Trick or Zombie Treat: The Revised 2nd Edition

In September of 2023 I planned to record an audiobook for my horror novel Trick or Zombie Treat (originally published in 2015) to release for Halloween of that year. However, I soon realized recording an audiobook would take much longer than I anticipated. I also realized the book needed some editing. There were a couple of typos, which were easy enough to fix, but there were other issues—not grammatical errors, but the prose just didn’t flow as smoothly as it should have. Correcting that took a bit more time and effort.

TZT was my first attempt at writing a novel (after working exclusively in the screenplay format), so my prose was not very crisp. The book was often overwritten and full of amateur mistakes. After shifting to write exclusively in prose form since then, my craft has gotten much better with experience (or so I hope). Before recording the audiobook, I edited the entire novel so it would read more smoothly. That also took longer than expected. Cut to one year later, it’s finally done.

The core story and characters in the second edition of Trick or Zombie Treat are all the same. There were some minor changes here and there, but most of the edits were to improve the clarity and flow of the prose. This involved more subtraction than addition. The first edition of the book was about 66,000 words, while this second edition is about 63,000 words (despite adding a prologue and epilogue). I tended to overwrite description back then, which is a common mistake among novice writers. You feel the need to explain everything rather than trusting your readers to put two and two together.

I also cut out a lot of the onomatopoeia sound effects, which I overused, but I added more 1990s references (there can never be too much 90s nostalgia). The majority of the changes are subtle edits of the syntax to improve the readability. The story, plot, and characters are all the same—with the exception of one scene, when the boys meet the witch and receive their magical candy (chapters 10 & 11).

In this version, I changed the witch to be more similar to the real-life lore of Jane Kanniff, the famous “Witch of West Nyack,” from my hometown in New York. I mentioned her name in the original book, but the witch in the story really had nothing to do with her. So this time, I changed her character to more accurately reflect the real history of Jane “Naut” Kanniff (but with added fantastical flourishes). The real Jane Kanniff actually did dress in eccentric colorful clothes, make odd herbal tinctures, and had a black cat and talking parrot. She was accused of being a witch and put on trial, but was found innocent when she weighed more than a Dutch Bible. As for what happened to Jane after that, no one really knows, which is where my fictional story comes in.

Another change I made was cutting back on the gore and violence to be more suitable for younger readers. There is still violence (of the zombie-killing variety), but I replaced most mentions of blood with green slime, to reiterate that the zombies are not human. If the book was a movie, I wanted it to be rated PG-13, or similar in tone to the Goosebumps books by R.L. Stine. Trick or Zombie Treat is intended for both kids today and millennials nostalgic for when they were kids in the 90s.

Finally I added a prologue and epilogue to the book, set in the present day, with an older Tommy looking back on the events from Halloween 1998. They help set the scene and serve to bookend the story—plus put the 90s nostalgia in perspective. You can read an excerpt of the new prologue on my Substack.

The one other obvious change to the book is the cover. I altered the original cover once before when I changed my pen name and created the paperback version. This new cover was created with the aid of new AI-art generation tools. Again, I wanted to invoke the vibes of Goosebumps by modeling the cover after those iconic 1990s books. Visit the Time Zone Weird Instagram page (@tzweird) for more AI art related to the book.

Cut to one year later, and the new and improved version of Trick or Zombie Treat is finally complete. I was hoping to have it ready by October 31, but it is always Halloween in Time Zone Weird. Had I known the edit would take so long, I might have waited to release the new edition next year for the book’s tenth anniversary (I can’t believe it’s been that long). Maybe I’ll finally have the audiobook ready for Halloween 2025 (unless AI narrators get good enough to record it for me sooner).

The revised 2nd edition of Trick or Zombie Treat is available now on Amazon. (If you purchased the original, the updated ebook should download for free.) If you have not read the book before, here is a brief synopsis:

In the late 90s, five boys go on an epic Halloween quest to get as much trick-or-treat candy as possible. After visiting a mysterious old mansion rumored to be haunted by a witch, they eat magical candy that transforms them into real-life versions of their costumes: Boba Fett, Shaq, a ghost, a soldier, and a velociraptor. The boys must use their newfound powers to fend off teenage zombies and other monsters loose in their neighborhood. Can they survive the night collecting candy, or will they become zombie treats?