From time to time, we'll feature a new voice - an author releasing their first book onto the scene - in literature. We, at The Authors Speak, want to steer you, the readers, towards hot new talent. If you're an author getting your voice out there for the first time, let us know. ericm@witty.com.
THE SPOTLIGHT: Thomas Brookside
In 2009, I was talking to someone about a bizarro Shakespeare tale I wanted to tell. Initially the idea was to recreate Julius Ceasar, have some fun with that historical tragedy. In my version, Ceasar would be re-born as a zombie and come after Brutus and leave caranage in his wake. Roman history and zombies just seemed to work.
A short time later, author Garrett Cook emailed me and asked if I remembered that Roman zombie thing I was talking about. I said I did. He then sent me a link to a new book released this Fall on Amazon. It was entitled De Bello Lemures, Or The Roman War Against the Zombies of Armorica
. Damn it! How did somebody beat me to the zombie punch? Well, disgruntled as I may have been, I contacted the author Thomas Brookside and asked for a copy. I'm pleased to say that after briefly exchanging emails with Mr. Brookside, it was impossible to hate him. He's smart, funny, and has a great way about him. And for a first book, Thomas tackled Romans and zombies (not necessarily in the way I would have) in an incredibly talented way.
When I re-started "The Author Speaks", I wanted to make sure that I included Mr. Brookside. Regardless of Mr. Revert's opining of zombie lore (joking, Matt, I love you), there are a great many readers who will read zombie texts and never once complain. I should know. I'm one of those.
Eric Mays: Your book unites two things that have needed uniting for some time: zombies and Ancient Rome. Makes sense to me. How did you come about this marriage, or are you really just translating actual text that you found on that school trip to Rome?
Thomas Brookside: I've always been a big fan of ancient and medieval history and of historical fiction based on those time periods. I can't walk by a Penguin Classics book at a book sale without picking it up to see if I already own it. [The black cover editions are the worst - I can detect those a few hundred feet away, and they draw me in like sirens.] Authors like Robert Graves, John Gardner, and Umberto Eco are big inspirations to me, as are genre authors like David Drake, Eric Fllint, and S.M. Stirling.
And one day, I was looking at my bookshelves and thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be great if one of these Penguin Classics about Ancient Rome had zombies in it?" It wasn't really any more complex than that.
EM: You do a good job, Thomas, of capturing the pacing and the style of the writers of that time. I'm not going to come out and say that it reads like Plato (that would be an insult to you). But it seemse to be very reminiscent of that sort of mythology you'd read. How far did you go to immerse yourself to get it just right?
TB: I think basically it was a matter of having read so many documents translated from ancient languages that their tempo and tone became second nature. When I looked for the "voice" it was already there in my memory.
It's a little geeky of me to admit this, but over the years I've accumulated so much of this material that I sometimes am convinced I can recognize different translation "styles". I personally prefer translations done by British academics and not Americans, and the older the better - stuff done before 1930 is generally more pleasant to my ear than more modern work. So I wasn't just going for a "Latin document" tone - I was trying for "Latin document translated by someone at Oxford in 1913".
EM: I'm sure you researched the heck out of this thing, because it shows! Any signs of true Ancient Roman zombie encounters?
TB: The Romans didn't actually have a word for "zombie" or revenant. I considered trying to cobble together the Latin for "walking corpse" but it was a bit unworkable and didn't flow right. I decided to use "lemures" as an all-purpose word for "ghosts" and have the characters interpret the zombies as the puppets of malevolent ghosts. Ancient Greek was actually a much more flexible language for describing the supernatural and that's why I have some characters employ Greek terms.
Many of our modern "ghost story" thematic elements have their antecedents in Roman and Greek sources, and I did research those extensively. Roman poetry and Greek tragedy are replete with references to supernatural punishments, incidents of insanity and battle-madness, etc., that also make their own appearances here. I pretty much threw the kitchen sink at the problem here.
EM: You like zombies quite a lot, and since you've written (more or less) a history text book for them...are you a zombie, Thomas?
TB: No. When thinking about zombie stories I pretty much always put myself on the other side of the shotgun. Or the sword, as the case may be.
EM: Are you a zombie supporter? Seems today, there's a school of thought that zombies are just misunderstood. Why should these shambling corpses be given equal rights?
TB: While some zombie authors like to speculate on the interior life of zombies, I tend to see them as forces of nature [or of the supernatural] that are no longer human. To me, zombies have no more rights than a fire or flood.
EM: Further, you deal with the military and the undead. Should we as a society look at adopting a "don't ask, don't tell" policy?
TB: I think, that with zombies, they should employ a "don't ask, just shoot 'em in the head" policy.
EM: Why are we so enraptured in zombie-mania right now?
TB: I think that zombie mania is just another example of the way that "disaster" stories tend to flourish in difficult times or during times of profound and rapid change. I think that Sontag had it right when she wrote that the appeal of disaster stories is that they offer the reader or viewer a release from conventional obligations and the opportunity to enjoy a simplified moral landscape. Zombie stories set in the modern era are basically fantasies of "walking away from it all" - the petty and prosaic problems of everyday life disappear, and the moral complexities of everyday life disappear, and life becomes a big camping trip with a clearly defined enemy that everyone is allowed to destroy without remorse.
Why zombie mashups have become popular is a different question, and I'm not sure what the answer is. I think people just decided that zombies were so much fun that they spilled out of their own genre and crossed over into everything else in a bizarre sort of postmodernist explosion.
EM: And why is there such an inconsistency? Fast zombies, slow zombies (the only real ones), zombies that use weapons, zombies that think...you name it.
TB: I think that once the Romero template was broken, writers and directors were free to have fun with variations on the basic idea - and so naturally they did just that.
EM: In Ancient Rome, the undead could not have come about from nuclear radiation, satellite dust, or chemically engineered diseases. How do you really make zombies - the kids at home want to know.
TB: The cause of zombies in my text is left ambiguous - it's either a supernatural phenomenon, or a viral phenomenon that comes so close in time to a very public "curse" that the characters misinterpret it as a supernatural phenomenon.
I wanted it left unclear. The relationship of the various characters to the supernatural is part of both the theme and the plot.
EM: And finally, Thomas, what's next for you? More zombies?
TB: The ending of the novel allows for the possibility of a sequel, so I hope to come back to this story at some point. My current project is another "ancient history / horror" mashup, but it's not a zombie story. It's called The Last Days of Jericho and it's set in ancient Canaan during the time of the Hebrew invasion described in the Bible in Deuteronomy, Judges and Joshua. It struck me one day that if you flip that story around and tell it from the Canaanite perspective, it's one heck of a supernatural "monster horror" tale. So if my first book was "Zombies in Ancient Rome", this one is "Godzilla in Ancient Israel".
De Bello Lemures, or the Roman War Against the Zombies of the Armorica is available through Amazon. If you've got ten bucks to spend on books and you're not sure what you want to read, I highly encourage you pick this one up. Also, keep in touch with Thomas Brookside on Facebook. That way you'll know when Ancient Israel will be torn down by Godzilla.
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