Path of the Dead

Nestled on the foot of Tibet’s sacred Seche La Mountain is the village of Dagz. The normally quiet streets are bustling with the steady stream of arrivals and preparations for the coming Festival of the Medicine King; a time of celebration, healing, and renewal. But a shadow is sweeping the world, a plague of apocalyptic proportions - the dead are rising and devouring the living, and no place is safe where humanity thrives. As Dagz burns, overtaken by the hungry undead, five people come together: Lama Tenzin, an elder monk; Gu-lang, the silent warrior nun and Tenzin’s protector; Cheung, a private in The People’s Army, driver, and escort of the Lama; 10-year-old Chodren Dawa, witness to his sister’s death and rising; and Dorje Cetan, a Shaolin-trained hermit monk of Seche La and a dreamer of a dark portent. Together they must fight their way out of Dagz to an abandoned Buddhist hermitage clinging to the mist-shrouded cliffs of Seche La.

With the undead following and gathering at Eagle’s Nest gate, they barricade themselves inside their dead-end haven, and are soon forced to battle the beasts without, as well as the ones within.

ARC reviewer T.L. Barrett says of the child named Chodren being one of the protagonists: "...[the boy] allows us a childlike perspective on the world, which amps the horror, the reader’s investment and gives us an unbiased witness perspective of the philosophical differences of the Chinese soldier and the Tibetan holy men (and [the] woman [Gu-lang] and...what a rounded and interesting character she is, however taciturn). The book balances scares, action, Gothic settings - the woods, the desolate Tibetan mountains, and abandoned temple monasteries - with thoughtful philosophical discussions and arguments that drags this novel out of pulp entertainment and into a literary exploration of the world." Path of the Dead is the first book in the Hungry Ghosts series from Ragnarok Publications. It is Timothy Baker's first full-length novel.