KRIS ASHTON

While I didn’t dislike the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake, it did disappoint me on two counts. One was its running zombies (the whole point of zombies is that they’re slow, otherwise they might as well be serial killers or vampires or werewolves), the other was its zombie baby. Knowing that a pregnant woman had been bitten was, for me, the high point of suspense in the movie. What was happening to that child in utero? How would it be born? Pure terror. When the answers came, they were an anti-climax of saurian proportions.

 

I was similarly disappointed with the third season of the otherwise magnificent TV series The Walking Dead. Its newborn baby created some drama as it came into the world, but then it just sort of faded into the background.

 

In the past, I might never have considered the tribulations of caring for an infant in the zombie apocalypse, but that viewing was preceded by the birth of my first child. I began to imagine such a scenario from my ‘new dad’ perspective, and when I flashed on the image of a mother suckling her zombie baby, I knew I had a story.

 

‘Teething Problems’, then, was an attempt to redress what I saw as inadequate treatment of potentially harrowing subject matter. During rewrites, it also became a reflection on idealist versus realist ideology in a post-apocalyptical milieu. Each approach fails in its own way: the nominal ‘good guys’ put their heads in the sand and it ends in disaster, while the villain of the piece is proven right but his fatalism makes him almost as inhuman as the zombies marauding through the streets.

 

One last thing about ‘Teething Problems’: it was my first sale, after nine years of trying, to the respected Australian journal of speculative fiction, Andromeda Spaceways. You can read more about that journey of persistence here..