How a Romance Author Ends Up Writing About Zombies

(Disclaimer: This is a re-publication of a post that originally appeared on my author page. However, it fits perfectly with what I want to say here on Day Two of the Twelve Days of Creepfest, and this is an entirely different reader base. I hope you enjoy it!)

(Disclaimer #2: If you want to skip this amazing, wonderful, insightful, and amusing post and get right to the links and Question of the Day, just scroll down to the bottom. But you'll regret it. Deeply.)

I read a wide variety of genres. My library contains mystery, urban fantasy, romance, suspense, paranormal, humor, erotica… and, yes, horror. I’d read a number of zombie stories, but none really stood out from the rest of my eclectic literary selections.

In October of 2010, the AMC original series The Walking Dead premiered. I don’t watch much serial television, and I don’t watch movies. I especially don’t watch scary movies, even though I read some pretty gruesome horror novels. When reading, I can fly through the graphic scenes, absorbing – and retaining – only as much as my wimpy constitution can bear. My imagination is too unruly. Once I get an image in my head, it’s there for good. I’ll envision it at the worst possible times, terrifying myself over and over. For some reason, I watched The Sixth Sense when it was available on cable, and I couldn’t get up at night to go to the bathroom for months. And that wasn’t even a particularly scary movie by most standards.

(Oh, yes, I love it, I surely do…)

(Well, if we’re being honest here, maybe I like Daryl a little extra much. Heh.)

Yet The Walking Dead grabbed me. I was obsessed from the first episode. This led to my seeking out as many quality zombie novels as I could find. I stumbled across Living With the Dead: With Spring Comes the Fall, the compilation of the first six months of the real-time zombie apocalypse blog by Joshua Guess. I was impressed, contacted the author, and Josh and I became online friends. When he was ready to release the first year compilation (Living With the Dead: Year One), he asked me if I’d like to write a short story to include as bonus material. Deep in my self-imposed zombiemania, I sat down and started writing. I’m not a short-story writer. I’m a novelist. It soon became clear I’d never be able to produce anything shorter than a novella, so that’s what I did. Luckily, Josh loved it, it was included in the compilation, and I later released it independently.

My concept for Monsters Unmasked struck me as somewhat unusual for a zombie apocalypse story, in that it is fairly light on the zombie-chopping and brain-eating, and heavy on the personal traumas suffered by the main character.

(Chomping, not so much. Pooooooor Amy. If only she hadn’t had to pee.)

I’d been asked to set the story in the world Josh had created in his blog, and I chose to tell the story of Ellen, a minor character mentioned as having been rescued from a group of “marauders” by the residents of Josh’s fortified compound. I’d wondered about her when I read his book, so I told how she’d come to be held captive, the atrocities she suffered, and the agonizing struggle she endured to overcome that horror and find her place in this new, strange world.

Then, when Monsters Unmasked was completed, I realized my approach wasn’t, perhaps, as odd as I’d originally thought. In many horror stories, you have a single villain, or a small, cohesive group of baddies. A rogue vampire preying on a small town. A few demons who escape their summoner and run amok in New York. A clan of werewolves gnawing on unwary hikers.

But zombies are different. We seldom see individual characters among the zombie population. The zombies are legion, they are the plague that overtakes the world and threatens all of humanity. They’re not a single enemy. They’re representations of the collapse of society. They’re a device to illuminate the human condition.

Honestly, they could just as easily be an alien invasion, an occupation by a foreign army, a nuclear holocaust, or meteor strike. I’ve always enjoyed apocalyptic fiction. I’ve read books where the planet-altering event was a series of massive earthquakes, sudden contamination and destruction of the world’s oil supply, reversal of the planet’s magnetic poles, nuclear war… anything that eliminates civilization as we know it. I always particularly enjoy when the characters go scavenging, finding those life-giving necessities and the occasional small luxuries that keep them going.

But the real story is the survivors, how they form bonds, sometimes prey on one another, and struggle to reshape a world that is forever changed. And in zombie fiction, sometimes flesh is rent asunder, brains are eaten, the dead rise again, and zombie heads go flying.

I found I liked this horror sub-genre, because it let me write the “human” story, with enough darkness and – oh, yes, I admit it – gore to make things even more interesting.

Am I a horror writer? I wrote a horror novella, but I don’t think I am. Then again, I might be wrong, as my next book is a paranormal dark comedy, in the same vein as the too-short-lived Showtime series, Dead Like Me.

(Sigh. Two seasons weren’t nearly enough.)

Am I a romance writer? Again, I don’t define myself as one, even though Make or Break is a steamy romantic suspense. I’d always assumed I was a mystery writer, but so far I haven’t managed to write any. Oh, there’s one simmering on the back burner of my brain, but this other stuff keeps pushing it out of the way and shouting, “Me first! Me first!”

I guess I’m just a writer. I read multiple genres, so perhaps it makes sense for me to write that way, as well.

Now the second season of The Walking Dead has premiered, and I watch it despite my hyper-active imagination and inability to remove my brain from the storyline. When I go downstairs to the family room or laundry room at night, I’m faced with a dilemma. There’s no light switch at the top of the steps, meaning I must descend in darkness, then reach for the light switch in the hallway. Every time, every single time, I imagine the scene from last season, where Amy comes out of the Winnebago, holding the door open, a zombie is waiting, and he tears into her arm like a chicken wing from Hooters.

(Replace perky young blonde by a Winnebago with cowardly, middle-aged brunette in my basement, and there you have it. My personal nightmare.)

If I have to fumble for the switch for even a second, I feel panic rising. Seriously, if my husband wanted to kill me by coronary, all he’d have to do is hide down there, wait for me to come downstairs and reach for the light, and grab my arm. My heart would explode. I’d be dead before I hit the ground. Even Thurston Fowl III, the four-foot-tall, zombie-killing, machete-wielding metal chicken that lives in my Writing Lair, couldn’t save me.

(Thurston, perhaps we should relocate you somewhere in the vicinity of the light switch…?)

My husband did have – and perhaps still does – a costume consisting of a brown monk’s robe, complete with cowl, and a rubber zombie mask. He admitted, when I cautioned him against trick-playing of that sort, he’d considered looking for the costume and “doing something with it.” When I pointed out this could be viewed as, at best, second degree murder, I think he began to comprehend the seriousness of the situation.

I love zombie stories. Reading them, watching The Walking Dead, and as it turns out, writing them. (Movies? So far, still no. Except Shaun of the Dead, because… hilarious!) Will I write more? Perhaps. It depends on whether the characters wandering about in my head start shambling, moaning, and decomposing. Or shooting crossbow arrows through the eye sockets of those who do.

Yeah, there’s a lot going on up there. I’m a writer.

And now I really want a crossbow.

QUESTION OF THE DAY: What do I call the room in which I do all my writer-type stuff?

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