I was just looking over an old interview with me from 2005 that originally appeared in Tobias S. Buckell‘s newsletter, and I noticed that at the end there’s this question about zombies. Given the imminent publication of my story “The Skull-Faced Boy” in the anthology The Living Dead, I thought I’d reproduce this segment of the interview here:

TB: Last, but not least, if zombies were spreading throughout the land by infectious bite what would be your 5 point response?

DK: 1. Make careful field observations. What exactly are we dealing with here? Are these the walking dead or merely the infected living? Are these old-school shambling zombies, or newer-model dashing zombies? Most importantly, if you chop off their arm with a chainsaw, will the arm just lie there, or will it crawl along and try to strangle you? These small details matter.

2. Hide in the attic. Not, I repeat not, in the basement.

3. If the group of survivors contains some loudmouthed jerk, just shoot him now. If you don’t, you’ll only be sorry later, and he’s going to die anyway.

4. Wrap your entire body in bite-proof bailing wire. Why does no one ever think of this?

5. We’re going to the Winchester.

In the dealers room at Confluence I found a copy of Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008, which includes my story “Save Me Plz” (alongside stories by authors such as Garth Nix, Karen Joy Fowler, Kelly Link, Andy Duncan, Ian R. MacLeod, Theodora Goss, Daniel Abraham, and Rachel Swirsky). So … the book is out, it’s real. My first year’s best appearance. Very exciting.

Edmund Schubert has updated the blog for Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show with my essay about how I conceived and wrote my short story “Red Road.”

And here’s a really nice blog post by Lisa Marie Andrews about my story “The Skull-Faced Boy”:

We’ve all heard the same old zombie spiel over and over again. Zombies rise. They are hungry. Living people run and hide before rising up and stomping zombie butt. (Well, some of the time.) What happens, though, when there is a zombie overlord? What happens when some of the zombies are the living dead with a mind still intact? Is there actually an original zombie story left out there? Well, I’ll answer that last question … YES! And this is it!

One of the first things to pop into my mind after hearing this is that this story would make a perfect episode of The Twilight Zone. A very good episode of The Twilight Zone. This is also probably one of the only zombie … well, anything! … that does not have massive amounts of gore flying around and detailed descriptions of mauling. Is there zombie grossness? Of course. But this guy has finesse!

I’ll be looking up more of this author and I highly recommend heading over to Pseudopod and downloading the audible version, as the reading was also excellent.

Here’s the final cover design for John Joseph Adams’ anthology The Living Dead, which will include my story “The Skull-Faced Boy” (available as a podcast from Pseudopod).

I just noticed that the introduction to John Joseph Adams’ upcoming zombie fiction anthology The Living Dead is now online. Here’s my characteristically pithy contribution: David Barr Kirtley, author of “The Skull-Faced Boy,” says that there are two reasons we find zombies appealing. “One, I think there’s an enormous segment of our brain that’s evolved for running away from packs of predators, and zombie stories give us a rare opportunity to take this primal part of our psyches out for a spin,” he says. “And, two, zombies are a great metaphor. The great mass of humanity often comes across to us as unreasoningly hostile and driven to consumption, and the image of the zombie captures this perfectly.” Read the complete introduction.

I notice there’s now a page up at Amazon.com for the anthology The Living Dead (which will contain my short story “The Skull-Faced Boy”). The page also includes this preliminary cover art (at least, I hope it’s preliminary, since John Joseph Adams’ name is spelled wrong):

I just got word that my short story “The Skull-Faced Boy,” which will be appearing later this year in the anthology The Living Dead (edited by John Joseph Adams), will also be appearing on the Pseudopod horror fiction podcast. Pseudopod did a really nice job with the last story of mine that they ran, “The Disciple,” so go check that out if you’re so inclined.

I was just glancing at the Escape Pod message board, and I noticed that the topic for my story “Blood of Virgins” has received the most page views of any story over there. I figured, well, it’s one of the oldest stories, so it’s had the most time to accrue views, and it was a somewhat controversial story, so that probably inflated the count, and it also probably gets a lot of visits from the same pervs who constantly barrage my website with google searches on variations of “blood sex video virgins first time.” So I didn’t think much of it. But then I noticed that my story “Save Me Plz” is right up there too, as the fourth most-viewed. “Save Me Plz” is relatively recent, was not particularly controversial, and is much less likely to draw in the sex-fiend traffic. So then I popped over to the Pseudopod message board and noticed that my story “The Disciple” has the most page views of any story over there. Okay, so that definitely seems to be a pattern. I hope it means that my stories are attracting a lot of interest from readers, but I’m really not sure how meaningful the “page views” thing is or how to interpret it. I do note that the second and third most-viewed topics on the Escape Pod board are for “The 43 Antarean Dynasties” by Mike Resnick and “Impossible Dreams” by Tim Pratt, both Hugo Award-winning stories, so that does seem to indicate that there’s at least some correlation between page views and how well a story is being received.

I updated the page for my story “The Skull-Faced Boy” with the newly-announced table of contents for the anthology The Living Dead, which will feature stories by Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, George R. R. Martin, and many, many other well-known writers.

Back in 2002, my offbeat zombie horror story “The Skull-Faced Boy” was published on Gothic.net. The story disappeared off their site a long time ago, but now the story is coming back. You might even say back from the dead. “The Skull-Faced Boy” is set to be reprinted in a Night Shade Books anthology titled The Living Dead, edited by John Joseph Adams, whose previous Night Shade project, Wastelands, is getting some great buzz. The Living Dead will feature a real powerhouse lineup, including Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, George R. R. Martin, Laurell K. Hamilton, Clive Barker, Harlan Ellison & Robert Silverberg, Poppy Z. Brite, Kelly Link, and Joe Hill.