V Wars

The ice kept a secret for thirteen thousand years, and the thaw let it out. A dormant pathogen wakes stretches of junk DNA nobody knew were loaded, and across the world ordinary people begin to turn — not into one monster but into thousands. Each new vampire takes the shape its own bloodline once feared: the revenant of Slavic legend, the blood-drinker of a half-forgotten folktale, the thing your ancestors warned each other about at night. Humanity gives them a name, the Bloods, and calls what comes next the V-Wars. Created and edited by Jonathan Maberry, this is a shared world built by many hands. Across four anthologies — beginning with V-Wars and running through Blood and Fire, Night Terrors, and Shockwaves — a rotating company of thriller and horror writers (Scott Sigler, Weston Ochse, James A. Moore, Yvonne Navarro, and others) each follow their own soldiers, senators, killers, and infected through the same unraveling. The threads cross and glance off one another, but the pandemic they report is a single one. Holding it together is Dr. Luther Swann, the scholar who names the plague and then has to live inside it. The register is war dispatch: field reports, newsroom crawl, kill-team debrief, and the cold argument over whether the Bloods are citizens or targets. It reads less like a saga than a global emergency filed one witness at a time. Begin with the first anthology, V-Wars, and take the volumes in the order they were published — the war only gets wider.