McKinney’s ‘The Red Empire’ gets new release with seven additional stories

San Antonio horror author Joe McKinney has scared readers with zombies and deadly disease outbreaks.

Now he’s unleashing fire ants on them.

A new trade paperback edition of McKinney’s The Red Empire — a novella about inch-long, super-intelligent fire ants loosed on an unsuspecting South Texas — will hit the shelves January 2012 from fledgling publisher Redrum Horror.

The book also will include seven McKinney short stories, including two specifically penned for this edition. But don’t expect any of the shambling undead creatures McKinney built the early part of his career on.

“There won’t be any zombies, so folks are going to get a taste of my other interests in the horror genre,” he says. “I’m doing this new version of the book because I was eager to branch out to other kinds of horror. Readers will find stories merging science fiction and horror, Lovecraftian horror and of course some psychological horror.”

The limited first edition of The Red Empire came out earlier this year from Bad Moon Books. Most, if not all, of those 1,000 books have sold out, McKinney adds.

And just in case you just can’t get enough of Joe, head on over to author Kealan Patrick Burke’s blog, where he does a guest shot writing about the virtues of creepy old buildings.