By Franklin Harris
DAILY Assistant Metro Editor
fharris@decaturdaily.com · 340-2394

A. Lee Martinez's debut novel, "Gil's All Fright Diner," is a supernatural concoction spicier and tastier than a bowl of Texas red.

Start with a diner in the middle of nowhere, where the cups of coffee are bottomless and so is the pit leading straight to hell. Add one vampire, one werewolf, one lovelorn ghost and one 17-year-old sorceress bent on bringing about the End of the World. Then liberally add zombies to taste. For added zest, use zombie cows.

That's the recipe for the funniest book you ever read about the undead, the occult and Armageddon.

Earl (a vampire) and Duke (a werewolf) are two good old boys in a beat-up pickup, tooling around the desert in search of gas, food and a quick buck, when they come upon a roadside diner called Gil's.

Nobody is quite sure what happened to Gil, but a waitress named Loretta has taken over the joint, and all seems well — except for the zombie problem.

Loretta is pretty handy with a shotgun, and zombies don't put up much of a fight after you shoot them in the head, but Loretta takes Earl and Duke up on their offer to look into the zombie situation in exchange for a place to sleep and some petty cash. After all, Duke and Earl seem like nice people, even if they are creatures of the night.

Besides, the supernatural isn't uncommon in Rockwood County, where every third house has a ghost story.

In fact, Rockwood seems to attract the otherworldly, in large part because of jailbait sorceress Tammy — but you can call her Mistress Lilith, Queen of Night.

Using a copy of the Necronomicon (abridged), Tammy is out to open a portal for the Old Gods, allowing them to reclaim the Earth and, just incidentally, kill everyone who has ever annoyed her.

But Tammy didn't count on two other supernatural creatures showing up and getting in the way of her plans.

And Earl didn't count on meeting a friendly ghost named Cathy, who is stuck watching over the town cemetery, where she was the last person buried.

Is there love after death? Can Duke and Earl track down "Mistress Lilith" before she sets her ghoulish minions upon them? Will Tammy's would-be boyfriend, Chad, wise up before Tammy sacrifices him to the Old Gods?

Martinez, who lives in Terrell, Texas, infuses his comic horror story with dry Texas wit, playing skillfully with the reader's expectations and the hoary conventions of the horror genre.

There's not much funnier than dismembered ghouls chatting away about where they might be resurrected next while waiting on the sun to come up and dissolve them: "I hear there's a cult in Paris with several openings. What say we float over there and give it a look-see?"

Well, zombie cows are funnier, but "Gil's All Fright Diner" has those, too, and that's all anyone really needs to know.

(This review appeared originally in the Sunday, Aug. 28, 2005, edition of THE DECATUR (Ala.) DAILY.)