Book Jacket:
Nine years ago, Jessie had a family.
Now, she has a gang.
Nine years ago, Jessie was a vegetarian.
Now, she eats very fresh meat.
Nine years ago,
Jessie was in a car crash and died.
Nine years ago, Jessie was human.
Now, she’s not.
After she was buried, Jessie awoke and tore through the earth to arise, reborn, as a zombie. Jessie’s gang is the Fly-by-Nights. She loves the ancient, skeletal Florian and his memories of time gone by. She’s in love with Joe, a maggot-infested corpse. They fight, hunt, dance together as one—something humans can never understand. There are dark places humans have learned to avoid, lest they run into the zombie gangs.
But now, Jessie and the Fly-by-Nights have seen new creatures in the woods—things not human and not zombie. A strange new illness has flamed up out of nowhere, causing the undeads to become more alive and the living to exist on the brink of death. As bits and pieces of the truth fall around Jessie, like the flesh off her bones, she’ll have to choose between looking away or staring down the madness—and hanging onto everything she has come to know as life…
The Interview:
Around the book booths, DUST was the talk of Comic-Con as the Next Big Thing in zombie lit. I tracked Joan down after the Reading Brains (zombie) panel to ask her for an interview, and despite my rumpled, wild-eyed, full on Comic-con frenzy, she agreed! I should have known a zombie author wouldn’t frighten easily…
Byrt: So first off, what did you think of the Comic-con experience?
Joan: It was completely overwhelming for the few first hours and then, it was a lot of fun. (It probably helps that I’m fine with huge crowds, as I couldn’t extend an arm without hitting at least three other people.) I’m just glad I didn’t find the books/comics section of the dealer room too early or I’d have spent all my money.
Byrt: Lol – I know the feeling!
Joan: Also, despite what everyone kept telling me I didn’t see one slavegirl Princess Leia cosplayer–lots of Harley Quinns and Poison Ivies, but no Leias. I’ve decided they’re an SDCC urban legend.
Byrt: I can in fact substantiate that rumor – I’ve seen at least 3 slaveship Leias in my day. And you can always count on the stormtroopers to show up.
Joan: I saw tons of Batman characters, Imperial stormtroopers, Boba Fett and a Gandalf who was about six and a half feet tall.
Byrt: I saw a group of Jokers poised for a photo when a 5 year old batman walked by – they immediately snagged him, it was hilarious…So did you have any idea when you started DUST that zombies would be so much in the zeitgeist?
Joan: Absolutely none. I started writing it back in 2003 and my only exposure to “zombie culture” was the 1968 Night of the Living Dead and (though you can argue about whether the lead character’s a “true” zombie) Carnival of Souls, and that was it–I didn’t see any other zombie films, didn’t read any books or comics about them or play any games/RPGs, I was sort of oblivious to all that. And then the whole subgenre exploded.
Byrt: Perfect timing. So what brought you to the zombie genre? You mentioned briefly at Comic-con that part of it came from dealing with a death in the family?
Joan: Several years earlier my grandfather had died very swiftly of lung and pancreatic cancer–his health deteriorated dramatically over the course of a month and within a week of diagnosis, he was dead. His death was the first I’d experienced of a close relative/loved one (my pen name is a feminized, Anglicized version of his name), and I had nightmarish thoughts about what was happening to his body, after he was buried. I had already been a fan of NOTLD/CoS but simply as movies in and of themselves–zombies as a monster, just for their own sake, didn’t attract me–but one day I began thinking about zombies purely as dead people, and then about the whole process of actual death and loss, and then suddenly it was two and two together.
Byrt: Do you like the zombie characters in your book more than the people? I’ve only begun reading it, but it seems an open question as to which side has more humanity than the other.
Joan: Well, to be honest–yes. :-) But that’s not a function of their being “better” or more moral than the human characters at all, it’s from years of making myself look at things as they would see them, perceiving how they see “hoos”–humans–as every bit as threatening to their way of life as vice versa. Rather as humans are afraid of bears and wolves, and bears and wolves do in fact kill people, but who’s got the real ultimate power there? Not the wild animals. As one human character admits, his entire job is to try to wipe out the undead like they’re a pestilence. At the same time, the humans aren’t “the monsters,” because that would be too simplistic. The undead do cruel, shortsighted, selfish things, and so do the humans. Some awful, world-changing things happen in the book because a human has good intentions, because he wants to help the undead (though he has selfish motives there as well). The whole point in the end is, all the characters are human by one definition or another, and all humans are both good and terrible.
Byrt: It’s interesting how you seem to come squarely from a writing humans viewpoint, and yet you have wonderful monster moments for your zombies. Did you have fun writing the gorier bits? (That arm falling off creeped me out delightfully.)
Joan: A hell of a good time. The fight scenes were immense fun (trickier to choreograph than you might think, but fun) and there were many, many opportunities to put to use everything I learned about what happens to decaying bodies, particularly the stuff about maggots. Maggots utterly repulse me so of course I find them fascinating–there’s a scene in the horror movie Suspiria where a character walks across a floor literally teeming with a carpet of the things, and so I had to pay a bit of tribute to that. Re: the arm – I got it into my head to open with a somewhat over the top, “We’re not in Kansas” moment, and that was it. People seem to like that line rather a lot.
Byrt: Ggaahh, yes. Lol.
Joan: Oh, and I forgot–in the video “Thriller” one of the zombies casually has an arm fall off and just keeps right on walking. I was probably thinking of that as well.
Byrt: Classic! Lol. Also in that opening scene, with the fight between Jessie and Joe – Joe definitely comes across as on the abusive side. Would he have been that way, regardless of if he was a zombie?
Joan: Yes. Being undead strips some of the “polite” surface off your personality–they’re all naturally aggressive, instinctively violent creatures–but he was domineering and controlling with women as a living human and so that’s how he behaves toward Jessie (and as we later find out, she’s repeating some patterns that she learned in her own family, the way she unconsciously tolerates and makes excuses for this). I’m very pleased, actually, that everyone thus far who’s read the book has picked up on this, I briefly worried that someone might romanticize all that as “protective” alpha male behavior. In fact, as she figures out, he likes it when she’s dependent on him and doesn’t like it when she has her own ideas.
Byrt: I think this is the first zombie story, as far as I know, that’s ever really dealt with zombie relationships. Given that there’s so many layers to this story – was there anything in particular you hope stays with people after reading DUST?
Joan: I hope that it makes readers think about what they really mean when they use the words “human” and “monster” and “living” and “dead.” By which I mean, I mentioned at SDCC how a lot of the zombie mythology is tied up in stereotypes you also see in classic xenophobia (those Others stink, they eat revolting food, they’re stupid, they can’t speak our language, they spread disease…), and so, people categorize their fellow people as “true” human beings versus “monsters” all the time whether they know it or not, you don’t need to watch a horror movie to play that game. And also, maybe, to think that even if a monster/mythology/etc. gets dismissed as camp or silly, as zombies usually are, that there’s really always something more there to think about if you really look at it and poke at it. The most frivolous and innocuous things in life really sometimes end up having surprising layers to them. But if you’re reading all that above and thinking, “Nonsense!” then what I want folks to take away from it is, “That was a good, engaging, exciting story, full stop.” :-)
Byrt: Lol.
Joan: And I hope too, maybe an appreciation of how “dislikable” people or “dangerous” creatures, there’s always more there as well.
Byrt: What are your future plans for your zombies? Is there a sequel on the horizon? Or are there other genre paradigms you’d like to play with?
Joan: I’m working on a sequel now, working title of “Frail”–for reasons I can’t explain as it’d be a major spoiler for Dust. It isn’t a zombie novel per se, but it even further complicates the question of what it truly means to be living and what it is to be dead. Some characters return from Dust but there’s a group of new ones as well, and much of it gives us some of the missing human perspective on past and present events. It wasn’t actually much fun at all to be human, before, there was a lot of authoritative stuff to put up with in the guise of “protection” from the undead.
Byrt: Present day allegories painfully apparent.
Joan: Very painfully apparent! It would all be all too familiar to those characters. As far as other genre paradigms, instead of checking off the boxes (“Done zombies, time for some vampires, now some djinn…”) I’d like to just throw it open and see what unsettling things come to me next. I have a few ideas that have nothing at all to do with zombies, but I keep seeming to come back to those questions of life and death and what all that means.
Byrt: Do you think you’ll stay in the genre realm? Does it provide more freedom to play with/in?
Joan: Philip Pullman once talked in an interview about how you can plan all you want what kind of writer you’re “going to” be, but your imagination has its own ideas–he imagined writing sprawling realistic novels like Dickens or Tolstoy but his imagination wanted to write about magic and alternative universes. My imagination keeps leading me back to trying to find the strange, hidden and unsettling things in what look like ordinary, dull surroundings–a tiny Rust Belt city, a county park–and so I follow it where it takes me, though I’d someday like to experiment with “pure” realism just to see what I can do with that. In the end I think it’s not that genre provides more or less freedom, it’s simply that your brain wants to build a certain sort of “structure” and sometimes, genre provides the most practical toolbox.
Byrt: I have one last question for you – what did you think when Charlaine Harris stopped you after the Brains panel to tell you how much she’d enjoyed your book?
Joan: “Stunned and gobsmacked” would be a good start! Along with immensely flattered. Sometimes you don’t really know what to say so you default to “Wow, thank you!”
Byrt: Lol. So thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me today. Any last words/final thoughts?
Joan: It was my pleasure! Final thoughts: I seriously never thought anyone would be interested in this book, I was prepared for it to be “drawer” fiction while something else got published instead, so I am so grateful and happy that people are already talking about it and enjoying it. It really is all about not just telling the story but telling it to someone else, and hearing them say, “….and then what?” Also, if you’re ever driving through northwest Indiana, make sure your car doesn’t break down near the Deep River County Park. Jessie and company get hungriest around sunset.
Byrt: LOL. When Garmin goes very, very wrong…
Joan: ROTFL. (Garmin always leads me forty miles faithfully out of my way.)
DUST comes out September 7th – you can read an excerpt (which includes that arm we were talking about) here.
