<aside> 💡 When it comes to monsters, some people want to fight them, some people want to study them, and some people want to smooch them (looking at you, Guillermo Del Toro). No matter how you feel about monsters, there’s one thing we can all agree on… they are freaking cool.

After penning over 50 monster-filled novels and with millions of reads across online platforms, no one knows this better than award-winning author K. Weikel — which is why we couldn’t wait to partner with her to bring her monsters to life on Tales.

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Award-Winning Author, K. Weikel

With a pile of books under her belt — and not to mention having won the Wattys Award in 2015 and the 2017 Writers Awards for Building Monsters, K. Weikel is a prime example of imagination running wild.

You might think that writing countless books would wear a person out.

When K. Weikel is involved? You’d be dead wrong.

When we got a whiff of Weikel’s Wattpad hit When Dead Men Bleed, we knew we’d found a kindred spirit in weird.

Set in a world where zombies and humans live alongside each other, Weikel has taken the blueprint for zombies that we all know and love — hungers for human flesh with an infectious bite — and jumped 1000 lightyears ahead with it.

When Dead Men Bleed centers around Zeke the zombie, right away signaling to readers that this isn’t yet another monster title. Rather than a main character who fights the zombies as a means to preserve human life, we’re immediately asked to sympathize with one.

And Zeke, despite his propensity for a flesh-based diet, is extremely relatable.

Riddled with angst and a hunger (no pun intended) for self-discovery in a world full of everyone else’s opinions, Zeke is a different kind of protagonist, blending familiar human struggles with the demands of a supernatural urban society.

Because there are not just venom-spitting zombies in Weikel’s worlds, delicious readers, oh no — there are so much more.

In addition to orcs, witches, and vampires, Weikel has introduced a wholly new kind of supernatural creature in When Dead Men Bleed, aptly called Bleeders.

Neither zombie nor human, Bleeders can look more or less mundane one second and turn into something wretchedly monstrous the next, complete with venomous teeth, distended talon-like fingers, and full-on spine-cracking body distortions.

Spoiler alert: Zeke the zombie gets up close & personal (real personal) with these bad boys.

Bleeders are just one of many incredible creatures that K. Weikel has brought to life with loving attention.

Whether they are a new imagining of something classic like bile-spewing zombies or something entirely new, every aspect of each monster is considered. From the way that a character’s monster instincts influence their individual idiosyncrasies to how they each view the social-political divides of Weikel’s supernatural world, Weikel creates fully formed three-dimensional characters from the ground up.

We had a blast creating character artwork and pairing her emotional, at times laugh-out-loud funny, prose with blood-splattering video effects and heart-pounding soundtracks.

The best part?

With a library like Weikel's, there's always more monster magic to come.

But don’t take our word for it. Check out When Dead Men Bleed on Tales, and get pumped for more K. Weikel titles to come, including The One-Hundred, When The Sky Eats, and The Replay Series.

Just don’t blame us if you walk away with an incurable hunger for brains and for more of these monstrous masterpieces.