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This week I’ll kick off the first of several panel discussion blogs focusing on the buzz around pop culture’s current ‘hot monster’: Zombies.  When George Romero and John Russo wrote the script for Night of the Living Dead they thought they were making a gritty little indie horror movie that would have been about vampires had they been able to obtain the film rights to Richard Matheson’s I AM LEGEND.  What they did instead was to invent a new kind of monster.  The Living Dead.

Despite the fact that we now call these monsters ‘zombies’ –an incorrect label hung on the genre by Italian film distributors—these new monsters are the recently deceased who return to a lifelike state and who attack and consume the living.  The reason for this reanimation is only sketchily handled by Romero, which was a good call at the time because it contributed to the sheer horror of the concept.

Since the film’s 1968 release, there have been thousands of zombie movies as well as countless zombie short stories, novels, anthologies, comic books, stage shows, toys, clothing, calendars, and more.  And each year hundreds of cities around the world stage zombie crawls, zombie proms, zombie beach parties, and even zombie weddings.

The living dead are here to stay.

I’ve asked a fair number of people who are involved in zombie pop culture to answer a handful of questions about the nature of these monsters, their popularity, the genre’s strengths and weaknesses, and other topics.  Their answers are compiled into a virtual panel discussion.  Each entry will feature one question and a variety of answers.  Because so many fine folks contributed to the discussion, we’ll sometimes have multiple blog entries with the same question but different groups answering them.

The weirdness starts this week on Jonathan Maberry’s Big Scary Blog.

So…what’s my interest in tales of the hungry dead?

I’ve become one of those writers often referred to (with enthusiasm by fans of the genre and with incredulity by those few who still don’t ‘get it’) as a ‘zombie author. I was in the Midway Theater in 1968 when Night of the Living Dead premiered in Philadelphia.  That movie hit me hard then and I can still feel the impact. So far, my own contributions to the genre include PATIENT ZERO (St. Martins Griffin; the first in the Joe Ledger series of thrillers, in which a government ops group tackles terrorists with a zombie plagues); ZOMBIE CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead (Citadel Press, 2008; a nonfic book that asks hundreds of experts the question: ‘How would the real world react and respond to zombies?’); the forthcoming ROT & RUIN (Simon & Schuster, Oct 2010; a teenager grows up fourteen years after the zombie apocalypse destroyed most of humanity) and its sequel, DUST & DECAY (2011); MARVEL ZOMBIES RETURN (Marvel Comics; the New York Times bestselling comic book series and graphic novel co-written by Fred Van Lente, David Wellington and Seth Grahame-Smith); and DEAD OF NIGHT (St. Martins Griffin, 2011; a standalone novel about the beginnings of an unstoppable zombie plague.  And I have three zombie short stories: “Pegleg and Paddy Save the World” (originally published in HISTORY IS DEAD edited by Kim Paffenroth for Permuted Press and reprinted in BEST NEW ZOMBIE TALES Vol 1 edited by James Roy Daley for Books of the Dead Press); “Family Business” (published in THE NEW DEAD, edited by Christopher Golden for St. Martins Griffin) and the forthcoming “Zero Tolerance” (a Joe Ledger short story in THE LIVING DEAD 2 edited by John Joseph Adams for Night Shade Books, Sept 2010).

I’ve also written about those creatures in folklore and myth that bear striking similarities to the Romero-esque flesheaters; and about the actual beliefs of the Haitian practitioners of Voduon (voodoo).   Information on these monsters appears in VAMPIRE UNIVERSE, THE CRYPTOPEDIA (co-authored by fellow Bram Stoker Award winner David F. Kramer), ZOMBIE CSU, THEY BITE (also co-authored by David F. Kramer), and the forthcoming WANTED UNDEAD OR ALIVE (co-authored by Janice Gable Bashman).

And zombielike monsters called ‘deadheads’ play a supporting role in my Pine Deep Trilogy(GHOST ROAD BLUES, DEAD MAN’S SONG and BAD MOON RISING).  So…yeah, I dig zombies.  As a writer and a lifelong fan.

Next up: The first batch of zombie experts tackles the question: “Why Zombies?” right here on the Big Scary Blog.

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