KRIS ASHTON

I’ve been a fan of George Romero’s zombie mythos since I saw Dawn of the Dead (1978) at age ten. I had always wanted to try my hand at a Dead-inspired story, but could never find the sort of 'high concept' that gets my nose to the grindstone. Sometime around 2005, I think, I wrote a tale called ‘Mere Symptoms of Living’, which was a cerebral and not terribly exciting attempt at such a story (but it did eventually get published - read about it here). Then one day I turned up an anthology calling for zombie stories set in the workplace. This set my imagination alight and I almost started a story called ‘The Last Place on Earth’, about a guy who worked in a morgue. But as I rolled the idea around in my mind, it didn’t seem to go anywhere; it didn’t have a theme or a point.

 

I let that one go and attacked the brief from another angle. I actually got the ending – and the twist – for ‘Bite Back’ first, and the story built itself around that. When it was done, I checked back on the anthology … only to discover it had been filled before its deadline.

 

The good thing about zombies, though, is that someone’s always devoting an anthology to them somewhere. I submitted ‘Bite Back’ to Tales of the Zombie War, and I think it’s the first time I’ve had a story published before I opened the acceptance letter.