Rise Again is the story of Danielle "Danny" Adelman, a war veteran back in the States and grappling with PTSD: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She's now the sheriff of Forest Peak, California, a typical American small town in the mountains north of Los Angeles. Danny has struggled her way back from terrible injuries and haunting memories that leave her popping pills and washing them down with liquor, just to keep herself from coming apart. Her biggest responsibility isn't police work, but taking care of her teenage sister, Kelley.

So when Danny wakes up after a bender, it's more than she can take to discover Kelley has run away from home -- and taken Danny's beloved vintage Ford Mustang with her. By the time Danny gets to work on what should be a typical Fourth of July weekend, she knows it's not going to be an ordinary day. However, she has no idea how bad things are about to get.

WIthin a few hours, communications have broken down. There are thousands of panicked refugees choking the mountain roads. And people are starting to die. By nightfall, it looks like the end of the world in Forest Peak.

By daybreak, it is clear the world has a long way farther to fall.

When the dead get back on their feet, the living don't know whether to feel horror or hope. Could it be that death has somehow lost its hold? But even the dead must feed. And they eat the living. That's when Danny Adelman kicks into high gear. She's a survivor. It's what she's good at. And it's all anybody has left. Danny must lead an ill-assorted group of the living through a landscape infested with the hungry dead, always seeking a safe place. And not just safety. Danny won't give up the search for her sister Kelley -- dead or alive.

Rise Again pounds the reader with relentless action and suspense, punctuated by passages of brutal horror. Its story of the collapse of civilization is hauntingly reminiscent of the disasters and challenges America faces today, but amplified to the ultimate degree. It is a story of people struggling to maintain their humanity in the face of a crisis such as mankind has never endured. Ultimately, it is the story of one woman getting her humanity back... But at a terrible cost.

Rise Again, appropriately enough, didn't get started until its afterlife.

Originally a television pilot in screenplay form, Ben Tripp's Rise Again was dead on arrival. He'd lost his representation at United Talent Agency and there was a Writer's Guild strike that threatened to go on for many months. The studios had pulled up the ladders. Hollywood wasn't interested in zombie projects for cable or television, he was told; they said the zombie craze had run its course. Try something with werewolves, went the advice. They're the next big thing.

But Tripp, a lifelong zombie aficionado, was determined to see this story get in front of horror fans. He resurrected the project, writing the manuscript over a six-month period in the closet of a tiny apartment in Pasadena, California. The first 80 pages went to an editor at Simon & Schuster. The editor just happened to be a serious zombie fan. On the strength of those pages, the publisher bought the book for its Gallery imprint to release in October of 2010 -- ironically, the same month as the cable television premier of the Walking Dead miniseries.

Rise Again is the first half of a planned two-book series, but stands alone. Its hard-hitting action and brutal horror have won advance praise from genre superfans; its rich characters and essential humanity have attracted general readers that never imagined they would venture into the realm of serious horror.

"I was always interested in writing novels," Ben Tripp explains. "Screenplays may be the hardest form to create: they're essentially 95-page haiku, damn few words and a lot of white page. You've got to fit it all in there, whether it's a love story, the end of the world, or both, with an absolute minimum of description. It's good discipline, but you're stuck in this very narrow technical space.

"It was liberating to write a novel for the first time. Writing long form is like swimming in the ocean: you can keep going forever, but if you don't know where you're headed, you will eventually drown. I used the screenplay as an outline for the first part of the book, and wrote an extended treatment for the remainder of the story based on the first season arc of the projected television series.

"At one point the novel ran over 75,000 words," Tripp admits. "That's what happens when you give a screenwriter all the pages in the world: he writes on them. Luckily, writing is maybe ten percent putting words in, and ninety percent cutting them out. Rise Again is now as lean and mean as I could make it.

"And along the way, I discovered novels are what I want to be doing. I love movie-making and all the amazing talent that goes into it. Every movie is a miracle, even the bad ones. But for a writer, the opportunity to put the words down and have a reader pick them up, without development people, studio executives, or anybody in between -- it's hard to describe what a rush that is. I guess I'd better figure out how to describe it, though. That's what writers do."