Zombies

I'm not really a fan of horror, and I particularly don't like zombie material, with the inevitable exception of Shaun of the Dead (and Cockneys vs Zombies, which you really should see if you haven't already). I think this is partly because of the low quality of quite a lot of the horror writing I've read, and partly because I'm a bit squeamish.

As a writer, though, I often find myself drawn to stuff I don't much like, possibly in an attempt to understand why I don't like it. So quite a bit of my work ends up riffing on horror tropes, whether that's the suburban slashers of Throwing Up With the Joneses, the off-kilter body horror of Gluttony, or the pure weirdness of the short story I'm currently working on, Someone Who'll Watch Under Me.

This has led to me producing no fewer than three zombie stories over the last couple of years. No one is more surprised about this than I am. Even more strangely, while one of them is a 500 word piece of flash fiction, the other two are currently novella length, with the potential to expand easily to full length books.

Strangest still, the longest of these might yet become a series, as inspiration struck on my walk to work the other day for a second adventure.

Whenever I sit down to write a story that deals with familiar tropes, I try to put some sort some sort of spin on it which is, well, perhaps not original, but I hope at least a little unexpected. I think I've found a couple of ways to do that with my approaches to zombies.

Time will tell.

In other news, it seems likely that there will be some new fiction from me in a long-awaited anthology very shortly. You read it here first.