Helloooo!

This week I reviewed the very entertaining Zombies! By Paul Kane a collection of short fiction tales exploring everyone’s favourite monstrous flesh-eaters. Paul Kane is an award winning author and editor as well as a fan of zombies and I was lucky enough to be able to ask a few questions about this book and more!

Hi there, thanks for asking me to take part!

How do you like to booktempt Zombies!

I’ve been promoting this one by saying if you like shows such as The Walking Dead or The Last of Us – which I absolutely do, by the way – then this is probably something you’ll enjoy. But there’s a lot more to it than that. Zombies! covers quite a wide range of different topics and viewpoints with regards to the living dead, from an historical take with a steampunk edge to a coming-of-age story, from a spy adventure to SF horror – influenced by the likes of Alien, Pitch Black and Event Horizon – and even dark comedy. Basically, there’s something for everyone in there, and if you’re unsure about zombie fiction I’m going to do my level best to try and change your mind. I said this online recently, but horror’s a very flexible genre, perhaps the most flexible, and the sub-genre of zombie fiction is no exception.

For you what is the constant attraction of these wee bitey beasties?

I’ve been a fan of them since I first saw Dawn of the Dead when I was little; I actually included this in my top five favourite monster films when I went on Nick Vince’s ‘Chattering With…’ show – it had that much of an impact. Obviously, I went back and devoured the original Night of the Living Dead and then watched Day, plus the subsequent Romero zombie movies as and when they came out, and they’re all just wonderful as far as I’m concerned. It’s the reason I dedicated this book to George, one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met but also one of the people responsible for putting zombies on the map. I also caught the Fulci zombie movies when I was a kid, going through my ‘video nasty’ phase, and adored those; you can imagine how excited I was when Fabio Frizzi agreed to score the short film I scripted, The Weeping Woman, directed by Mark Steensland! All of which is an attempt to explain where my interest in them stems from, but as for the constant attraction I think Brian Keene summed up a lot of it in the excellent introduction to this collection, in that they keep ‘rising from the grave’, adopted by new creatives every now and again, and usually when you think those stories are dead for good. Every generation has something to say about them, or maybe that should be they have something to say ‘using’ zombies as metaphors. Whether it’s the consumer thing from Dawn or the dangers of technology, which King touches on in Cell, zombies are always happy to oblige.  Again, it comes down to the flexibility thing that horror does so well anyway. Hell, if you can cross Sherlock Holmes with zombi-lore plus say something about the human condition and the history of Haiti, like I did in my story ‘The Case of the Lost Soul’ recently out in Nailbiters – Hard Bitten from Encyclopocalypse here (https://shorturl.at/xIXZ8), you can pretty much do anything with them.                 

And, of course, the real attraction isn’t about the zombies at all – well, not wholly – it’s about the human characters and what they’re going through, how they’re reacting to or coping with these strange creatures. Relationships, friendships or just trying to get by on your own. There are definite parallels to something like my Hooded Man books here, which are all about power-plays and who’s going to be ruling the roost once the worst’s happened. In ‘He is Legend’, it just happens to be the main protagonist against the zombies, rather than another human faction – though in a sense I guess they are human, or were once. They’ve even retained some of their characteristics, as you see with the speech the mayor gives. Which brings me to another way in which zombies fascinate folk, because like ghosts they’re an example of life continuing on after death. I mean, we might not be aware it's continuing on other than looking for our next brain to eat, but it’s carrying on nonetheless in some way.

The collection is very varied, have you set yourself a challenge to keep the stories different or did that happen more organically?

I always try to come at things from a different angle to what’s gone before, and here it helps to be such a lifelong fan of horror in all its forms. So in that respect most of what I do – I hope – is going to be fresh or thinking outside of the box, or combining things that don’t normally go together. That’s true for the reprinted stories in the collection, picked from the whole of my career – ‘Pay the Piper’ was one of the earliest stories I ever wrote. But it’s also true of the new material, so when I sat down to write all that – and I think there’s something like 60k new words in this one – I thought about what hadn’t been done before, or at least done my way. The steampunk zombie entry, for example, which leans heavily into Frankenstein, is a prose poem; ‘The Corpse Identity’ takes my favourite spy cliches and gives them an outlandish Re-animator spin; and ‘Planet of the Dead’ imagines a zombie uprising transplanted to deep space, with a few extra twists you hopefully don’t see coming. In actual fact, that short novel is a sort of multiverse alt-future version of the post-apocalyptic stuff I did in The Dead Trilogy, the first of which was adapted for TV as ‘New Year’s Day’ for Lionsgate/NBC’s Fear Itself. If this one ever gets made, I’ll be delighted!

Which story was the hardest to write?

I think perhaps ‘The Corpse Identity’, simply because it was while the whole pandemic, lockdown nightmare was happening. Like a lot of my friends, I’d been struggling to write anyway during those later months, but we were also house hunting, I was dealing with re-writes and edits on the third PL Kane thriller – The Family Lie, which is more folk horror than anything, a totally different mindset – and very conscious of the research I needed to do in order to bang this one into shape. So there was a whole lot of procrastination going on, and just not being able to settle into writing it; a similar thing is happening at the moment with another project. Luckily, as often happens, once I started I began to hear and see Jane Doe in my mind, and she became one of my favourite characters I’ve ever written. I’ll definitely do another one of those, plus I might cross her over with a certain Mr D who appeared most recently in my collection Tempting Fate from Crossroad Press (https://shorturl.at/osyBV).  

What is your favourite zombie fiction tale?

Short story-wise, that’s actually a fantastic tale by the late, great Christopher Fowler: one of the best short story writers there’s ever been in my opinion, and a terrific friend who I miss tons. He wrote one called ‘Night After Night of the Living Dead’ which I first read back in the ’90s, and which is an essay a young schoolboy writes about the dead coming back, including his zombie grandfather. It’s touching, heart-breaking and simply stunning; another metaphor about how as children we deal with death. It was a massive inspiration for a ghost story of mine called ‘Grandpa’s Chair’ which I read out at the UK Ghost Story Festival in Derby back in February. Mine’s obviously not a patch on Chris’s.

What else can we look forward to seeing from you in the future and where can we find out more?

There’s a lot going on at the moment and in the coming months, so this might be a long answer… My better half Marie O’Regan – a first-class writer herself – and I have co-edited a couple of anthologies for Titan called Twice Cursed, a sequel to the bestselling Cursed, and The Other Side of Never, both of which came out recently. The first is twists on dark fairy tales, featuring the likes of Neil Gaiman, Joanne Harris, MR Carey and Laura Purcell. The second contains ‘dark tales from the world of Peter and Wendy’ by authors such as Kirsty Logan, Claire North, Paul Finch and AC Wise. Both are truly amazing books, and I’m not just saying that because I was involved in putting them together. We had a signing for Twice Cursed back in April and there’s one coming up for The Other Side of Never at the same place, Forbidden Planet Megastore in London on 17th June at 4pm, with drinks afterwards at 5pm round the corner at the Angel pub. Links to buy those books are here (shorturl.at/xFJK3) and here (https://shorturl.at/kqPR4). We’ve also co-edited a Dark Academia anthology called In These Hallowed Halls, again for Titan – our first mass market hardback anthology – which features the likes of Olivie Blake, David Bell, ML Rio and Susie Yang. That comes out in September, but is up for pre-order here (https://shorturl.at/hJO08). 

Zombies! has obviously just landed, so I’m doing promo work for that – like this very interview – but there are also a couple more collections due out before the end of the year. One’s just been announced, Dark Reflections from Black Beacon Books. It’s my homage to the masters of dark fiction, including M.R. James, Charles Dickens, William Hope Hodgson, H.P. Lovecraft, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe; that comes with a cover by Greg Chapman and an introduction by the one and only Kim Newman! See the full announcement here (https://blackbeaconbooks.blogspot.com/2023/06/dark-reflections-collection-by-paul-kane.html). Watch this space for more on the second collection…

Last year I finally sat down and wrote the sequel to my serial killer chiller The Gemini Factor, which was re-released for its 10th Anniversary by Encyclopocalypse here (https://shorturl.at/htV46). The second novel – in what’s looking increasingly like a trilogy now – is coming out towards the back end of summer. I’ve also been merrily penning a few PL Kane novelettes for my newsletter, the latest of which is a sequel to The Family Lie called The Communion – and you can sign up for that here (https://www.plkane.com/), plus just announced is an omnibus edition of my RED werewolf trilogy – one novella and two short novels – coming out through Hellbound. 

I’m one new story away from putting my next general collection to bed, and also working on a third ‘Mortis-Man’ novella – my horror superhero – which I’ll put together with the previous couple, ‘The Return of Mortis-Man’ and ‘Mortis-Man: Origins’, to form a collection of those. In addition to all that, I’ve got a couple of film things on the go – more of that as and when – plus an extract from my play One for the Road is being performed by Hideout Theatre in London on 2nd July as part of their ‘Lights On’ evening. You can pick up tickets for that here (https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lights-on-tickets-607852983637?aff=ebdssbdestsearch&keep_tld=1). There’s more, but I think that’s probably enough to be going on with…

NB Find out more at his site https://shadow-writer.co.uk which has featured Guest Writers such as Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Charlaine Harris, Robert Kirkman, Catriona Ward, Dean Koontz, Olivie Blake and Guillermo del Toro. 

If there was one book, not your own, that you wish you could get everyone else to read what would it be and why?

There are obvious ones that I’ve mentioned in the past, like The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker, Dune by Frank Herbert, The Stand by Stephen King, Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman, The Rats by Jim Herbert… But they’re all pretty well known and lots of people have read them already. One from my childhood which probably set me on the road to writing post-apocalyptic stuff, and therefore had an indirect influence on my zombie work, was Brother in the Land by Robert Swindells. We read it in English classes in secondary school, but then I bought a copy and read it for pleasure, lost that and bought it again about 15 years ago to re-read it. Still packs a hell of a punch for what we’d now call YA, but which in the ’80s they didn’t really have a term for. It’s about family, love and struggling through the hard times. So if you haven’t read that I have no hesitation in recommending it.