Please welcome author Stant Litore, author
of Strangers in the
Land. He joins us today with his thoughts on zombie apocalypse...Are you ready?
Publisher: 47 North
Date of publication: October 2012
STRANGERS IN THE LAND retells one of
our earliest biblical stories as an episode in humanity’s long struggle with
hunger and with the hungry dead. These are the stories of our spiritual
ancestors, who faced the dead without electricity or firearms or petroleum,
often with little more than a prayer and a hatchet or a stick. It's the story
of what they saw when they gazed into the unseeing eyes of the walking corpses,
and what they did next.
Four will stand against the
dead: Devora, who sees what God sees; the slave girl Hurriya; Zadok, a legend
among warriors; and the widower Barak, fighting to keep his vineyard free of
this new peril. But can they stand together? For the living fear each
other—fear the strangers in the land—as much as they fear the hungry dead.
So, zombie apocalypse. You’re ready?
I keep a Templar sword by the bed. Just in case. Actually scared
to death of the hungry dead. On one of our first dates, my future wife and I
rented Dawn of the Dead and about five minutes
in, I quietly got to my feet, tiptoed out, and retrieved my wood-ax from the
shed. Set it right against my armchair. Felt much better through the whole
movie after that. The fact that Jessica was more amused than alarmed by this
likely is one reason she and I now wear wedding rings.
Actually though, you have to understand that it’s not just one
big outbreak we have to watch for. Zombies have been here all along, devouring
our history from the inside. In every generation, there has been a plague
somewhere. That’s what The Zombie Bible is about – how generations of our ancestors
wrestled with the restless dead. How they fought for survival and for sanity in
the centuries before electricity or guns or the CDC. Moviemakers like to freak
me out with warnings of an imminent global collapse and a world rendered
wasteland inhabited only by the dead gnawing on the last bones. But in fact
tomorrow or the day after may only be the latest chapter in a long and grisly
story.
I’ve been collecting these tales for a while. I have a place up
in Colorado where there are few trees and you can see the dead coming from a
long way off. I write each evening to scholars and archaeologists who can piece
together bits of our half-eaten and half-forgotten memory. If you stop by or
take a look in one of my books, I’ll tell you a few tales. How the prophet
Jeremiah was left in a dry well three days with the dead tossed in after him.
How Polycarp the martyr used to bring rest to dozens of the dead with a touch
of his hand and his soul-searching eyes. How in the twelfth century BC Devora,
an aging prophetess, led a tribal people against great herds of dead, her blade
uplifted above her like a slice of moon against the night sky.
These are tales that will fascinate you and they are tales that
will break the heart. Because whether today or three thousand years ago, one’s
dead are never faced without terrible cost. Our ancestors understood that
better than we, and we can learn from their stories.
About the author:
Born a farmer's son in the Pacific Northwest, Stant Litore took the college road and eventually earned his PhD in English, but remains passionate for things that grow. He spent several years in a dim corner of a library, repairing bruised and battered books, before heading overseas to backpack through Europe. Haunted by the hunger and poverty he witnessed at home and abroad, he began spinning stories about the hungers that devour us and the hopes that preserve us. Today he lives in Colorado with his wife and their two daughters, writing about the restless dead and the restless living. He avoids certain parts of the mountains during the dark of the moon. STRANGERS IN THE LAND is his first published novel.
