The downside of walking around open to the world, free from expectation, is that it involves taking one’s armor off. All writers have armor. Armor is required gear for anyone who willfully engages in a career path fraught with rejection, public criticism, or, worse, obscurity. I actually think my armor is pretty tough, battle hardened by far too many years trying and failing to “break in.” But like any other writer’s, it is patchy and cobbled together out of spare parts, rife with weak spots that could let deadly, near-mortal wounds pass through. Regardless, I’d left it home.
You’d think after writing a book about dead kids, and dead kids falling in love with living kids and vice versa, that I’d have been a little more battle ready. I may officially be an author of young adult books, but I’d grown up thinking I would be a horror author, and so I read all the introductions to great horror novels and anthologies. These were usually autobiographical in nature, and almost invariably the intros had some anecdote about the social awkwardness of being a horror author. I gathered that it was weird enough being a “normal” author (World to author: What is it you really do?), but horror authors, it seemed, dealt with another level of bizarre social awkwardness entirely. Some of their experiences I read about included having their books banned, getting ostracized by the local PTA at their children’s schools, being accosted constantly by armchair psychoanalysts, or—one of my favorites—fielding questions like “Ever et raw meat?” (one posed to Mr. Stephen King, who has many such anecdotes). A horror author clearly had to deal with a segment of the public that was less than adoring and, in many cases, downright hostile. Maybe I should have done more to guard myself against such hostility.
There was a pause as I took note of the woman’s posture, her tone, the glint in her eyes. She wanted to fight. Did I? Am I the guy who writes about dead kids? A hundred responses, mostly defensive, many belligerent, sprang to my mind. Responses about judging books by covers and did you actually read the book or do you actually read any books and much, much worse. As a writer, you don’t get to tell someone the meaning of what they just read. That’s the job of the book itself. You can, however, talk about what informed the writing, what your mood was, and what was going on in your head when you were writing the story.
The initial idea for
We’ve all got our horror pressure points. That was mine. That’s what I wrote about.
Well, really I wrote a love story. That’s what it says on the dedication page, anyway:
But the damaged boy crying on the pavement is in the book, too, as are the damaged boys that attacked and filmed him. You won’t see them as you see Tommy, the living-impaired boy who falls for Phoebe, the traditionally biotic girl who notices that Tommy is different from all the other boys in her class in more ways than the obvious one. The YouTube victim and his assailants aren’t physical characters in the book, but they are there lurking somewhere under the surface of the story.
I think the zombies were my brain’s (my braaaaaiiiiiin’s!) way of coping with what to me was a truly horrific subject. Cthulhu scares me. Dracula is creepy, and I fear the Rough Beast slouching toward Bethlehem, but the idea (no, not the idea, the reality) of a kid injuring another kid for no other reason than the entertainment value he assumes to be inherent in the act absolutely horrifies me. The zombies allowed me to inject humor into a subject matter that, if I dwelled on it for too long, would put me in the deepest blue funk imaginable. The zombies helped me cope.
And zombies are, of course, wicked cool.
