Walking in Undead Skin

By Jeff Norton

There’s an important quotation in Harper Lee’s wonderful To Kill A Mockingbird, where Atticus Finch tells Scout that: “you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view-until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

In my new book, my main character Adam Meltzer is studying that book in school, but he’s not a regular schoolboy at all, he’s a zomboy. 

Yes, he’s a zombie. 

I’ve been fascinated with the rise of zombie culture over the past few years, from The Walking Dead TV show to Darren Shan’s blood-splattered Zom-B book series, but I wanted to understand the world of the living from the point of view of the living dead.

Adam Meltzer is twelve-years-old and has early-onset OCD. So when he dies and later crawls out of the grave, you can imagine his disgust at not only the filthy grave dirt, but also his own decomposing skin. The germs he’s afraid of may not kill him (he’s already dead!) and so he grapples with his newly undead incarnation. Adam teams up with a vegan vampire and a reluctant chupacabra (think: a Mexican werewolf, but lizard-like) to solve his own murder.

You see, authors like Darren Shan or World War Z’s Max Brooks paint zombies as raging, cannibalistic creatures, who deserve their second death at human hands, but what if zombies just wanted to get their old life back? 

What if they wished for life as it once was?

As a new parent, and feeling like a sleep-deprived zombie most of the time, I made a short film about a zombie who just wants to put his family back together. You can view it online, and it provided the initial spark to take a more empathetic look at the living dead.

I hope Atticus Finch would be proud.

Jeff Norton is the author of the award-winning MetaWars saga (Orchard Books) and the upcoming Memoirs Of A Neurotic Zombie (out 7th August from Faber). He is also a filmmaker and is currently developing his first feature film, The Chosen. Jeff Norton is on twitter at @thejeffnorton and on the web at jeffnorton.com. Originally from Canada, Norton now lives in the UK.

Darren Shan will be reading from and talking about Zom-B, his epic 12-book series about B Smith, a teenager who must learn to survive in a world of racism, zombies and darkness, on Saturday 5th July. For more information, and to book tickets, please visit the MCBF website.