Interview with Joe McKinney

There seems to be quite an uprising (if you’ll pardon the pun) in zombie fiction and related media. Any guesses as to what triggered this?

Well, we’ve had zombie fiction for close to 200 years now, if you allow voodoo-inspired zombies into the discussion.  Most of us though mean the Romeroesque shambling corpses (or some variant thereof) when we talk about zombies, and that of course goes back to 1968 and the original Night of the Living Dead.  If you limit the discussion to just that kind of zombie, what you see is a genre that has lurched forward on the strength of a few powerful pieces, gaining significant ground every decade or so on the strength of some watershed book, story or movie.  There was of course the original Night of the Living Dead, heavily inspired as it was on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend.  Then, in 1989, you had John Skipp’s landmark anthology, Mondo Zombie.  But the current trend, I think, started with Brian Keene’s The Rising.  There has been a steady stream of powerful zombie fiction ever since, with a few high water marks, like Max Brooks’ World War Z and Robert Kirkman’s still-going graphic novel series The Walking Dead.  Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, especially in its TV incarnation, has probably done more than any other work to popularize the zombie.  But why these works captured the public’s imagination is another question entirely.  And the answer, I think, has to do with the zombie being a wholly original and unique monster, a monster tailor-made for today’s world.  Yes, I know the zombie is just a revenant, same as Dracula or Frankenstein’s creature or the legions of ghosts haunting Victorian literature, but the zombie is nonetheless unique.  Not in its form, mind you, but in its plurality.  Unlike all previous horror tropes, the zombie comes at you in waves.  One zombie is a snap to kill.  But legions of them, coming wave upon wave, those are impossible to fight.  Plus the zombie is a blank.  Not only is one zombie a nameless face in a crowd, but as a hook to hang a metaphor, it is also a blank, waiting for any clever idea to give it purpose.  Put those qualities together and you find a monster that today’s world of mind-numbing labor and constantly streaming information naturally gravitates toward.

Until vampires sparkled, so many vamps seemed alike, and the same can be said about zombies. What do you do to set your walking dead apart from the pack?

In my Dead World series the zombies are actually living people who have been infected with a variant of hemorrhagic fever called the necrosis filovirus.  Other franchises, such as the 28 Days Later series, have gone this same route, but unlike in those films and comic books, the disease I’ve created follows a fairly well-developed pattern.  Stage I zombies are those who are recently infected.  They experience an absence of pain, and near complete depersonalization.  They are, basically, identical to the shambling undead corpses of most of the zombie stories out there.  But as the disease takes its course, the zombies lose that sense of depersonalization.  In other words, they retain their relentless aggression and need to infect others, but they slowly start to get their sense of self back.  The result is a smarter, and highly unpredictable, zombie.  This is where my zombies differ from the pack.  And it also allows me to discuss issues I find important, such as the nature of justice and the rights of the government to protect the populace through unconventional means.

Zombie stories tend to be plot-driven. What do you do to create believable and sympathetic characters amid the chaos?

Way too many zombies amount to what I call survival porn.  In other words, the main concern seems to be to show characters that clean weapons the way porn stars rub themselves in lube.  The characters are prepared for the worst, and they make all the right decisions.  Zombies go down like paper targets, and we the reader can only stand back, dazzled by the kill shots the way porn aficionados thrill over money shots.  The zombie hunters in survival porn know what it takes to survive and they do it well.  Some great zombie fiction has come out of this survival porn movement, including Day by Day Armageddon, which is one of the finest zombie stories ever told - but that’s not what I do.  I don’t write characters that have all the right answers.  I write characters with conflicting senses of what’s right.  Characters with families, with shortcomings, with emotional baggage.  Those are the characters that interest me, and that’s what I write.

What is the single worst misconception about zombie fiction?

That it is all uniformly low brow.  I hate that.  There seems to be a sense that Lovecraftian fiction, or ghost stories, or other forms of psychological horror are somehow intrinsically superior to zombie fiction.  That’s bunk, of course.  Good fiction goes beyond the framework of its genre’s convention.  That’s why James’ Turn of the Screw and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol are more than simple ghost stories.  That’s why Nick Mamatas’ Move Under Ground is more than Lovecraftian horror.  And that’s why so many noteworthy mainstream fiction novelists, such as Colson Whitehead and Joshua Gaylord, have started writing zombie fiction. 

How do your books cater to the movie buff audience?

I rehearse every scene I write many times before I ever put it down on paper.  The result, I’m told, is something akin to a cinematic approach to fiction.  I guess that qualifies as catering to the movie buff audience.  That said, I think there is a sort of democratic nature to the zombie genre.  Unlike other genres, zombie fiction has embraced every significant form of media - be it film, novel, short story, nonfiction essay, blog, whatever - on a more or less equal footing.  Zombie fans seem willing to accept their monster drug of choice in just about any form they can get it.  Like all zombie fans, I love zombie movies, and so, yeah, I toss in a few nods here and there.  Anybody who reads Apocalypse of the Dead, for example, should be able to spot zombie film references by the dozens.  Also, I recently wrote a short story that contains my answer to Fulci’s shark vs. zombie fight scene.

Let’s talk about your background with the San Antonio Police Department. How have hard facts weaved themselves into your work? Do they ever create stumbling blocks that force you to take liberties?

Well, that runs pretty deep throughout my fiction.  I make it a point not to write about cases that I’ve been involved in directly, but being a cop has been such a significant part of my life that it can’t help but surface in my fiction.  Readers of Dead City and Flesh Eaters will definitely see this.  And of course my police experience has led to some frustration on my part when it comes to reading reviews.  I can’t tell you, for example, how many times I’ve read a review that gigs me for having my zombies (who are living people, remember) walking around with their guts oozing out of their bellies.  How could living people do this, they ask, as though they’ve caught me in some sort of terrible oversight.  I have a strict policy of never responding to reviews, so I can’t tell them that in my role as a cop I have seen people walking around with their intestines in their hands.  I have seen people walk away from gunshot wounds to the face.  I have seen people survive car crashes that slice open the skull.  Every weekend, the cops in America’s biggest cities shoot somebody with an AR-15, only to have that person run away with wounds to their chest.  These things really do happen, and I put them in my zombie fiction.  I can’t help it if some readers have trouble believing the damage the human body can withstand.

Your collection, The Red Empire, is a departure from the zombies that have branded your name. How challenging was the experience? Any plans to return to foreign waters?

Well, yes and no...at least as far as the challenging part is concerned.  I am best known for my zombie fiction.  That’s certainly true.  However, zombies are only one corner of my literary interests.  I have written extensively in the crime fiction and science fiction genres, for example.  I have published literary mainstream fiction, plays, screenplays, essays, history articles, newspaper articles on cooking and even travel pieces.  The Red Empire and Other Stories was composed of non-zombie fiction for a reason.  It was meant to showcase the strong police procedural element that runs through my horror fiction.  And as to my plans to return to these (non)foreign waters...you can count on it.  In fact, I’m already under contract to do just that.  Here in the near future readers can expect to see novels that have nothing to do with zombies, and even a few that have nothing to do with horror...though horror will has always been my first love and will always be the comfort food that brings me back for more.  No worries there.

In what direction do you think zombie fiction is headed?

Two directions at once, I think.  On the one hand, there has been a glut of zombie fiction lately (nearly all of it horrible) that will probably pull the reputation of the genre further down into the abyss of the self-published trash heap.  This is an inevitable result of the democratic nature of zombie fiction that I mentioned earlier.  But on the other hand, select examples of the zombie genre will carve new paths.  Some of these will be in film, some in novels, some in other modes, and through these, the zombie genre will survive.  It will continue to lurch along, much as it has done for the last 45 years, much as it does now.  We will see long stretches of nothing special, then someone will come along with a truly spectacular work that revitalizes the genre.  The zombie is here to stay.  You can’t put that genie back in the bottle.  But its fortunes will move along a lot like a wave from here on out.  We will have high points and low, the good and the bad.