, massive, shared threat that impacts the lives of every single character in the story. Their impact is so overwhelming that each character’s life is shaken up, which means that the affected elements of their personalities fall away to reveal a truer inner self. In times of great crisis we see personality qualities emerge (or disintegrate) in fascinating and revelatory ways. A corporate CEO who is used to being a lion in the boardroom may be a useless coward when it comes to surviving a crisis; while a kid working a minimum-wage dead-end job at a convenience store might discover qualities of heroism that might otherwise never have emerged. Don’t forget, all real drama is about ordinary people in some kind of crisis. We don’t tell stories about a bunch of nice people having a pleasant day –there’s no drama (and therefore no insight) in that.

And also, the general public has, of late, had their perceptions of what ‘zombie stories’ are. For decades the perceptual standard has been that zombie stories are about death, dying, and visceral slaughter; that these stories were self-indulgent gorefests with nothing redeeming about them. But now that there are so many zombie stories out there, and in so many formats: novels, TV, comics, movies, short stories, video games, toys and more, it’s forced Joe Public to take a closer look. What they’re finding is that the zombie genre has drawn some of today’s top storytellers –writers who understand that the best zombie stories aren’t actually about the zombies. The best zombie stories are about the people. Real people. After all, the title of ‘The Walking Dead’ does not refer to the zombies. The dead men walking are the people whose lives and preconceptions and expectations have died. They are walking from the world that was into an uncertain future, and the name of the landscape through which they walk is ‘drama’.

As long as good writers bring quality storytelling to the genre, zombies will be around for a long, long time. Deservedly so.

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I like The Walking Dead, but I’ll be the first to admit that the pacing in the first 2 seasons was a bit slow. Season 3, however, is much better paced, with multiple storylines and interesting turns of events.

The Waking Dead is on a mid-season break at the moment, but fans can get a quick taste of the show’s return in February with the episode ‘The Suicide King’ right here, right now…

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Zombies! Brad Pitt! Zombies!

So, Mel Brooks’ kid, Max, wrote this book called World War Z. Everyone loved it, so they made it into a film. Film mags were happy to report that the filming was troubled, but that doesn’t keep this trailer from looking decent…despite the apparent downplay of the z-word.

Here’s the film description:

A U.N. employee is racing against time and fate, as he travels the world trying to stop the outbreak of a deadly Zombie pandemic.

Now check out the trailer:

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Cadbury pushes their creme egg product annually around Halloween. I usually pay no never mind, but this series of ads for Cadbury’s “Screme Eggs” is inspired.

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A clip from Conan that shows how zombies feel about AMC’s zombie show, The Walking Dead…

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Just in time for this weekend’s return of The Walking Dead to AMC (October 14th – check your local listings), the folks over at How It Should Have Ended have released an extended cut of their popular Zombie Song…

He’s just a lonely zombie.. who could really eat some brains…

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While not as long or as revealing as the original Season 3 trailer, this new, shorter trailer has me wishing October was already here…

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Born in the Bronx, Stefan Petrucha spent his formative years moving between the big city and the suburbs, both of which made him prefer escapism. A fan of comic books, science fiction and horror since learning to read, in high school and college he added a love for all sorts of literary work, eventually learning that the very best fiction always brings you back to reality, so, really, there’s no way out. He’s since written 20 novels and scores of comics, Ripper from Philomel Books and Dead Mann Running from Ace/Roc, the latest. Much more on him can be had at www.petrucha.com.

Thanks to SF Signal for inviting me to gab about the Sept. 4 release of Dead Mann Running, my second Hessius Mann novel, from Ace/Roc Books. I’ve grown fond, of late, of reminding everyone that Publishers Weekly called it a “must-read for Urban Fantasy fans.” In fact, I often wake in a cold sweat, screaming those very words: Must-read! Must-read!

My hubris, however, extends beyond my nightmares. When conscious, I think the saga of zombie-detective Hess will appeal not only to UF fans, but to followers of everything else I like, from Breaking Bad to Dexter. To that end, I’m terribly pleased to announce that a Dead Mann television series is currently being developed by some great folk whose names I can’t mention yet.

So how do you mix sputtering neon signs and graveyard gore?
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This illuminating (and spoilery) video interview with From Robert Kirkman, creator of The Walking Dead, comes from the season 2 BluRay extras.

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[GUEST POST] Jules Sherred on Five Little Zombies and Fred, A Not-For-Children Children’s Book

Jules Sherred does way more than should be legal. Most notably, she is the General Manager and Programming Director of The Look 24/7, host of the Geeky Pleasures Radio Show and the offshoot website, Geeky Pleasures, and core contributor to Wired’s GeekMom. She’s already written two non-fiction books — From The Mundane To The Insane: A Wonderful Journey Without A Destination and Tales Of A Lupus Butterfly — the partial proceeds of which go to lupus research and treatment, is working on another book called Nerd Love, and is beyond excited to make Five Little Zombies And Fred a real thing for people to hold, read, and love. You can follow her on Twitter @GeekyJules. Also, SHE LOVES STAR TREK.

If you are a creative, then you probably know what it is like to be plagued with idea after idea. Some of these ideas may be so ridiculous that they should never make it past the idea phase. Others may be so ridiculous that they MUST go beyond the idea phase. Sometimes, it can be quite difficult to tell the difference between to two. That is when you call on the help of friends you trust to tell it to you straight; friends who are willing to put aside any worry that they have of hurting your feelings when they have to say, “Dude. That idea is stupid. Move onto something else. Now.”

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For all the complaining I do about how slow The Walking Dead episodes seem to be, I still return every week. And this peek into season 3 (the “Governor” story line from the graphic novels) is looking mighty fine.

I did *not* expect the surprise at the end of this trailer. Nice…
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Welcome to the zombie edition of SF Signal’s Book Cover Smackdown, where you get to tell it like it is. Have your way with these book covers!

Today’s contenders:

Your Mission (should you choose to accept it): Tell us what you like, what you don’t like, and which is your favorite.
Books shown here:

• 21st Century Dead: A Zombie Anthology edited by Christopher Golden (Artist: Unknown)
• The Mammoth Book of Zombie Apocalypse! Fightback by Stephen Jones (Artist: Unknown)
• Stalking the Zombie by Mike Resnick (Artist: Douglas Klauba)

NOTE: Bigger, better cover art images are available by clicking the images or title links.

Playing off the “Carl, get back in the &#*!@*” meme from The Walking Dead, Wil Wheaton and Chandler Riggs have created a video that transcends awesome.

[via The Mary Sue]