A riotous yet thought-provoking journey...
Title: Hi De Ho, Infecterino! The Come Up
Author: Andrew Marc Rowe
Pages: 202
Genre: Zombie/Horror/Comedy
Larry Evans was on the brink of his big break. As the lead singer of a rising rock band in 1980s London, his dream of leaving behind his small-time drug-dealing days seemed within reach. But fate—or more accurately, a freak fire and a faceful of experimental fungal spores—had other plans. Transformed into patient zero of a flesh-eating zombie outbreak, Larry unwittingly becomes ground zero for a pandemic that’s more psychedelic than apocalyptic.
The culprit? De Longeuil, a hallucinogenic fungal infection created by the brilliant but socially awkward scientist Hester. As the infection spreads, it alters not just bodies but minds, creating a hive mind of infected individuals who crave brains and challenge the limits of human evolution. Meanwhile, global leaders weigh the nuclear option, threatening to obliterate Great Britain in a desperate bid to contain the outbreak.
Enter an unlikely alliance: Larry, fighting to maintain his humanity; Starseed, the newly sentient fungal hive mind; and a ragtag crew of survivors, including Willy, an adult bookstore clerk battling his own addictions, and Ralph, whose experimental fluconazole offers a glimmer of hope but at a strange cost to her own humanity. Together, they must find a way to prove to the world that the infected aren’t mindless monsters, all while dodging fallout—both literal and figurative.
Across the Atlantic, Subject #30452—a crow gifted with sapience thanks to Parasol Industries’ sinister experiments—embarks on his own odyssey. From revenge to psychedelic enlightenment, his journey takes him to a New Jersey arcade run by a hippie named Zane, where unexpected connections begin to reshape his worldview.
Hi De Ho, Infecterino! is the first explosive installment of The Parasol Files, a mind-bending trilogy that blends apocalyptic chaos with dark humor, wild characters, and a sharp, satirical edge. Equal parts zany adventure, raunchy comedy, and biting commentary, this is a story of survival, evolution, and the absurdity of it all. Buckle up for a trippy, laugh-out-loud ride into the end of the world—and the strange possibilities it might bring.
Hi De Ho, Infecterino! The Come Up is available at Amazon.
Book Excerpt
The line went dead as soon as the man sitting in the darkened office uttered the name. In the dusky light filtering in through gaudy Venetian blinds, a barely-visible haze of blue smoke wreathed the speaker’s head. He replaced the phone in its cradle, sighing as he did so. Then he pulled another draw on the cigarette. His face glowed a faint orange in the gloom.
White-haired, fat, well past the prime of his life, he had given everything he could to his career as a lawyer. At least, that was the party line he fed to others. In truth, he had given his life to himself, or at least tried to. In addition to the pounds of adipose tissue, he had the pounds Sterling to prove it - and to lose. Every single jiggling part of him had cringed before he picked up the phone to make the call to that bottom-feeding reporter, the one who had been dogging him for weeks.
Humphrey Carter: even the reporter’s name sounded made up, to go with his well-coiffed hair and plastic grin that he wore whenever he delivered his latest on the nightly news spot reserved for ‘hard-hitting investigative journalism.’ Carter was the guy who exposed an Anglican priest as a diddler with several child victims over the decades, a scandal at a pulp and paper mill involving glory holes, buggery, and married mill workers, and a former Labour MP’s connections with the Californian porn industry, among other sordid tales of perversion.
Carter might very well have been a lech himself, because all he ever did was shine a light on the dirty secrets of the local heavyweights. His latest scoop? He had discovered that Rufus Duhaim, one of the managing partners of London’s biggest corporate law firms, was living a double life, splitting his time as a family man with the 2.3 kids and fancy apartment whilst also maintaining a loving relationship with a transgender prostitute from Germany named Greta. Or, as Duhaim’s starched-collar colleagues at the firm liked to call women like Greta, ‘tranny whore.’
The whole blackmail exchange with Carter was not surprising. For every Father Terry unmasked for the vicarious titillation of the masses, there must have been a dozen perverts still working their ‘magic’ in the closet of the various churches and freak havens like Buckingham Palace and the House of Lords. It was clear that Carter was earning well beyond the pay grade of an investigative journalist, what with the Bugatti sports car and the Italian suits that only men like Duhaim could afford. It stood to reason that Carter’s silence was for sale, and the price for said silence was a handsome one indeed.
– Excerpted from Hi De Ho, Infecterino! The Come Up by Andrew Marc Rowe, Sophic Press, 2024. Reprinted with permission.
Born and raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, Andrew Marc Rowe had no idea that the human psyche and the nature of reality were going to end up as his prime fascinations in life. Perhaps he had more than an inkling that he would not wake up one morning as a jock doing sports things, given his penchant for nerdiness like mythology and fantasy and science fiction, but matters of the spirit and philosophy were the furthest things from his mind as an adolescent. More his speed were the most puerile and juvenile expressions of toilet and sexual humour offered up on silver platters by stand-up comedians and nascent Internet peeps.
People grow up, though, or so Andrew has been told. His interests expanded, limited world views were shattered, horizons increased in scope. Mental health problems became intractable, psychedelic medicines and following one’s dreams were recognized for their curative powers. Atheism became raving pantheism became ‘wrong question, dude’ as Andrew found himself no longer young enough to know everything or believe anything. Instead, he finds himself writing characters who think they know everything.
If you really want to stroke Andrew’s ego, tell him you’ve never read anything like his work before. It makes his writing nearly impossible to market but at least I’ve got chicken, as young Leroy Jenkins once proclaimed to a bunch of nerds in the mid-aughts.
What’s that? You want bog-standard biographical info? Lawyer, father of one, man nearing middle age who gets his jollies pushing and bending and licking the literary envelope.
Happy?
Interview:
Where are you from?
I'm from a little city that happens to be as far east as you can go in North America, St. John's on the island of Newfoundland. That's pronounced New-finnd-land, not New-found-land or New-found-lund or whatever it is you Yanks or whomever is going to read this has cooked up in your mind. 'New finned land' if you want it in three separate and actual English words that gets the pronunciation in one go.
They say we're a friendly bunch.
Tell us your latest news?
Welp, on the writing front I have just finished the first drafts of the sequels to Hi De Ho, Infecterino!: The Come Up (The Parasol Files #1). Cerebrum Deficiency: The Lost Art Of Tripping Balls (The Parasol Files #2) and The Headshop At The Bellend Of The Universe: The Afterglow (The Parasol Files #3). It's a trilogy of novels, billed as A Psychedelic-Soaked Zombie Horror Comedy. I think it's apt - I came up with it!
On a personal note, this month I am back down in Peru, drinking ayahuasca in the jungle to try to map out a bit more of the bestial terrain that is my mind, a bit like that South African arsehole chap with a blunderbuss from the move Jumanji. Except I'm not hunting Robin Williams nor a cartoon villain out of a metaphysical board game, I'm just trying to keep my mind buttoned up by blowing it into cosmic bits.
When and why did you begin writing?
To answer that question, we'll have to go back, far back into the furthest reaches of time and space, to a little event known as the Big Bang...
I'm only being slightly facetious. To tell the story takes a lot more juice than what is reasonable to expect of you. The reality is, I feel like I was always meant to be a writer. To have chosen not to be a writer would probably have driven me mad. I mean, I'm already a bit mad, but I mean madder. Writing is like the pressure relief valve that keeps the insanity from boiling over. In short, I simply have got to, and that's all there is to it.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
Probably after my daughter was born and I wrote the first book that I published, The Yoga of Strength. Before that, I was like a kid trying to ride a bike but not able to figure out that the damn thing would ride itself if I just stopped worrying about it.
What inspired you to write your first book?
The birth of my daughter, to a degree. But in terms of actual inspiration, I would say that going to Peru to drink ayahuasca for the first time in 2014 and 2015 and the lessons I learned in the two years after that of integrating what happened to me. That book was probably the most retrospective of my books. Everything since then has been prospective, as in I had not lived through the things that occurred... yet.
Do you have a specific writing style?
Yup. It's my own. Built it myself. It's probably got a bit of Tolkien, of Paulo Coelho, of Irvine Welsh, of Stephen King, of Frank Herbert, of... well, of pretty much everyone else who came before me and whose work I absorbed through my eye holes. But it's my writing style and I'll be gorsh dorned if I'm going to apologize for it. You ought to be apologizing to me, for asking me a question like that.
How did you come up with the title?
I actually thought that I was ripping off a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror with the name of the book: Hi De Ho, Infecterino! sounds like something zombie Flanders ought to have said to Homer in that episode where Bart accidentally raises the dead when he's trying to help bring Lisa's cat Snowball back. I know that Homer blasted him with a shotgun, and there is a bit of shotgun on zombie action in the book, thankfully. As for The Come Up, the subtitle to the novel, well, anyone who's encountered a psychedelic can tell you what that means.
Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
Yes and no. I mean, I certainly hope that people laugh at my story. It's meant to be funny and absurd and filthy. I feel like a laugh is a fully formed philosophical statement, as Wittgenstein put it when he said that 'A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.' When you look at the absurdity of life itself, really dig into the muck of these lives of ours, if you don't laugh, you cry. And, to paraphrase Joseph Campbell, the Greeks held the comedies as being a more fully realized understanding of life than tragedies. There is something in these ideas that not a soul on earth can truly communicate to one another. We each have to have our own experiences of divinity, if it's our 'job' in this lifetime to have an experience like that.
I like to mix the sacred and profane in my work, to really try to communicate the wholeness that I feel is at the heart of what we are. There is a lot of cause for pessimism in this world. The Parasol Files, though it deals with horrors and brutality and weirdness in equal measure, is a very bright and optimistic counterpoint. All of these apocalyptic tales seem to be endless hellscapes. The Walking Dead, for example, shows a world where the horror and brutality never ends. But everything ends eventually, even the bad stuff. The good stuff goes too quickly - we all know that. But the counter-point, that the bad stuff ends too, that is not as talked about as I would like.
As someone far wiser than me once put it, if you're going through Hell, keep going.
How much of the book is realistic?
The setting is quasi realistic. The most research that went on in this series had to do with stuff like who was in charge of which country and when. I had to know that Francois Mitterand was the President of France in 1988, for example. To the extent that it's not set in some fantasy world is realistic. Do I really think that some weird Igor-like hunchback lady named Hester could come up with a fungal infection that develops into a hivemind like Starseed using jock itch and 80s DNA recombination technology? No. That definitely is not realistic.
Are experiences based on someone you know, or events in your own life?
I feel like each of my characters has something of me in them. I try to empathize with them, even the ones I see as evil. Darkness lurks in all of our hearts. When we self-righteously condemn each other for not being as perfectly in control of their shadows as we think we are of ours, then I think even then the darkness prevails. A friend once told me that all of my characters get redemption arcs and that is because that is the way I prefer to look at life. I don't think anyone is irredeemable. I obviously haven't had a serial killer harm a member of my family or been through something like the Holocaust, so I think I'm a bit privileged to be able to think that way, but I have traveled to Hell on multiple occasions. The Hells that psychedelics can bring you to can eclipse the suffering of this existence. Imagine if not only were you damned for a lifetime, but for all lifetimes into eternity? Imagine if there was no escape, not even death, from such isolation and torment? I think - I know - that I have been tested to the limits of what I can endure. When you go to realms where time loses meaning, where you truly understand eternity, the things you can experience might make any number of physical tortures sufferable, if only that you were not cut off from all of life forever.
Sometimes you just need a good dick joke to relieve that kind of pressure, and I feel like I'm Johnny on the spot with them.
What books have most influenced your life most?
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien was my first foray into fantasy. I remember watching the old Rankin/Bass cartoon on a tiny CRT in my parents' starter home when I was three or so. It's one of my earliest memories. I was a precocious reader and I think I read the book itself when I was six. That certainly caught my attention. Immediately before I discovered my process, I wrote out, chapter for chapter, The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coelho and my own last real shitty attempt at writing before I finally figured out how to do it. That definitely has had an impact. Stephen King's The Dark Tower deals with metaphysical themes, Irvine Welsh's stuff (particularly Filth and Glue and The Bedroom Secrets Of The Master Chefs, but really, everything he's written that I've read has been solid gold), American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Dune by Frank Herbert. There are so many books I cannot name them all.
If you had to choose, which writer would you consider a mentor?
Probably Paulo Coelho, for the reason I cited above. He is a bit of a rhetorical type of writer, he has characters talk a bit of philosophy in his books. Mine definitely do the same. Fiction just seems a bit less preachy, and really, what the Hell do I know, except that I will be different tomorrow, and was different yesterday?
What book are you reading now?
I'm listening to The Source, the third book in the Necroscope series by Brian Lumley. One of my favourite shows / series of books is The Strain by Guillermo Del Toro, which is a vampire story that seems a very scientific / biological apocalyptic tale at first, but turns out to be a mythological tour de force. Someone mentioned that it probably owed some of its body horror vampire heritage to Necroscope. I definitely see it, and definitely am loving Necroscope.
Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?
A fellow Atlantic Canadian author, Jennifer Shelby, wrote this book Care & Feeding Of Your Little Banned Bookshop and released it late 2024. It's one that is very much a propos of the moment, partly because it has a message of its own about free speech. There are those who are absolutists and those who believe it should be tempered owing to the damage that unfettered speech can do. Shelby's tale gives a very nuanced look at the issue, though I'd say it's pretty clear where she lands on it based on the book itself. What makes it a stand out piece of literature for me is the way that it presents the problem of the absolutist approach. As a guy who tries to second guess any absolutism in his own thinking, I can very much appreciate what she tries and succeeds in doing. I know that there are people who might dismiss it as a piece of 'woke' literature (to be fair, there's an LGBT flag on the cover), another salvo in the culture war, but if one reads the whole thing and looks a bit deeper at what is being communicated, I think it's one of the most human pieces of fiction I've encountered in the past couple of years.
What are your current projects?
I'm finishing the rest of The Parasol Files, Cerebrum Deficiency: The Lost Art Of Tripping Balls (The Parasol Files #2) and The Headshop At The Bellend Of The Universe: The Afterglow (The Parasol Files #3) and releasing them in 2025. I also have a book of philosophy, Lounging Jaguar: A Leisurely Meat-Eating Heretic's Guide To That Mystical Wossname, coming out this year. The long-awaited fourth book in The Thoth Quadrilogy, Fly Me To The Moon: A True Lie (The Thoth Quadrilogy #4) will be coming as well. I also am taking up a new nom de plume, Lounging Jaguar, which is a story for another day, and I have started rewriting the original series of books that I released, The Yoga Trilogy, except that they will be a bit different. It will be set in a fantasy version of Newfoundland and will be called the Punk The Rock Trilogy and will be far more comedic than The Yoga Trilogy, albeit with some similar themes. They might be late 2025, early 2026, depending on how quickly they get written.
Name one entity that you feel supported you outside of family members?
Definitely a little Facebook group headed by one Peter J. Foote of Nova Scotia called Genre Writers of Atlantic Canada. Though all of my writing defies genre, it would likely scandalize the esteemed ranks of the literary fiction lovers, and I feel more than at home at Peter's brainchild. It's well run, well moderated, and I get to yell and scream about my writing on a regular basis on the group.
What would you like my readers to know?
You've got far more power than you think. You've got a voice, you've got purpose, you're here for a reason. I'd say don't blow it, but I don't think that it's possible that you can blow it. You're loved for exactly who you are, no matter what.
And God doesn't give a flying frig whether you beat your meat or flick your bean.
Andrew Marc Rowe’s latest book is Hi De Ho, Infecterino! The Come Up.
Website & Social Media:
Website ➜ http://www.andrewmarcrowe.com
Facebook ➜ https://www.facebook.com/andrewmarcrowe
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