I remember sitting in the hall of my Grandmother’s house staring at the sculptured carpet afraid to go into the room that held the small TV. What was scaring me? It was the commercial for the 1978 Dawn of the Dead. The sight of the zombies in the mall, on the escalators, shambling through the parking lot terrified me.
As the years progressed I came to love these creeping carriers of death. As I began to write I always came back to these slow moving beasts. My first book, “Respect the Dead”, starts at the very beginning of the outbreak. It follows everyday people as they learn to adapt to a world overrun with death and danger. Finally those who survive learn how to maintain life and hope in the world of constant danger and death from the living and the dead. I wrote it to answer my own questions about the outbreak as well as to give myself hope. I have watched the TV shows and read several books about zombies. While all are good the themes began to depress me. By the end of the stories I started to root for the Zombies as the humans were all too broken and reprehensible. My story follows the fall of civilization and the struggle to find and keep a family together.
Ir is about people who are normal but are thrown into extreme circumstances. How do they keep their humanity while all around them crumbles? Can they survive in a world where the worst of people seem to excel while all others suffer and die?
I write what I enjoy. I write about zombies, I write about the supernatural, and I write about wizards and witches, darkness and light.
I have been writing short stories since middle school. The stories tend to be horror but has branched out into mystery and some fantasy. My love of zombies comes from watching Romero’s zombies and seeing the fear they could create by being us but much less and still much more.
Most of my professional writing so far can be heard in promotional material for a Statewide Television network. I have been in Broadcasting for nearly 30 years. In that time I have been exposed to the worst and best of humanity. Corruption, betrayal, murder, and theft contrasted by the acts of pure heroism and humanity. My experience has helped shape my writing. Knowing the strong survive does not always mean that the worst get to.
