by Joe McKinney
The second reason is a little more complex. The San Antonio Police Department has very specific rules about its officers writing for publication. Not only do they take a suspicious view of officers giving away police tactics and procedures, but they also want to preserve their valuable relationship with the public they serve. I had nightmares of some community activist throwing my book at the feet of City Council and saying, “So, this is what the San Antonio Police Department thinks of my neighborhood!”
I did not want to explain that scene to Internal Affairs.
So, I made up some street names. The places are real, but they’re called by different names. The first line of the book is a good example. The empty parking lot near the corner of Seafarer and Rood is actually the empty parking lot near the intersection of Roanoke Street and Culebra. I think there’s an Auto Zone there now, but at the time I wrote Dead City, it was a vacant lot.
So, where did the names come from?
Well, at the time I wrote the book, I was finishing up my master’s degree in English from the University of Texas at San Antonio. I was reading a lot of poetry, preparing for my comps. If you want to find your way around Dead City, don’t bother with a map. You’ll have better luck with the table of contents of The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
Survivors
“Survivors,” originally published in Dead Set: A Zombie Anthology, edited by Joe McKinney and Michelle McCrary (23 House Publishing; February, 2010).
I didn’t write Dead City with the intention of turning it into a series, mainly because I find most series annoying. Sure, The Lord of the Rings was cool. I also liked the Dave Robicheaux books by James Lee Burke. But with nearly everything else, the magic that worked in the first book tends to become tedious and annoying about midway through the second book.
Even so, I get why authors love to do them. First and foremost, they make money. A lot of readers, I guess, enjoy the comfort of covering familiar ground. I don’t begrudge them that. Hell, I followed Buffy through all seven seasons. I even kept on with Angel after that. So I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with covering familiar ground. It is what it is. Sometimes it works. Publishers know this, and so they encourage their authors to turn good ideas into lucrative franchises.
I have nothing against making money. In fact, I rather enjoy making money. But there has to be more to it than that. If money was all there was, storytelling would be down there on the very bottom of the career ladder. It may be that Stephen King makes so much cash he needs to build a warehouse out back just to store it all, but we can’t all be Stephen King. Most writers, in fact, make a shockingly low wage. The figures get even more embarrassing when you start figuring the actual money earned per time spent writing. It’s a wonder really, that anybody does this job at all.
But we do it. And every year, hundreds of thousands of authors submit their manuscripts to publishers in the hopes that they will be able to do it, too.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me, the physical process of creating stories is hugely rewarding. There are innumerable hours spent in frustration and self-doubt, but there are also those wonderful moments when all the cylinders are firing and the story is pouring out of you and you feel like you’ve lost yourself in your imagination. Those moments keep writers coming back for more of this abuse we call writing for a living.
Writing a novel, even when it comes with white-hot moments of excitement like I’ve just described, is mentally exhausting. When I was done with Dead City, I developed a sort of separation anxiety. Though I didn’t have any real desire to revisit Eddie Hudson, at least not right away, I did want to go back to the world I had created. Houston, after all, was still underwater, and though San Antonio was mostly cleared of the infected by the end of Dead City, other parts of the Gulf Coast were not so lucky. There were other parts of Dead World that needed exploring, and for that reason, I began to think of the possibility of doing a series of books, each one following a different set of characters through some other part of Dead World. That way, I could assuage my separation anxiety without doing the very thing that so frustrated me as a reader. I could have my cake and eat it too.
Meanwhile, I was writing other stories and publishing them here and there. One of the stories I published after Dead City was a vampire tale called “Down in the Cellar” in Nights of Blood 2: More Legends of the Vampire, edited by Bob Nailor and Elyse Salpeter, and released by 23 House Publishing. I was impressed by the way 23 House did business, and I wrote Mitchel Whitington, the managing editor, to let him know. As it turns out, Mitchel enjoyed my story a great deal and had tracked down a copy of Dead City as well. He told me he was getting a zombie-themed anthology together and asked if I’d be interested in co-editing it with a fabulous lady named Michelle McCrary, organizer of the Shreveport Zombie Walk. I agreed right away.
As I was thinking of the short story I would write for the book, I kept coming back to one of the major criticisms I received of Dead City. Eddie Hudson’s story was one of redemption, and to tell that story I needed to compress time. One night was just about perfect for my purposes. (Remember Scrooge’s surprise in “A Christmas Carol”: “And the spirits have done it all in just one night!”) I could have ended the book after Chapter 33, but I felt like I wanted to show the change in Eddie after the one night of hell described in the rest of the book, which is why I included Chapter 34.
That told the story the way I thought it should be told. But, as I mentioned earlier, quite a few readers thought differently. They wanted details of the six weeks that pass between Chapter 33 and 34. I felt for them, because I wanted to write about that part of the overall story, but my instincts told me that Eddie Hudson was not the right person to tell of that confusing time. That part of the story would have to wait.
And then Dead Set came along, and I saw my chance to tell the story of those missing six weeks.
Hence we have “Survivors,” my contribution to the anthology.
The main character is James Canavan, a Marine corporal from Houston on assignment in San Antonio. Canavan and his platoon have been tasked with a very simple mission. Their lieutenant is pinned down with a few survivors. Canavan is to take his men into downtown, rescue the lieutenant and any uninfected survivors, and get them to safety.
But of course nothing is ever as easy as it sounds, especially when there are hundreds of thousands of zombies flooding into the area. Despite deploying prodigious firepower, Canavan’s squad is son torn apart, Canavan himself the sole survivor. While trying to fight his way out of the compromised area, he encounters a dying woman in a bombed-out bank. Amid the swirling dust and the moaning hordes of zombies, the two share a tense and bitter moment that changes Canavan forever.
When I wrote “Survivors,” I knew the main thematic drive had to be survivor guilt. The missing six weeks from Dead City were a time of rebuilding, or at least an attempt at rebuilding, and survivor guilt is an unfortunate symptom of that process. After all, there can’t be a need to rebuild without an equally strong sense that something has been lost that is worth rebuilding. Those who live through traumatic moments of loss know this. They know there is a drive to throw oneself headlong into any kind of mind-numbing labor and that that labor is at once an urge to destroy oneself while building up the memory of those who have died.
What was needed, I decided, was an outsider, someone who could bring in a firsthand account of what happened in Houston, while also commenting on the deep sense of loss through the rebuilding process.
That meant telling a very dark story, which certainly describes James Canavan’s adventures in San Antonio.
Ethical Solution
“Ethical Solution,” originally published as “People for the Ethical Treatment of Zombies,” in The Harrow, Volume 10, Number 5 (2007).
There is an elementary school teacher in Dead City named Ken Stoler, and if Eddie Hudson were here with us today, he would tell you that God never made a sorrier sack of shit than Ken Stoler.
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Stoler and Eddie spend the middle third of the book arguing about the philosophical and moral implications of a world populated by zombies. Eddie, being who he is, finds the conversation pointless. But Stoler won’t let it go. He has discovered that the zombies aren’t really dead, as Eddie believes. They are very much alive but infected with a disease that eats away their minds until they are completely depersonalized. They feel no pain, only aggression, so they continue to attack even when mortally wounded.
Eddie never sees Stoler’s point. For him, it is a matter of kill or be killed. The zombies don’t allow another option, so he intends to be the one doing the killing.
Stoler, on the other hand, refuses to heap violence on the zombies. “You wouldn’t kill someone just because they have the flu, would you?” he argues.
“I would if they were trying to eat me,” Eddie counters, rather petulantly, and rather ineffectively. He lacks the mental horsepower necessary to debate Ken Stoler, and they both know it. Stoler hopes to use this to his advantage and convert Eddie. He wants to quarantine the entire Gulf Coast and pressure the government to research the disease that turns the infected into zombies. Every infected person, he argues, deserves to be rehabilitated. We can no more hold them criminally liable for their acts of murder and cannibalism than we can hold an insane person responsible for murdering.
That, of course, is not an effective argument to use on a cop, and though Eddie tries to respond intelligently, all he does is trip over his tongue. When Ken Stoler leaves the book, it is none too soon for Eddie Hudson.
Ben Richardson
After Dead City had been on the shelves for a few months, I started getting emails from people who loved Ken Stoler. And just as many from people who hated him. No one, it seemed, was on the fence about him, which is exactly how I hoped he would come across. Ken Stoler generated so much attention, in fact, that I decided to put his ideas to the test.
But, as in “Survivors,” which would come along two years later, I sensed that Ken Stoler wasn’t the right person. At the end of Dead City, Stoler has gone on speaking tours and makes quite a few friends, and just as many enemies…much as his character did with Dead City’s readers. The way I looked at it, I had created a wide world outside the confines of Dead City’s covers: Why not bring in a fresh batch of characters, nearly all caught up in Ken Stoler’s cause? Sending them into San Antonio would give me a chance to color a little doubt into Eddie Hudson’s version of events, and it would also give me a chance to show how the rest of the country had been affected by the Outbreak.
And I could introduce a man destined to become one of the most important characters in the whole Dead World series.
Ben Richardson.
Ben is single, mid-thirties, smart, but not pompously so. He’s a staff writer for The Atlantic. He was born and raised in Port Arthur, Texas, like Janis Joplin, and when the first reports of cannibalism emerged from Houston after Hurricane Mardell, Ben went into action. He decided to write the definitive history of the Outbreak, covering every aspect of the zombie plague, from the lofty, but ultimately empty, speeches on the White House lawn to the plight of the lowliest individual hiding in the back alleys of a ruined town.
Just before the events in “Ethical Solution,” which takes place about eight months after Eddie’s ending to Dead City, Ben Richardson gets wind of an English professor from the University of Texas at Austin named Dr. Sylvia Carnes. Dr. Carnes has bought Ken Stoler’s cause, hook, line and sinker, and now she plans to take a chartered bus through the military quarantine that surrounds San Antonio. She has about forty students with her, each a member of the local chapter of People for an Ethical Solution, and a court order authorizing her to enter the quarantine zone. The idea, she tells Ben, is to show the rest of the country that the infected—she refuses to call them zombies—can be handled in a humane way by normal people. This, she hopes, will open the door to meaningful research into a cure.
Richardson is naturally skeptical. He and Carnes fall on opposite sides of the issue, but he maintains an open mind and convinces her that he should accompany her expedition into San Antonio.
One of the complaints I got from San Antonio locals who read Dead City was that I didn’t mention many of the city’s wonderful landmarks, such as the Alamo. Well, okay, I said. You want the Alamo, I’ll give you the Alamo. So the basic plot of “Ethical Solutions,” if you know anything about the Battle of the Alamo, wasn’t hard to imagine. The more important part of that story was the way the debate between Sylvia Carnes and Ben Richardson develops. They cover quite a bit of ground during “Ethical Solutions,” but even still, neither character is any closer to winning over the other by the end.
Real agreement, in fact, wouldn’t happen for another eight years—and three books—later, when the two of them met again in the crumbling ruins of St. Louis.
But that’s a different story.
APOCALYPSE OF THE DEAD
Apocalypse of the Dead (Pinnacle; November, 2010).
Dead City meant to show a private view of the apocalypse. Hence the first-person narrative… the constant focus on family… the mounting sense of claustrophobia… the book’s events spanning a single night. All were a deliberate part of the overall point of view.
When I sat down to write the next book in the series, I felt I had to go the other way. I needed to cut a wide path. I needed to show the zombie apocalypse going global. I envisioned multiple groups of characters fleeing the advancing zombie hordes, seeking shelter in the frozen expanse of the North Dakota Grasslands. In my mind I saw a huge novel, both in scope and in size, an homage to the giant Stephen King horror novels of the 1970s.
Turns out, my publisher was thinking along the same lines. The folks at Kensington called me and said, “What do you think about writing an epic?”
“An epic?” I said.
“Yeah, you know, a huge book. Really do it up. Blow the whole world up, that kind of thing. A really epic book.”
Now, I have a confession to make: flagrant misuse of the word epic is a pet peeve of mine. Aloud I told my publisher of my idea and shared in his enthusiasm that we were going to be in business again; but inside, I was groaning, for I knew then that people would erroneously pin the tag of epic on the book that was to become Apocalypse of the Dead.
Why does that bother me so much?
I’m glad you asked.
The Nature of the Epic
Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey—those were epic poems. Virgil’s Aenied, Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost—all epics.
Stephen King’s The Stand—not an epic.
Joe McKinney’s Apocalypse of the Dead—also not an epic.
Why?
You see, we’ve gotten sloppy with our genres these days. And I don’t mean genre as in horror, or science fiction, or romance. I mean genre in the more traditional sense. Genre as it pertains to specific literary forms, such as comedy, or tragedy, or even in slightly narrower poetic terms, such as the elegy, or the ode.
I was trained to read literature as an academic. Dealing in the finer points of literary terms was my stock in trade for a good long while. And when you talk about literary terms with the familiarity that some people reserve for sports statistics, you can’t help but flinch inwardly when somebody misappropriates a significant term.
Hence my consternation with the inappropriate use of epic.
For too long we’ve called books epic because they’re huge. Somebody puts out a 700-page novel and the next you know it’s being called the next big epic fantasy, or SF novel, or whatever.
But epic should—and does—mean more than simply big.
In traditional academic terms, an epic is a long, narrative poem defining the significant heroes and historical context of a nation. That is why Homer’s epics focus on the exploits of Greek heroes such as Odysseus and Achilles and Agamemnon. That is why Virgil’s Aeneid tells the story of Aeneas, who escaped the fall of Troy in The Iliad to become one of the
founding mythological figures of Rome. That is why Dante’s The Divine Comedy populates the afterlife with real people from Italy’s warring city states. That is why Milton’s Paradise Lost can be read as a commentary on England’s brief flirtation with a purely legislative government under Cromwell.
Epics define the culture and the values of a nation. And, as you will no doubt remember from your freshman Intro to British Literature, they have a number of other distinct conventions meant to telegraph the work’s genre to its reader.
For example, they begin in medias res, or, in English, “in the midst of things.” This is why Star Wars started with episode four… and you can pause here to pat yourself on the back if you clicked on this before you finished the sentence.
True epics can also be read as maps of a given culture’s cosmology. Reading an epic, you not only learn the limits of a culture’s physical world but of their spiritual world as well. That is why Dante’s The Divine Comedy takes us first through hell, then purgatory, and finally to heaven. Milton’s Paradise Lost is also a clear example of this.
Also, epics use things such as heroic epithets and catalogs and godly intervention and long digressive passages. And their authors generally telegraph their intentions to write epics early in their career by first earning their writing chops with pastoral poetry.
That does not apply to Apocalypse of the Dead. I didn’t do any of the things outlined above. Neither did Stephen King in The Stand. Neither did Robert Jordan in The Wheel of Time series. Neither did any of the other modern scribblers you can think of. In fact, about as close as any American author has ever come to writing a true epic is Melville with Moby Dick.
