Undead Anonymous

This is a story about love.
And desperation
And madness.

It’s about suffering and redemption.
Infidelity and infertility.
Betrayal and heartbreak.

It’s about the choices people make when at their most vulnerable.
Their most courageous.
Their most inebriated.

But mostly, it’s about peanut butter.

The players are the usual suspects. The hero. The villain. The doting wife. The overbearing mother. The comic relief sidekick. And the lovable dog who inevitably gets hit by a car or otherwise injured and yet miraculously survives in the end.

Nothing changes. There’s no character arc. No one learns anything.  They all exist in a cocoon of consumer excess and designer drugs and reality television. So don’t expect growth and revelations. These are, after all, mostly men.

So why would anyone care about what happens to these people? That’s simple…

Because of the peanut butter.

It seems like I’ve had a lot of interview requests lately, which is a good thing.  Hopefully I’m not just regurgitating the same story every time.  Like Jude Law in I Heart Huckabees, who tells the same Shania Twain joke over and over as a way of defining himself before being called on it by Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman who wonder if he is himself without the story.

“How am I not myself?”

Where was I?  Oh yes, repetitive responses to interview questions.  It seems like whenever anyone asks me to describe Breathers during a “live” interview, I end up either rambling about social satire and zombie angst or paraphrasing the back cover copy.  Usually at the end of this, I’ll say, “It’s Fight Club meets Shaun of the Dead, only with the zombies as the good guys,” and then wonder why I just didn’t say that in the first place.  Short.  Simple.  And it conveys the basic idea in less than 20 words.

My favorite interviews are the ones in which I get asked odd or playful questions, such as:

What scares you?  (Children. And paraplegic mannequins.)
How do you escape these days? (By hot air balloon.)
Can you describe Breathers using haiku? (It’s like Fight Club meets / Shaun of the Dead only with / Cannibalism)

I actually prefer doing the written interviews by e-mail, which give me a chance to edit my responses and maybe wax a little philosophical or throw in some amusing comments. While I appreciate that people find Breathers as amusing as I do, I’m not nearly as funny in person. I need to be able to edit my thoughts or do research before I come up with a good, snappy response. I would make a poor stand-up comic.

So if you’re interested, you can read my most recent interviews, which include a phone interview for the Santa Cruz Sentinel, a written e-mail interview about the marketing of Breathers with Buzz, Balls, and Hype, and an in-person lunch interview with Gothic Angst Magazine.  You can even check out my video interview with Suvudu.com from Comic-Con.

As always, thanks for listening…

all stray zombies are taken to the spca and held for three days, seven days with identification.  most fresh zombies who haven’t been embalmed tend to spoil within 72 hours, so they have to move those who are formaldehyde-challenged out pretty quick before a rectal cavity bursts.  trust me, you don’t want to be around when that happens.

my stay at the spca wasn’t all that bad.  they put me in my own cage in the zombie kennel, complete with a bowl of water and a rawhide bone to chew on.  they even gave me my own litter box, which isn’t all that easy to use, if you want to know the truth. 

if you’ve never tried squatting naked over a litter box with one useless ankle and one useless arm while other animated rotting corpses in adjacent cages stare at you, then you probably wouldn’t understand.

fortunately, my parents claimed me after two days.  the stigma of claiming your undead son and bringing him home to live with you can wreak havoc on your social status, so i can’t exactly blame mom and dad for not rushing out to get me, but one more day and i would have been a crash test dummy.

not all of the dead who reanimate have relatives or friends who can take them in.  most don’t.  and without a host guardian, zombies eventually get turned over to the county for salvage and redistribution or used for medical research, like impact testing.

the spca is working to implement a companion zombie program and solicit more zombie foster volunteers, but those ideas haven’t exactly caught on yet.