A Thousand Miles to Nowhere: An Apocalypse Thriller

By David Curfiss

When a stranger shows up and infects almost everyone Matt Tanner knows with the zombie virus that destroyed the world fifteen years prior, he's forced to make a decision: flee with only a handful of survivors, or stay in the mountains and rebuild.

But when Matt discovers the stranger was carrying a letter addressed to him from someone he thought he'd never hear from again, he's forced to reconcile demons from the past with the chance for a future with the brother he left behind.

Avoiding the withered zombies that roam the wastelands and the flesh-eating humans that stalk the night, Matt struggles to find the balance necessary to keep everyone alive and his own mind sane.

But when things go wrong and he watches friend after friend die, can he survive, or will the wastelands consume him, too?

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1734273100
• ISBN13: 9781734273106
• Release Date: November 2019
• Publisher: David Curfiss
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

An emotional, realistic, relentless zombie threat. Buckle up.

A Thousand Miles To Nowhere, authored by David Curfiss, was a birthday buy for myself that I chose after listening to a YouTube review by Well Read Beard; his no-nonsense review helped push it from a maybe to a must buy. Zombies have been a favorite horror sub-genre of mine from all the way back to the beginning of my horror addiction introduction. I remember sitting frozen on my couch after viewing Night Of The Living Dead for the first time, convinced I would see shambling shadows cross my wall as the dead came to get me. I rated this 5 stars. I think the zombie is a versatile creature to use in fiction; rate of infection, zombie speed, how they break down, intelligence, strength, the list goes on. These can be adjusted or created anew by the author for their story, and it gives such a rich field to pick from when reading. This work focused on a less explored aspect: life where zombies are never going away, food and water supplies ever dwindling, and being without fear is a long lost memory. Many people can give you their plan for a zombie outbreak, but what next? I’ll admit growing up and reading/watching zombie horror, I never really gave much thought to what happened...later, if no equilibrium is met. Romero’s movies moved along the same road, so in that way I could imagine a world where zombies stayed but other than that, I didn’t worry about it, finished the movie, closed the book and the story ended. How would one feel after a decade of living in this type of environment? Always being on guard, seeing people you love turning, having to fight for shelter or food, never ending, on and on….. What kind of person would you be after that long? Medication is going to expire, so even if you were able to medicate for a number of illnesses, that will dry out. I just imagine myself being too exhausted to continue, way before the decade mark. I have depression, I take medication and I would not want to be without it, trying to keep calm and navigating zombies. I would be a liability at some point. Even if you were pretty stable before, I can only imagine that seeing death and having to deal death in the wake of a zombie apocalypse would give some heavy PTSD. Human interaction would be pretty hard, right? You wouldn’t just come across someone naturally, and trust barely earned, not freely given. Even if you were happy to see someone new, you would have to take into account several logistics before admitting them, just to have a great chance of it failing anyway, maybe taking down everyone. Thinking about all that, I feel how relentless the weight would be, how tired so many of the sporadic population would get of surviving, even if that was all they knew to do, and how dehumanizing isolation from larger groups it could be for those really struggling on their own. I think that one fun thing about having a zombie preparedness plan is that you get to imagine yourself as someone’s hero, an apocalyptic survivor, someone who is going to help shape the new world when the dust settles. What I felt was unique to this novel was that we were shown a more realistic view, humans just trying to continue, wrinkles and all. No over the top masterminds, controlling armies to attack each other, with zombies as a backdrop to take out a loved one at peak emotional cost, though that has to be possible I guess. We were shown... us, getting up each day, trying to keep those we love together and safe, while not being at our best, being at the end of our ropes and still going. I found it a very moving novel to read through, while still moving at a fast clip.