I hate zombies. I hate zombie movies. I hate the very idea… living in a distopian world where there is no hope, where mindless drones shuffle about, seeking only to snuff out your very existence. For one thing, it reminds me too much of the real world. For another, there a *lot* of books and movies where the characters are so wildly incompetent or disfunctional that it strains the imagination that they’d survive at all.
Why, then, have I written not just one, but two zombie apocalypse books set in the Hell Train universe?
It started with an argument with a publisher. He wanted to do an anthology where there were a bunch of characters hiding out in a mall surviving the zombies, with different authors doing different characters and areas of the mall and he wanted me to write a story for it.
I thought it was a terrible idea. Malls have been done to death (pun intended) in the zombie genre. Besides, if there are legions of undead, a static position doesn’t make a ton of sense. Besides, with the location unchanging, you would just have the same group with steadily dwindling supplies and no change of scenery or options for improvement. I proposed a train, where you could have stories from lots of survivors, with new locations, new challenges and obstacles as they head towards (presumed) safety.
The physics of a train, large, slow to stop and start, requiring fuel and clear tracks, present interesting challenges for the characters. The requirement for train bridges across rivers also makes for interesting choke points, directing the train to cities where there would be more dead people, and thus, a far greater threat.
Basically I’d written half the plot of the book in the argument back and forth, but the publisher wasn’t impressed. So I started writing a “short” story and it turned into a novel.
That in-turn, turned into a second and I’m 1/3 of the way through the third, with a whole series planned. In the process, I’ve taken a lot of the things I hated about zombie novels and inverted them.
I hated idiot main characters who made bad choices because “plot,” so I have military and civilian survivors who approach survival as a science, who have worked out the best ways to deal with threats and stay alive.
I hate the ludicrous virus that kills people but somehow makes them walk around, that’s quick enough to turn someone in minutes or seconds but somehow guides them to murder afterwards. There’s no virus in my books, there is a supernatural element that causes the dead to rise, drives their bodies until they are too physically broken to continue. These possessed are literally that, driven by forces which hate the living.
I hated the lack of hope and how pointless so many of the deaths were in zombie books and movies. And so I turned that on its head, as well. When fighters die, they do so buying time for their friends and family. There is a hope, a destination where the survivors can possibly find refuge.
Most importantly, while there are terrible powers of evil… there are also powers of good. Good men and women who stand up for what is right. Powers above them, that influence the world and counter the evils in ways that the characters can only describe as miraculous.
Writing Hell Train: All Aboard and Hell Train: Green Line has been a challenge: challenges with trying to do something new, something different, trying to break free from the tropes… but also a lot of fun. I don’t have to take everything seriously, I can make jokes, explore characters who’s disfunctions make them better survivors (rather than the opposite), and have characters change, grow, and transform through the course of the books.
Will my band of survivors manage to get their train out west, to start over and rebuild civilization? That’s a question to explore over the other books in the series. The story, the journey, is the point, after all.
Thanks for reading, and don’t forget, Hell Train: Green Line goes live this weekend, if you’re looking for some books that I never, ever, expected to write.
Hell Train: All Aboard: https://amzn.to/3SS3DJQ
Hell Train: Green Line: https://amzn.to/49yxheu
Kal Spriggs 