**From a Los Angeles Times–bestselling author, "a [vampire] novel that goes out of its way to not to glorify the villainy of vampirism" ( Miami Herald). How to control the bloodlust? How to find inner peace as the living dead? The Way of the Wooden Stake. One man rises in a SoHo alleyway to find his lover dead and his own body terribly transformed . . . He strains to overcome his murderous instincts through zen meditation and blood deprivation. He is reclaimed by The Ministry, an underground society waging war with the undead. Again and again he will find his will tested, and his thirst tempted, by the killers who demand his allegiance . . . and the zen masters who will burn him down at his first missed step . . . He must walk a tightrope between the living and the dead . . . to master himself and his hunger. And the way of the wooden stake . . . The 25th Anniversary Revised Author Edition of the Los Angeles Times–bestselling author Steven-Elliot Altman's controversial Zen in the Art of Slaying Vampires. Foreword by the New York Times bestseller Nancy Holder, author of Angel , Smallville, and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels.