Creepfest Day 11 With Stant Latore

Welcome to Day 11 of the Twelve Days of Creepfest!

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Today we visit with Stant Latore, author of The Zombie Bible. Book One and Book Two are available now, and I encourage you to check them out.

I’ll forego a full review, because Stant has answered many of the questions I’d address in the context of his interview. I will say this is a deep, gripping tale rich in historical detail, both actual and speculative. Could zombie outbreaks really have been a factor in shaping the sieges, wars, and doctrines of biblical times? The Zombie Bible makes a convincing case in support of this theory.

The Zombie Bible is not a campy zombie gore-fest, though there is plenty of carnage and horror that will haunt you. Spectacularly crafted and expertly written, it reads like literary fiction rather than the mass-produced horror fiction that often floods the market and gives people an erroneous impression of the genre. If you like a rich, dark, splendidly-woven tapestry of fiction, you’ll love The Zombie Bible.

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DEATH HAS COME UP INTO OUR WINDOWS (The Zombie Bible, Book One)

595 BC. God is weeping behind her veil in the Temple while the dead eat her city.

Her prophet Yirmiyahu wakes sometimes in the night and hears those cries. He has foreseen the devouring of the city, and his warnings to its citizens are far from popular. As our story opens, Yirmiyahu is imprisoned at the bottom of a dry well; once each day, his gaolers toss the hungry dead into the well after him. Yirmiyahu will have to fight to survive the dead, dehydration, and some truly wrenching memories -- memories of atrocities witnessed, lives lost, and sacrifices made that shatter the heart.


ABOUT THE ZOMBIE BIBLE

The new fiction series Zombie Bible isn’t your average gore flick reproduced on paper or e-ink. And this isn’t your parents’ Sunday School, or your college bible study. It’s the old stories coming back, with teeth, with their innards spilling out messily before your eyes. Zombie Bible isn’t going to pull any punches. It isn’t going to water down the truth. It isn’t going to look for a PG-13 rating and it definitely isn’t going to tidy anything up with a happy love story at the end.

But over the course of this series, you're going to see human beings living the bravest lives they can in a world that wants to eat them alive. You’ll see men, women, and children facing impossible choices and fighting to live lives that are about far more than just surviving. The series will move you and pierce you to the heart.

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My Interview With Stant Latore:

1. Books One and Two of your Zombie Bible series are tearing up the bestseller charts! Where are they currently ranking?

Book One, Death Has Come Up into Our Windows, is currently #5 for horror on the Amazon Kindle. Book Two, What Our Eyes Have Witnessed, was released a few days ago and is already flirting with the bottom of the Top 100 for horror.

(Note: I believe these titles have climbed further since completion of this interview. –Ed.)

2. What is your writing environment like? Which elements must be present (or absent) for you to tap into your creativity?

My writing is wherever I am. In our fast-paced and very noisy world, a writer cannot afford to rely on finding a cozy nook to scribble in. I have trained myself to zone in and write wherever I happen to be, though my wife has taken great pains to persuade me to exclude rush hour traffic from that list. I do, however, need motion in order to brainstorm or visualize scenes – usually I walk. A mountain hike is good but a city block will do, as long as I’m active and the movement of my feet can jar my brain into action.

3. Your story is set amid a Biblical time, and encompasses religious figures and places which may be familiar to many of your readers. How did you select this place and time?

The biblical stories are some of the most passionate and surprising stories ever written. Many of them are among the world’s oldest horror stories, as well – gritty and shocking. What is more shocking than crucifixion, resurrection, rape and incest, or the ethical demands of “love your enemies”? We lose sight of this because of the polarized conditions of our culture and our politics – and also because we always want to tame the old, wild stories, and paint clothing on the figures in the Sistine Chapel. But these stories can still have the power to shock us awake, if we let them.

4. The premise that zombie outbreaks might have played a role in shaping of civilization during events and times depicted in the sacred works of various religions. What led you to wonder - and then write about - this?

One way of understanding human history is as a long struggle between hunger and intimacy. I’ll put it this way. When you encounter someone other than yourself, you have several rival longings in your heart. One is to open yourself, vulnerably, to find union with them. Another is to consume them, feeding on them for your own purposes (another human being might feed your lust, or your stereotypes, or your ambition or your desire for approval; you might use them in any number of ways). Another is to flee them in fear. Which of these is strongest depends less on who we’re encountering and more on who we are and how we choose to live. Ethics and religion are forged out of this friction. Zombie stories demand that we pay attention to these primal human desires. In a world that wants to eat us – in which even our dead wish to consume us – how do we who live treat each other? Will we feed on each other, or feed with each other? And what will feed us and sustain us?

I wanted to write about how our spiritual ancestors, the founders of traditions which have shaped our world, tried to find ways to hope in a world that was “out to get them” – and how they fought to define what it meant to them to be human and to be alive.

5. How much of the history is actual, and how much is speculative? I mean, did you have to tweak recounting of historical events to fit the story, or did you shape the story to fit events?

Mostly the latter, and then I tweaked a few things for thematic reasons. For example, Polycarp in the second book was, in real history, the bishop of Smyrna. I had him come to Rome afterward, so I could pit his understanding of our world and of ethics against the ethics of Rome – and so that I could have a few pitched battles with zombies in the cramped streets of the Eternal City.

An alternate history lets you do that. But I believe I have been in no place untrue to the spirit of the old stories. Mostly, I held true to the events, just added nuance.

6. What was the first horror story you ever wrote? Was it as a child, or did you not discover this genre till you were older?

I’ve always written fantasy. The Zombie Bible is dark fantasy. But the reality is that our world is so carved open and bleeding with suffering that I no longer find it possible to write fantasy without it also becoming a horror novel. The first story I ever wrote – that was a quest story, I remember. I was a farmer’s son with a herd of livestock to tend and a hidden stash of books collecting myths and folklore. I read about the barometz – the vegetable lambs, exotic plants rather like cornstalks except with attached lambs instead of ears of corn – and I wrote a story about a people who are six inches tall, and they are farmers. Instead of herds of livestock, they cultivate herds (or crops) of vegetable lambs. They make the finest wool in the world. Until their village is raided and the story begins. I will probably return to that idea at some point, though not perhaps to the same story I wrote.

7. The 12 Days of Creepfest spotlights independent (“indie”) authors. What made you decide to go the indie route? Which parts of the publishing process do you do yourself, and which do you contract out?

I like to be in control of my work, and I like to move with great speed. That’s really all it was. I wanted to move fast, and I wanted to select and contract with my own developmental editor and my own cover artist and designer. The rest – formatting, marketing, publicity, soliciting reviews – I do myself. I haven’t sought out a relationship with a traditional publisher but would not necessarily be closed to one. It would have to be a unique kind of publisher.

8. What do you find to be the most difficult or frustrating part of the writing and publishing process?

The final weeks of editing are frustrating, though not difficult – mostly because the fine-tuning goes on, and on, and on, and your creative mind is ready to leap to the next thing. Yet it must be done. As for the most difficult thing, that’s when you have a character who is stuck. Or rather, you get stuck. Try as you might, you cannot get inside that character’s skin; you may never have intended them to be in the story at all, but they insisted. And now you need to find out how to understand them and listen for their cues, and sometimes you’re in a hurry and don’t listen well, and then you just want to beat your head against the wall. Except it eventually works out. You and your characters may cause each other some pain and distress, but in the end that love affair is usually successful.

9. Do you read much horror (or any sub-genre of horror)? What is the scariest thing you’ve ever read? What scares you in real life?

I read pretty widely, but certainly read horror when it’s good. It has to be really good. The scariest scene I ever read was a scene in The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe – that’s part science fiction, part fantasy, part horror, part everything else. There is a scene in the second volume when this town opens up a house that has been boarded up for months with a prisoner inside, and before they do, one character is telling another about the time they boarded up a woman too long, and when they opened up the house she had become something … quite different. The way it was described, it gave me the willies, and I still have nightmares about that scene.

The second scariest thing I ever read was H. P. Lovecraft’s “Rats in the Walls.” Let’s just say he knows how to write an ending.

10. What is your biggest hobby or interest outside writing?

Ancient languages. They are the mighty cedars growing in the ruins of the minds of our ancestors.

11. As a reader, what will make you put down a book without finishing it?

Missed opportunities. I’ve had books recommended to me that I could not finish. Usually it was because the book presented an idea I’d seen many times before and did nothing new with it. As a reader, I like to be wooed, so I like some spontaneity and surprise; if the author is just going to sit me down for popcorn and a movie, well that’s only going to work so many times, even if it’s a good movie and even if it’s real butter. I’d like a more exciting night out sometimes.

12. What are you working on now, and what should we expect to see from you in the new year?

I’m working on the third installment in The Zombie Bible, entitled Galilee Night. You’ll love it – it takes this series to a whole new level, painting with an epic brush. You’ve seen two volumes in packed and decaying cities; now we’ll be out in the wild and ancient hills, watching an ancient people struggle to preserve their flocks, their vineyards, their children, and their minds against a world that wants very badly to eat them.

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Links:

http://zombiebible.blogspot.com (The Zombie Bible Website)

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005SNK13K (The Zombie Bible Book One)

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006JW2VXW (The Zombie Bible Book Two)

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MY LINKS:

Official Lori Whitwam Author Page

Facebook Fan Page

Twitter

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