In Progress
Attack of the Food Zombies!
A "sci-fry thriller" tale of rogue scientists and addictive additives
A violent food riot at a low-rent buffet off the Las Vegas Strip brings cops to find diners madly gobbling the cheap eats. The culprit seems to be some drug that had been added to the food.
Then the buffet's manager is found dead in the desert under flat-out weird circumstances. He has literally eaten dirt and died, after ingesting the drug.
Determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, FBI agent Rochelle "Leafy" Chun and eccentric FDA investigator Mary Louette Baumgartner launch an investigation to track down the culprit.
They are joined by master chef Giovanni "Nonny" Ciotti, the brilliant founder of a three-star Michelin restaurant, as well as Las Vegas' premier gourmet buffet, the Emperor's Feast "Gourffet."
Their intrepid investigations lead to disgraced neuropharmacologist Edwin Kane, who has created the ultimate computer model of the human gustatory system.
He has used his computer model to secretly develop the drug gustatene that gives any food an irresistible, highly addictive taste. He seeks to salvage his reputation with the stunning discovery.
The chase is on, and the scientist is pursued by, not only by Chun, Lou and Chef Nonny, but drug dealers, food industrialists, and vegan terrorists, called Veganites.
The drug dealers see gustatene as a highly profitable product. The food industrialists see gustatene as the ultimate food additive that would enable them to make their foods irresistibly addictive.
The Veganite terrorists see gustatene as an ultimate weapon of mass destruction. After all, when gustatene is sprayed on crowds of people, they collapse in a mad feeding frenzy—on each other! The Veganites hijack a shipment of the drug and proceed to launch attacks—ultimately attempting a mass spraying that would cause huge casualties.
Forced by drug dealers, Kane engineers an even more potent version, gustatene X, or GX. It is peddled by the drug dealers to a ruthless executive at the food giant GloboChem, who tests it out on unsuspecting Las Vegas diners. The powerful drug transforms them into hunger-maddened food zombies. Doctors diagnose the victims, popularly known as the "Unfed," as suffering from a new medical disorder, gluttonous maximus, declaring that the victims will literally "eat your lunch."
What's more, GX threatens to become pervasive in the global environment, creating a worldwide epidemic of ravenous food zombies.
In a series of dramatic climaxes, the heroes manage to thwart the Veganites, the drug dealers, and the Globochem industrialists. They persuade Kane to develop a cure for the food zombies and stop the spread of the scourge of GX.
Attack of the Food Zombies is not only a "sci-fry thriller," but a revelatory novel about the ubiquity and dangers of the massive industry of food additives and addictive manufactured foods.