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What started as weekly emails to coworkers during the pandemic has grown into a full-length survival horror novel set in the author’s own hometown

EAST LONGMEADOW, MA — Andrew Cimino, a lifelong manufacturing industry professional with no formal background in publishing, announces the release of his debut novel, The Creatures of Covid, a zombie survival horror story born from an unlikely source: the author’s own lucid dreams.

The novel began during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic as a series of email “episodes” Cimino sent to a small circle of coworkers to pass the time. Encouraged by friend Mike Ford, Cimino kept writing, and the email list quietly grew across his workplace as readers began looking forward to each new weekly installment. What was intended as a joke gradually became a project people cared about and eventually, a finished book.

Set in the real town of East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, with landmarks and geography drawn directly from the author’s own community, The Creatures of Covid follows AJ, a self-described doomsday prepper, as a mutated strain of Covid-19 collapses the world into a full-blown zombie apocalypse. From the very first moments of the outbreak, AJ is forced to fight for survival while confronting devastating loss and the slow erosion of his own humanity in a world that no longer resembles the one he knew.

Cimino credits much of the book’s raw, immersive quality to his lifelong ability to lucid dream. “I’ve always been a fan of the apocalypse genre, and during Covid this just came to me naturally in my dream state,” he explains. Rather than plotting the story in the traditional sense, Cimino says he was able to “live” many of the novel’s most harrowing sequences before ever writing them down.

Grounded in Cimino’s early years of martial arts training and decades in manufacturing, The Creatures of Covid offers readers a fast-paced, emotionally grounded take on the zombie genre — one built not around Hollywood tropes, but around the very real anxieties, isolation, and uncertainty of the pandemic era. The undead in Cimino’s world are also faster and more dangerous than genre convention allows, upending the classic “slow zombie” trope and raising the stakes for every character.

“In the end I’m just a normal working guy that accidentally wrote a book,” says Cimino. “Without the support of my friends and family, I would never have gotten this published. It’s funny how something so trivial — a joke, even — can turn into something great, given the right encouragement.”

The Creatures of Covid is now available for purchase on Amazon! https://amzn.to/4pvPtLX

About the Author

Andrew Cimino grew up in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, where he spent his early years immersed in martial arts training before entering the workforce at 18. He has spent his entire career in the manufacturing industry, holding a variety of positions along the way. A lifelong lucid dreamer, Cimino discovered years ago that he could use his dreams as a tool for storytelling, drawing on countless nighttime adventures — some far darker than others — to shape his fiction. The Creatures of Covid is his first novel.