“WISHFUL THINKING” FINALIST #3.5: V-WARS!

No, it isn’t a Finalist.

Okay, so we’re cheating a little.

Yes, this is our Countdown to the Audies, but after our teeth got all pointy over DRACULA, our minds couldn’t help but slink back to one of Skyboat’s favorite projects from last year: V-WARS.  Blackstone Audio calls the book a “threaded narrative of the global phenomenon known as the Vampire Wars.”  A story in which “mankind is unwittingly infected by a millennia-old bacteria unknowingly exhumed by a scientific expedition in Antarctica.”  Just yesterday we were reminiscing about how Tim Curry’s Van Helsing had racked his brain to figure out what sort of strange illness had befallen Lucy.  (Hint, hint: it involves bloodsucking.)  Seems like a natural progression to us.

V-WARS is the sci-fi fantasy brainchild of Jonathan Maberry, a sweeping work that also includes prose from writers Nancy Holder, Yvonne Navarro, James A. Moore, Gregory Frost, John Everson, Keith R. A. DeCandido, and Scott Nicholson.  When it came time to record, Blackstone was lovely enough to bring the project here to Skyboat, where Gabrielle de Cuir donned the cape of Producer/Director, as well as narrator.  The rest of the cast included such luminary talents as Cassandra Campbell, Roxanne Hernandez, Arte Johnson, Lisa Renee Pitts, John Rubinstein, Wil Wheaton and Stefan Rudnicki, and we’ve got some fun footage of our wonderful cast hard at work.

Click here for a sneak listen into V-WARS end result.  Special thanks to Wil Wheaton and Tanya Perez and Grover Gardner for their contributions to this project.

And if you haven’t gotten your fill of vampires today, check out this little nod to Nosferatu.  And do stay tuned: not only do we have seven more Audie finalists on deck, come summer we’ll be launching Skyboaters’ Picks, where our very own staffers will share the ins and outs of their favorite projects.