by Tom Clark
Be sure to check out Tom Clark’s first blog post in this special Summer of Zombie series “Things Not to Say Without Backing Them Up.” Both articles are great alone, but they are great together.
—
To many I’m new to all of this, this writing thing. Well, actually I’m not. I’ve been writing all my life, or at least since second or third grade that I can recall. So, what, we’re really looking at nearly five decades of writing. Short stories here and there, RPG adventures and all that in my youth; internet journalism, blogging and fiction in my adult years. It’s funny, I always thought I knew how to write, but I was wrong. Shit, Uncle Sam spent a ton of money teaching me how to write, as well as recruit stringers, develop film and manufacture headlines at Ft. Benjamin Harrison 35 years ago. And I pissed it away. But now, as I enter my personal middle-ages, I’m all about getting the weird bullshit I’ve been brewing in my brain over five decades on the page. 300,000 blogged words and half a dozen published short stories later, and I’m on to a longer prose, in the form of a short novella, auspiciously titled Good Boy. And, of course, it’s a fucking zombie story.
Whoa! We thought you hated zombies!
Yes, indeed. In my previous blog post on this tour, I expressed my hatred of zombies. It’s not because they’re zombies, it’s because of what they remind me of, the true cruelty of the real world. I swore over and over again as I grew as a writer, that I’d NEVER write a zombie story. To me, the trope was beat to death, with nothing original left to tell story-wise. So why does a man, who openly expresses disdain for zombies and zombie story telling, write a zombie story? Well, part of it is necessity, and part of it is ego. Regarding the former, the story I wanted to tell in Good Boy required zombies. And the latter? My ego? Well, you see, I may be new to this writing thing, but I was zombie before most of you knew what a fucking zombie is.
That’s my ego talking. Sorry, not sorry.
The Last Man on Earth, a brilliant Italian-American adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, was my first exposure to the idea of zombies as we now know them. Yes, I know it’s vampires in the movie and the story, but these shambling vampires are more zombie-like than they are a Prince of Darkness. Being mindless makes them, scarier. Ever since watching Vincent Price toss his dead daughter into a burial pyre on a Monster Movie Matinee sometime in the early 1970’s, I’ve been horrified (and mystified!) by the zombie trope.
I never really cared for Night of the Living Dead or any of the zombie films to come after it. Italian horror films, with their pink blood and ridiculous masks are part of the reason. I saw them all as cheap knock-offs of I Am Legend. It wasn’t until the remake of Night of the Living Dead came out in the early 90’s that I went back and found new appreciation for what had come before it. And I wouldn’t have watched that if it hadn’t been for the John Skipp & Craig Spector edited anthology, Book of the Dead.
In the late 80’s I discovered splatter punk, and Book of the Dead was a who’s who of horror in the then sub-genre. Its premise was simple, a collection of stories by authors, telling zombie stories in the world of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Reading the stories in this collection is a right of passage into the soul of what is to be a zombie fan. With that being said, unless you can tell me who’s on the far side of the Cadillac Desert, or the distinction between Jerry’s Kids and Wormboy (His M-60 was named Zombo, and it was swell.), or what Wetwork actually means, I don’t want to hear shit out of your mouth when it comes to zombies. You see, soon after this little gem hit, zombie-mania started sweeping the nation. I loved it, at first.
I’m confused, I thought he said he hated zombies?
I do. You see, I grew to hate it, as my beloved secret became more than a niche interest. It became a cultural phenomena. I stuck around with my zombie pals for more than a decade. Phil Nutman’s Wetwork, the expansion of his short story in Book of the Dead. The Rising, Brian Keene’s entry into the mix, even Max Brooks’ World War Z and Zombie Survival Guide. And then I lost it, after WWZ hit. The same year my tastes started to change. You can’t really top this, I told myself. But I was wrong. I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and everything changed. I started thinking outside the box, and it made me hate zombies.
My favorite zombie stories in the modern era don’t have what you would call a traditional zombie in them, and it all started with The Road. For as much as I LOVE pulp and mid-list horror, I’m a student of literature. No one writes better than Cormac McCarthy in this world. If you were to say otherwise, I’d call bullshit on you. My pen name, Thomas R Clark, omits the period after the R intentionally. Its in homage to Mr. McCarthy. The Road is a huge influence on Good Boy, both the brilliant novel and the film. It’s not what you would call a zombie story, there isn’t a zombie to be found in the book. Or is there? Zombies don’t have to be literal zombies ala Night of the Living Dead. The Road is survival horror and the people in the story, are they not zombies, shambling about the wastes?
I still dig survival horror, and more often than not, zombies are the driving force behind much of survival horror. It’s one of my favorite plot devices. The last stand trope, included. All of that gives me goose bumps. They’re perfect opportunities for you to exercise heroism and feats of valor from your heroes. And also to strike your reader with grief over the loss of a beloved character. I’m all about setting you up for a fall, and taking the tumble with you. Good Boy does that in spades.
If you hate zombies so much, why make your first long form fiction piece a zombie story?
It’s not. It just happens to have what could be defined as zombies in it. In that sense it’s somewhat reminiscent of From Dusk Til Dawn. The Rodriguez/Tarantino collaboration isn’t so much a vampire movie, as it is a gangster movie that happens to have vampires in it’s third act. Now I could have skirted around the issue. I could have done what I did in an audio play I produced (The Necrocasticon Presents: Hallowed Ground can be found in the Necrocasticon archives at Project Entertainment Network), and replaced zombies with ghosts. But I didn’t. I wanted this fantasy grounded in a plausible reality, and it needed fucking zombies.
So if it’s not about zombies, what is it about?
Any good zombie story isn’t about zombies, it’s about the characters. In my case, with Good Boy, it’s a story about a dog and his animal companions. Good Boy is a multi-layered novella, utilizing the zombie trope to move the narrative along. It may be influenced by I am Legend, The Road or by Book of the Dead, but its genesis is actually from another source, one you wouldn’t think of when it comes to zombies or even horror fiction. A pair of Richard Adams novels, Watership Down and The Plague Dogs. I have an unabashed love affair with these books and their screen adaptations, on par with my love for Matheson, McCarthy and Skipp & Spector’s work. It was a recent viewing of The Plague Dogs that actually turned the wheels and gave me the idea Good Boy would evolve from. The title, in of itself, infers an apocalyptic event. Everything else snowballed from there to become Good Boy.
So now, here I am, on a writers blog tour promoting my debut novella. It features zombies as primary antagonist. The one thing I said I’d never do is what I burst onto the scene with. Let this serve as a lesson to you, fair reader. Never say never, especially when your roots are so deeply imbedded in a genre as mine are. It’s rejuvenated my writing and I’m now producing material at a level I’ve never done before. You could say zombies brought me back to life. With that in mind, Good Boy won’t be our last visit to my zombie apocalypse world. I’m working on the follow up, Good Girl, and there will be a third book to make it a trilogy. I hope you stick around for the ride. It’s going to be a roller coaster of emotions.
Be on the lookout for Good Boy by Tom Clark.
Jay's Patreon Page | Purchase Signed Books