by Jay Wilburn
Grivante’s Zee Brother’s series is something to behold in the zombie genre. We feature Zombie School Lockdown on the tour, but everything from the series is worth checking out. He also has a piece in Undead Worlds.
Grivante wanted to be a writer since he was in the second grade. He loved reading and as part of a class project, they wrote Easter stories that they illustrated and then read to the kindergarten class. It was so much fun for him seeing the other kids enjoying the stories. He’s had a passion for it ever since. He wrote off and on for years, but didn’t know what to do with any of it. When self-publishing came about, he knew that he had found a way to write and publish his work and find the audience that would enjoy it.
His unique tone and style with zombies was both a conscious choice and simply the story he wanted to tell. He always had a drive to write stories that were different, but still engaging, coherent and usually at least a little funny. The initial Zee Brother’s story just came to him; he had no idea where it was going. He just dove in and it went from weird to weirder and he was laughing and enjoying himself as he wrote it. I definitely got that feel from reading his work. He was very aware that by the time he was writing a zombie story, the genre had already exploded and probably peaked, in his opinion, so to write in that environment, he’d either have to write something better than anything else out there or something completely different. I personally think he did pretty well on both counts.
I asked him about his participation in the Undead Worlds anthology. He said it was born out of the group he formed, The Reanimated Writers. The RW is a collective of authors who write in the zombie genre who have come together to network with one another, learn from one another, and work together to promote their combined works. Various members in the group have brought forth ideas that they have then turned around and made happen. The anthology was one of those ideas and was the brainchild of author Valerie Lioudis, Reanimated Writer’s Co-Chair. She came up with and spearheaded the initial idea, gathered the authors together, and from there they worked collectively, brainstorming everything from the premise, new stories from each of their unique zombie worlds, to the title and the cover art concept. They utilized everyone in the anthology’s unique skill sets to get things done. Grivante, Valerie, and Author R.L. Blalock took on the admin rolls and kept things on track while the others did everything from graphic design, formatting, promoting, research, and more. The result was one of the best zombie anthologies of the year by my estimation.
I pressed him for what might be next or on the drawing board for him and his readers. There are lots of ideas on the back burner. He’s got an idea for a dystopian series that’s something like Indiana Jones in the apocalypse that has been rolling around in his head for a while, and a more recent idea that is a serious zombie tale which blends post-apoc and sci-fi, but is rooted in a very personal story of two families just trying to survive. His next project though is a 12 page mini comic that takes place in the Zee Brothers universe and explores the villain of the series and one of her zombie experiments. It is called Zombie Buffet. I’m looking forward to all of this.
I hope I have made the case for Grivante. Check out Zombie School Lockdown or any of the other great works linked above.
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