by Jay Wilburn
*Jay ducked as the ghosts flew around his head. As if zombies were not trouble enough, he had these to deal with now. He made it inside and got the door closed behind him. It held off the zombies for now, but the ghosts seemed undeterred.*
MV Clark: Very disturbing, isn’t it?
Jay Wilburn: Yeah, it’s not exactly the apocalypse I’m used to.
Clark: You’ll get used to it.
Wilburn: Tell me the title of your debut novel, please.
Clark: The Splits
Wilburn: Describe it to me.
Clark: The Splits is a worldwide zombie plague that turns the infected into ghosts, leaving their bodies to walk, and rot and feed. Meanwhile, the ghosts haunt the living.
Wilburn: That’s a very interesting apocalypse. How does it play out?
Clark: Splits zombies are not mindless, at least not in the usual way. For every zombie there is a ghost. The separation of body and mind, which is the moment when the infected ‘turns’, is a truly terrifying experience for the person going through it. That person, that consciousness, then haunts the people it loves for as long as the body continues its strange zombie half-life. This also isolates whoever is being haunted, and creates a secondary victim.
Ghost and zombie can be re-united and the infection cured, but this is very, very difficult to achieve. It’s even more difficult because most people in the society I have depicted in the novel do not even believe that the ghosts exist or that a cure is possible. The people who do believe have to work underground.
Wilburn: There is some ambiguity in the book about what it means to be “split.” Can you explain that without giving the book away?
Clark: There are a lot of surprises about just what The Splits is. One, which is only implicit in the book, is that we are all on a continuum of having the splits – nobody is competely untouched by it. Everybody is splitting a little bit, everybody is always losing their mind and becoming zombie, just slightly. Similarly, nobody is incurable.
Wilburn: What would you compare The Splits to in other books you’ve read?
Clark: World War Z – I wanted to tell an intimate emotional of zombies that was just as epic in its way as the geopolitical story in World War Z. People have compared The Splits to The Girl With All the Gifts, but I hadn’t even heard of that book, let alone read it, until long after I finished the third or fourth draft of The Splits.
Wilburn: Where does the story go from here?
Clark: There’s so much to explore in the concept of the Splits that I intend to write a number of ‘paraquels’ – stories set in the same world that intersect with The Splits but don’t necessarily follow on from it. The idea of the simultaneous ghost and zombie is a big metaphysical idea that allows massive zombie fun but also an exploration of what it means to be human. I see no end to the stories that can come from it.
The Splits is the first novel in the series. It covers 40 years, has six narrators, and gives the big sweep of the zombie disease I have created. My next book will take place within 24 hours and have only two narrators. It’s set in a brothel, and its about a client and a prostitute who have to develop a new relationship when a horde erupts nearby.
Wilburn: What are your thoughts on the zombie genre as a whole?
Clark: I am fascinated by the moment when people ‘turn’. That is just such a sad and yet exciting transformation. I’m fascinated by people in ‘between’ states – between zombie and non-zombie. For that reason I love Bub in Day of the Dead, and I greatly admire ‘Turned’ a harrowing film from Crypt TV in which a mother is trying to protect her son from herself as she turns. It’s almost unbearable to watch.
I think the idea that the zombie genre will ever die out is poppycock. Are we suddenly going to stop dying? Stop thinking about death, and what happens to the body after death? Stop caring about what happens to people who die, stop asking ourselves what their death means? Are we going to stop being fascinated by how the mind and the body interact? Stop being horrified by the power of our basic drives and appetites to override our better natures? While all those big questions carry on, zombies will continue to be important.
Wilburn: What do you hope readers take away from The Splits?
Clark: The idea that being human is a work in progress, and that when life seems to want to break your humanity, or even when you become less human voluntarily, you can always come back. You can always recover your humanity, rebuild it.
Wilburn: Everyone, check out The Splits now.
Clark: Who are you talking to? Are you haunted too?
*Jay considered his answer, but then just stepped back outside with the ghosts and zombies.*
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