by Jay Wilburn
I was a fan of Kenny Van Dyke Jr.’s Holy Crap! It’s Zombies! as soon as I had the chance to read it in consideration for this tour. I’ve always loved Zombie Survival Guides though not all of them are written well. Van Dyke’s zombie survival bathroom book is excellent.
I find his origin story as interesting as I do his work and I believe that played into what made his guide so exceptional in the genre. His influences are almost like the timeline of zombie entertainment played out in the perfect sequence to create a zombie fan and writer. Thriller, the Michael Jackson music video, was as good a starting point as any for his zombie obsession. He was terrified and fascinated. He was born in 1981, so he was young to see the video. He says affectionately that his grandma was nuts and had the house cleansed with holy water, no joke. Then, the Night of the Living Dead and Return of the Living Dead entered his consciousness and he was hooked. After that, he read a lot, mostly fantasy and Steven King. Then, Ving Rhames and the Dawn of the Dead remake came out and he was back in full force. His zombie mindset was reawakened. 28 Days Later blew his mind as well. By the time Walking Dead came around, his book had been on a shelf for years and he thought he had missed his window entirely. Eventually his wife (and maybe some inspiration from Joe Rogan) convinced him to finish what he started and that’s how we all ended up here.
I asked him what exactly led him to tackle the zombie survival guide format over a traditional novel. He told me it was hard to say exactly. His younger brother was in prison for 30 days, and Kenny wrote him a letter each day, pretending he was lucky to be behind the walls there because “out here” was a zombie apocalypse. Each day, he had to tell a bit of story, and have a new topic, so he decided to give him tips for when he got out. That was back in 2005. Eventually, this game evolved into a bathroom reader that sat on his shelf for literally a decade before Van Dyke got the wild hair to finally finish it and publish it. I’m glad he did. It works on every level. I believe the amount of time he put into the project really shows.
He told me that as far as he could remember he had always written, but it was either just for him, or he was maybe writing other people’s papers for them for school. At one point, he was almost 150 pages into a fantasy novel when a hard drive corrupted. The back-up CD-R got stolen too from his CD collection. The story was never recovered. It crushed him and he stopped writing for a long time.
He appears to be reawakening his writing spirit and inspiration along with his fully fueled zombie obsession. He is working with a guy he met on Facebook from doing his popular Zombie Questions of the Day. They are working on co-authoring another guide, and that’s all he was willing to reveal to me about that project in terms of hard detail. I pushed a little and got more from him about the process. He did tell me it’s going to be full of quirky, dark humor. It appears their writing styles are almost interchangeable, so it’s been a breeze so far and they are ahead of schedule. It started as just a fun idea, but now he’s spending more time on it than he is on the other project he’s been planning.
He’s a little worried that it will be lost in the muddle, but he wants to do a quality post Zompoc novel. There are a lot of zombie novels out there, so I understand his concern. He wants to put out a quality product worth the readers’ time and not every zombie novel achieves that. He’s not looking to write a bunch of gore and bravado because that’s not what he considers his strong suit. He’s looking for more world building and something that can be taken as seriously as anything written by the pros out there. His attention to detail and quality show through his work and I’m looking forward to what he will create in the future.
I hope I have made the case for Kenny Van Dyke Jr. Check out Holy Crap! It’s Zombies! now.
Jay's Patreon Page | Purchase Signed Books