Craig DiLouie is a horror author that we are huge fans of. We have recently posted The Infection and The Killing Floor.
Theresa: Hi Craig, could you introduce yourself and tell us how you got into writing?
Craig: I’m old enough to remember standing in bookstores some years ago looking at the shelves looking for zombie books and finding very few. Then small presses started cranking out quality books and the eBook market got me in touch with fantastic authors like David Moody. People like David and Joe McKinney inspired me to give zombie fiction–which at the time was still brand new–a shot, and so I wrote Tooth and Nail, published by Salvo Press in 2010. The book was extraordinarily successful, and so I wrote two more zombie books–The Infection (2011) and its sequel The Killing Floor (2012), published by Permuted Press. These novels have sold extremely well in paperback, eBook and audiobook, gotten hundreds of positive reviews from readers and reviewers, and are being published in multiple languages such as Spanish, French and Russian. Tooth and Nail was also optioned for film. Your readers can check out my fiction for themselves by visiting www.craigdilouie.com.
Theresa: In The Infection & The Killing Floor, the military feature as characters quite fully. How did you conduct your research into the military?
Craig: One of the things I noticed while reading the first generations of zombie books was the focus on a small group of average people doing whatever it took to survive in a post-apocalyptic world filled with zombies. I always wondered, “Hey, whatever happened to the military? The U.S. has the best-funded and equipped military in the world. How can these people survive against such impossible odds when the military was so easily overrun?”
At the same time, I found myself as a reader increasingly fascinated with the fall of civilization, not its aftermath. My favourite part of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (and the remake) wasn’t the mall, it was the chaos, adrenaline and horror of the zombie apocalypse in full swing. That’s where some seriously intense stories would be found, I believed.
And so I wrote a book I always wanted to read, my first zombie novel, which was published as Tooth and Nail. The novel is a bit of a military procedural, focusing heavily on portraying as realistically as possible what it would be like for a company of combat infantry to try to do its job and survive in a major city during the zombie apocalypse.
I carried some of those popular themes into The Infection and The Killing Floor. In The Infection, our protagonists, civilians all, are alive because they have teamed up with the crew of a Bradley fighting vehicle. The civilians protect the Bradley, and the Bradley protects them. The use of the Bradley also allows the novel to transcend the usual “house under siege” plotting of zombie fiction and allows the survivors to realistically travel across this new world. In The Killing Floor, America’s far-flung military has recovered and is returning home from its overseas deployments to invade its own country, starting with Washington, DC.
In all things with my fiction, I do my best to make it as realistic as possible. For the military aspect, I’ve researched military weaponry, small unit tactics, radio communications, bayonet fighting, and so on. I also worked with a former serviceman to read and edit The Killing Floor for accuracy. As a civilian, I don’t get every single thing right, but I’ve been told by members of the military that for the most part, what you see in my work is very close to what you would really see happen in a crisis like this.
Theresa: Without giving away too much, in my review, I mention that the creatures remind me of something from Stephen King’s ‘The Mist’. The creatures are a bit left field and come as a surprise. Where did this come from?
Craig: I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of an alien ecology supplanting ours, displacing humans at the top of the food chain. In The Infection and The Killing Floor, the creatures and even the zombies themselves do not bear people any malice. They are simply fighting to survive, and for them, surviving involves people–either using them as new hosts for the master organism, or consuming them as nutrition. By exploring these ideas, I hoped to touch upon a theme grander than the usual survival scenario of a group of people fighting their way through a zombie-infested land.
To be frank, as a writer, I also wanted to do something new. I have no problem with the typical zombie formula but feel that once the reader gets to know the zombies, particularly what rules the author has established for their behaviour, they become predictable. In horror, predictable means boring. What’s unpredictable? People. So that’s why we see in AMC’s The Walking Dead that the zombies are the main threat in the first season, internal conflict is the main threat in the second (Rick versus Shane), and external threat is the main threat in the third (Rick’s group against another’s).
I had no interest in having my survivors hate each other. They are fighting minute to minute to survive and to do so, they must function as a military unit around a woman who is clearly their leader. Dropping a marauding nihilistic biker gang into the story also didn’t interest me. I wanted the threat in the story to stay focused on the monster element. So I came up with the idea of maintaining tension by introducing creatures that represent a next stage of evolution of the Infection. These creatures are unpredictable and for most readers pretty seriously horrifying, so I was able to accomplish my goal.
Theresa: Will you be writing a third Infection book?
Craig: Unfortunately, at this time, I have no plans to write a third instalment. This has more to do with how the publishing industry works than with personal interest. That being said, one never says, never. At some point, I’d love to revisit the sad, dangerous world of The Infection.
Theresa: What is next in your writing?
Craig: I have written a new horror novel that is in contract negotiations with one of the top publishers in the country. If that works out, I will be making a major announcement. Your readers can stay tuned at my blog, www.craigdilouie.com, where I blog about apocalyptic horror. In the meantime, I’m nearly done with a fantasy novel, which I’m hoping to place with a larger publishing house as well. After that, I will be fully immersed in a new horror novel that I believe will be seriously disturbing even to jaded horror fans. In short, I’ve got a lot going on and hope to continue writing as long as people keep reading my work. It’s been amazing and humbling to see how popular my horror fiction has been, and I hope to continue giving them scares!
Theresa: Thanks and good luck with it all!
