AUTHOR PROFILE · MILITARY FICTION · HORROR · ARISEN

“We're not writing a zombie story. We're writing a story about what the best soldiers in the world do when the world they trained to protect stops existing.”

— Michael Stephen Fuchs

Michael Stephen Fuchs was born in New York City, educated at the University of Virginia, and eventually emigrated to London, where he built a writing career across multiple genres. His D-Boys series and Pandora trilogy established him as a writer who takes military detail seriously — he does the research, finds the operators who'll talk to him, and gets the tactics right. The Arisen series grew out of his desire to write a full-scale zombie apocalypse that didn't flinch from what that would actually look like for the most heavily armed fighting force in human history.

Glynn James is a UK-based author whose early work sits squarely in horror and post-apocalyptic fiction. His Diary of the Displaced series built a quiet following in British horror circles before Fuchs approached him about collaborating on what would become Arisen. The Dustfall series they produced together leans harder into the horror roots — bleaker, stranger, more concerned with the psychology of the end. Arisen is where they found the widest audience: readers who want the horror of a zombie world but with the operational texture of the best military thrillers.

They've never been in the same room. The entire series — every firefight, every character arc, every tactical decision — was written across an ocean via document sharing and a creative process that neither of them has fully explained to outsiders' satisfaction. It works.

Arisen is set twelve days after the outbreak. The world hasn't had time to form new societies or new power structures — it's just ended, and the people who were already trained to operate in chaos are the people still operating. The series follows MARSOC Marine Sergeant First Sergeant Zack, British SAS operator Sergeant John "Alpha" Henriksen, JSOC sniper Ali, Delta Force's "Predator", and a rotating cast of operators, aircrew, and survivors who are doing what they were trained to do in a world that has run out of reasons to keep going.

The military detail is exceptional. Fuchs and James clearly did the research — or found people who'd done it for them — on everything from MARSOC selection to British SAS SP Team protocols to the specific radio frequencies US carrier groups use for deck ops. None of it feels like Wikipedia. The zombie hordes are a credible tactical problem, not a metaphor. And the characters — Alpha most of all — carry genuine emotional weight across thirteen books.

The audiobooks, narrated by James Foster, have become nearly as popular as the print editions. Foster's ability to handle multiple British and American accents without losing the pace of the action sequences is one of the better narration performances in military fiction.

NOT SURE WHERE TO START?

Check the reading order guide and catch-up summaries for every book in the series.