Matt Darst got hooked on reading early. He started reading recreationally at first. But after reading a dog-eared copy of one of his dad’s Stephen King novels, he started hitting the hard stuff.

By twelve, Matt’s addiction to the written word took a turn for the worse. He started writing…for fun. His experimentation with notebooks (a classic gateway) led to dabbling with typewriters.

Matt went cold turkey in law school. He decided to straighten out his life. He got a job, a girl, a house, and a dog. His normal life was good. Still…

Pen and pad call to Matt late at night, cooing his name, telling him to take one last hit of fiction. Sometimes, when Matt’s weak, he heeds the siren call of the drug. He wakes from each blackout amid reams of freshly written pages, pages that have seemingly written themselves. Somehow, they coalesced into a book.

Dead Things is Matt’s first novel. His creation is grafted of horror, science fiction, and humor.

I recently got to sit him down and pick his brains (so to speak) about Zombies, inspiration, and which cinematic zombie is his favorite, among other topics of interest.

BZ- Hi Matt. Let me start out with an easy question.What is it about the Zombie genre do you find most intriguing?

MD-Zombies are a very different type of monster. My dad introduced me to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead when I was a kid. That movie scared me in a way that, until then, “creature features” and Universal Monsters had not. Zombies represent a fate worse than death: the loss of individuality. That’s been a popular theme in literature, especially science fiction (think Fahrenheit 451, 1984, or The Stepford Wives), and it especially resonates today.

I worry—in the way that a lot of us worry as we get older—about our future as a society. Have we lost our creative drive, our sense of wonderment? More and more, we accept what we are told by pundits and politicians at face value. Less and less, we applaud our individual differences. Diversity of thought, creativity, I think, is as critical to our existence as biodiversity is to our environment. My goal was to explore this concept in Dead Things, taking our loss of freedom, including freedom of thought, to a logical extreme. Readers, I hope, are left wondering just who are the Dead Things, the zombies or the survivors? “Surviving,” after all, does not necessarily equate to “living.”

BZ-What writers, both genre and non-genre have inspired you?

MD-So many authors! Beowulf was a great read, and I really liked Seamus Heaney’s translation. The cadence is enthralling. So is the free verse in Toby Barlow’s book Sharp Teeth. It’s a lycanthropy tale that won’t leave you disappointed. Early influences include Richard Matheson’s I am Legend, Ray Bradbury, everything H.G. Wells, Washington Irving, J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephen King, Michael Crichton, and Dean Koontz. I also find inspiration in Chuck Palahniuk, Brett Easton Ellis, Bernard Cornwell, and John le Carre. There’s also a hint of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book in my book. The Jungle Book is a great read for young and old alike.

In truth, I’m coming late to the zombie genre. It’s my own darn fault. I made a decision to take a break from the genre when I was writing Dead Things. I was really worried something that I might read or watch would subconsciously creep into the text of my book. I didn’t want to be derivative. Because, let’s face it, zombies have been done to death.

To my surprise, though, I discovered a host of fantastic and original zpoc authors when I came out of my self-imposed exile. These writers have really added their unique voices and visions to the genre. Joe McKinney is prolific and versatile. He can write procedural crime, horror, and science fiction. Joe is someone in the profession who I really admire, someone who has built a Dead World that gets more and more exciting with each installment. I can’t wait for the release of his next book, The Zombie King. I recently started Domain of the Dead by Ian McKinnon, and I’m really enjoying it. There’s a bit of a deserved cult developing around his work among my friends. And then there’s David Moody who put his spin on the genre. His self-publishing roots are inspiring. Autumn is a fantastic read. I need to get cracking on his Hater books.

BZ-What is your favorite zombie movie?

MD-Dawn of the Dead is fantastic. That’s got to be one of my favorites. But I also have to give credit to movies like Shawn of the Dead and Zombieland for reinvigorating the genre. I like zom-coms (zombie comedy); some purists hate them. Personally, I think the addition of comedy actually heightens our enjoyment of horror. If zombies are peanut butter, comedy is chocolate.

A nerdy digression: we have an evolutionary need for a good scare. If you think about it, human evolution was shaped by horror. Our ancestors lived in constant fear of predators, competing tribes, starvation, and disease. The emergence of civilization mitigated these horrors along time ago. But our bodies are still wired for fear, and we need to fill the void artificially from time to time.

Comedy provides context when we watch horror, telling us that the trigger for our fight or flight response is fake. And that’s important, because the killer in the closet, the creature that lurks just under the surface of the water, and the monster under the bed are only fun if we know in our hearts that they’re not really there.

BZ-What was the inspiration behind DEAD THINGS?

MD-After watching a zombie movie with my family one Christmas (that sounds odd, no?), I felt compelled to submit my own take on the genre. My goal was to tell a different kind of zombie story while staying true to the source material: George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. (An aside: the name of one of the characters, Roger Gerome, is, in fact, a loose anagram for George Romero.) There are potential problems, however, when you align yourself to the Romero zombie. Romero specifies two paths of transmission: you can return as the living dead after a natural death or you can be turned after being bitten. Most writers and directors skip over the former, focusing almost exclusively on the transmission of a virus or pathogen. I challenged myself to try to solve this incongruity.

I did a lot of research for Dead Things. Science, fortunately, holds the key to explaining the various methods of transmission. I hope that’s something my book adds to the genre.

The church-state was perfect foil for a journey of scientific discovery. We all know what happens immediately after a zombie outbreak, but what does civilization look like twenty years later? How is it governed? How do those who survived manage? This was a great opportunity for me to create a new world, one that winks mischievously at the world we live in now.

BZ-Do you have any plans to revisit that world with a sequel?

MD-Not immediately, but I do have a concept waiting in the wings. It could easily be a prequel.

BZ-You wake up tomorrow to find the z-poc has hit. What’s in your bug-out bag?

MD-I’m screwed. I guess I’d tear up the stairs leading to my apartment, fill my tub and every container I could find with water, and bug-in for as long as possible. May be I’d grow a garden on the roof, catch and eat some pigeons. They’re supposed to be a delicacy in France after all.

BZ-What, if anything, scares you?

MD-Zombies, but not how one might think. Zombies are real; they occur everyday in the natural world. There are whole ecosystems based on parasitic relationships. Spiders, grasshoppers, caterpillars, fish, mice, and even humans are controlled at some level by pathogens. They’re not dead, but their minds are no longer their own.

Toxoplasmosis is a great example. About a third of the world is already infected with this parasite. Humans aren’t the natural host (cats are), so the protozoan takes up residence in our brain and protects itself from our immune system by forming a cyst. Still, there’s evidence that toxoplasmosis is chemically altering our behavior, changing our personalities. Infected men tend to be antisocial and suspicious and women more outgoing and promiscuous. Toxoplasmosis may even lead to schizophrenia and impact the increase the likelihood of giving birth to a male over a female. This all raises an interesting question: how much of what we perceive as us is actually us? How much of our personality is shaped by parasites? How much control do we really have?

BZ-What are some of your upcoming projects you want to share with us?

MD-I have so many stories I want to tell, and not enough time. I have some pretty disparate books in the works: superheroes, ghosts, and espionage. The superhero tale I’m working on is called Freaks Anon, and I hope to have it done early next year. I’m really excited about that one.

BZ-Romero slow movers or 28 days later fast zombies…what’s your favorite and why?

MD-I am extremely opinionated when it comes to this debate, so hopefully I don’t offend! I am definitely Team Slow. I like my zombies dead. “Necroanthrophagism” is a term I coined for the book. It means, literally, the dead eating their own.

Sure the living dead are slower. But they’re unrelenting. Unlike us, they don’t need to rest or pause. One mistake, and you’re lunch.

May be the movie studios believe it’s easier for fans to suspend disbelief if they think zombies are just really sick—as opposed to dead—folks with a hankering for human flesh. And it is admittedly a pretty big leap of faith to accept that the dead have been reanimated.

Or is it?

Death is something more than a single temporal event, something beyond a sheer moment in time: the heart stops, and with it, blood flow; deprived of oxygen, brain cells die; the body cools, blood settles, then other cells, like muscles and skin cells, die, disintegrate, and decompose at varying rates.

But if something hijacks that process, not necessarily reversing it, but suspending it…

In a time when superheroes are more popular than ever, suspending disbelief shouldn’t be that hard, right? I, for one, am hoping for the rise of traditional Romero zombies again.

BZ-What’s your take on Modern Horror today, both films and literature?

MD-That is a tough one. On one hand, I hear a lot of complaints about the “state of horror” today. Critics call modern horror “a joke” or compare it to porn. On the other hand, there are probably more horror fans today then ever. That’s a weird inconsistency to square.

Personally, I rarely watch horror movies today unless something is highly recommended. Back in 1995 when “Se7en” came out, I thought David Fincher’s neo-noir bleakness was really original. Now, though, everything seems to emulate that style. Worse, directors have added the shaky camera to the mix. It’s too formulaic. There are exceptions, but it seems like they are fewer and farther between.

So I tend to stick to books. You get the whole package with a book: characters that are layered and original; intricate and twisting plotlines; rhythm, the voice of the author; and an amazing attention to detail. Horror literature—and I think it’s important to note that horror is finally getting its due as literature—continues to amaze and astound me.

Thanks to Matt Darst for the time and info. Matt Darst’s novel “Dead Things” is currently available on E-Book. Check out my review HERE.