brainwavez.org | 5 Zombie Questions: Author Sarah Lotz

5 Zombie Questions: Author Sarah Lotz
A brainwavez.org Literary Feature

By: Mandy J Watson on 17 May 2011
Category: Books > Features
Tags: #horror, #speculative_fiction, #team_scripticon, #zombies

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Today we debut a new feature on the site in which we ask someone five zombie questions. Author Sarah Lotz, who has zombies crawling out of all sorts of places in her back catalogue, kindly allowed us to use her as our inaugural guinea pig. Here are the results of the experiment.

Under the pseudonym "Lily Herne", Sarah Lotz recently co-authored a new zombie-themed young-adult novel with her daughter Savannah. It's set in a post (zombie-)apocalyptic Cape Town, South Africa, 10 years after the 2010 World Cup. Most survivors live in "the enclave", a cordoned-off section of the suburbs somewhere in the Cape Flats area of the city surrounds that's designed to keep people safe from the dead, who are hauled off to the Deadlands after they die, where they become dangerous, reanimated, zombie-like creatures.

Deadlands isn't Sarah's only exploration of all things zombie, however. Her first published story, The Perfect Man [ read it here ], appeared in the first issue of Something Wicked and went on to win the 2006 Something Wicked Short Story Competition.

There was also "Till Death Do Us Part (An Anti-Twilight Love Poem To A Zombie)" [ read it here ], which Sarah performed at the 2009 Bloody Parchment event in Cape Town (sample lines: "I'll never forget when I first caught your eye, // And I've still got it here, though it's withered and dry), and Maun Of The Dead, a humorous African-themed zombie tale that appears in the anthology Home Away [ review ].

Finally, Sarah came up for the concept for Deadbeats, an animated show that "revolves around the lives of four undead slacker housemates trying to live in contemporary society without losing their heads".

5 Zombie Questions

Sarah was asked to answer these as fast as she could - there's no time to think when the zombies attack!

1: If you were a zombie, what colour would the ribbon in your hair be?
SL: Green

2: If you were shipwrecked on a desert island with a zombie would you eat him before he ate you and what are the top five books you'd take with you?
SL: I would use the following hardback weighty tomes (that also provide helpful survival hints and are awesome reads) as weapons to pulverise the zombie's head:

The Hyperion Omnibus, Dan Simmons; The Stand, Stephen King; The Passage, Justin Cronin; Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson.

Then I would use a James Patterson omnibus as kindling in order to smoke its flesh.

3: What would you do with the zombie in your basement if you had one?
SL: Train it to play poker or make jam.

4: You're having a zombie over for dinner but you run out of braaaiiins. What do you serve?
SL: Tofu (apparently it tastes the same as brains).

5: You have enough time during a zombie attack to gain a few precious moments by grabbing a book from your bookshelf and throwing it (with precision) at the undead. Which book do you choose?
SL: The Norton Anthology Of Poetry (it's bloody heavy and I know where to get one second-hand if it gets soaked in spinal fluid).

Videos

Deadlands Trailer

[ YouTube link ]

Deadbeats

[ YouTube link ]

Deadlands (Penguin South Africa, ISBN: 9780143527695) is available now, and look out for Sarah's next book, The Mall, which she co-authored with Louis Greenberg under the pseudonym "SL Grey". It is published by Corvus (ISBN: 9780857890429) and will be on stands soon.