Between the Living and the Lost
From the author of the classic true-life haunted house book "The Uninvited" and the terrifying horror-thriller "Grace," best-selling horror author Steven LaChance presents his most frightening work yet: "Zombie Road." With personal anchors including his own grief and decades of investigation, LaChance shows why haunted places matter.
Every town has a haunted place, but few roads carry the weight of legend like Missouri's Zombie Road. For generations, people have whispered about widows in white, maniacs crouched in shacks, soldiers marching where no wars were fought, children laughing in the trees, and lights that hover and vanish with a will of their own. But Zombie Road is more than a collection of ghost stories. It is a living net that collects grief, trauma, and memory, binding them into the valley until even the ground seems to breathe.
Steven LaChance leads readers into this landscape step by step. He begins with the legends themselves, told in all their eerie texture, then pivots to the evidence: how limestone bluffs and flowing rivers can echo sound and energy, how trauma like the Great Flood of 1993 leaves scars that places replay, how folklore multiplies through ritual until dares become proof, and how cultures-from French settlers to German immigrants to Indigenous peoples-poured their shadows into the same soil.
With personal anchors including his own grief and decades of investigation, LaChance shows why haunted places matter. They are not curiosities but mirrors of human resilience, reminders of how loss, fear, and memory shape both land and people. Zombie Road: Between the Living and the Lost refuses to choose between chills and insight.
It honors the victims, respects the folklore, and challenges readers to see haunted ground with new eyes. By the end, the road itself becomes a metaphor for how places remember us-and why we can never entirely leave them behind.
ZOMBIE ROAD
Own the nightmare. Bring ZOMBIE ROAD home today!
ZOMBIE ROAD by Steven LaChance
Literary Critque and Review by Morgan Ellis
Steven LaChance’s Zombie Road stands apart within zombie fiction by emphasizing psychological erosion and moral fatigue over spectacle. Rather than relying on gore or constant action, LaChance presents the apocalypse as an intimate study of grief, endurance, and the quiet violence of survival. The result feels less like a genre exercise and more like a bleak meditation on what it means to keep going. The road functions as both setting and symbol—an endless stretch mirroring the internal depletion of its characters. Movement is compulsory, not hopeful, and progress offers no promise of rescue or renewal. Zombies are ever-present but rarely the focal point, recast as a persistent environmental threat rather than the core horror. This reframing makes emotional numbness, not death, the novel’s most unsettling element.
LaChance’s prose is spare and restrained, favoring blunt sentences that echo exhaustion and loss. Violence arrives suddenly and without flourish, denying readers any sense of catharsis. When the narrative slows, it lingers on memory—fragmented images of the world before and the lingering ache of love. These moments ground the horror in deeply human experience. Characterization is a central strength. There are no traditional heroes, only flawed survivors whose choices are shaped by fear and depletion. While the pacing may test readers seeking constant action, the attrition feels intentional. Zombie Road ultimately uses the undead not as spectacle, but as a lens for examining what remains of humanity when hope has worn thin.