Guest Blog: Joan Frances Turner
Please welcome our guest blogger – Joan Frances Turner!
Thank you, Debbie, for inviting me to say a little bit about my book. Dust is the story of what happens when you take a writer already somewhat…neurotic about death and the probability of oblivion, add an actual death in the family, mix with the original Night of the Living Dead and Carnival of Souls, shake well, let ferment in a cool, dark part of the subconscious for several years and then carefully stir in the three magic words: “That’s somebody’s mother.” The undead characters of Dust–despite their rot, decay and pitiless appetites–are for all intents and purposes a surrogate family of the unwanted, the homeless, those who through no fault of their own can’t speak our language and can never return to their human loved ones again. These “dead” folk have emotions, however deeply and forcibly buried, and futile memories of everything they’ve lost. And their human family members know their beloved dead are out there, somewhere–but they’re trying very hard to pretend it isn’t so.
If there’s humanity in these monsters, then, there’s also monstrosity in the humans who, for their own safety, have no choice but to live barricaded from their aggression. Zombies, in this world, aren’t some nasty new birthday surprise, nor are they a contagion: They’ve always existed, nobody knows why some dead people revive and some don’t, they’re a lethal but extremely natural hazard and humans have always lived uneasily just outside their orbit. Lately, though–and it’s not just paranoia, the thanatologists have confirmed it, though they don’t know why–there’s so many more of them, and they’re attacking more aggressively, and whole towns, cities, counties are existing under siege. Someone needs to do something. But of course, it’s far easier to say that when it’s not your mother, brother, child trying to get past the gates. There must be another way, a third path, that can make everyone happy. There’s always another path, and it’s always paved with very good intentions. It’s love, not loathing–on both sides–that makes the uneasy, unsustainable stasis of this world finally, irrevocably, tip over.
Of course this all sounds terribly solemn, but there’s a fair share of (unavoidably grotesque) humor in Dust and that’s why the book trailers amused me so much: The undead are a perverse sort of family, any family only wants to protect its “children” and, like “parents” since the dawn of time, they invariably don’t quite know how to express that without inciting giggle fits. As an authentic child of the eighties I have fond memories of the original Partnership for a Drug-Free America PSAs–and the sincere puzzlement of the adults around us when we all pointed at them and laughed–and so seeing the trailers play out was terribly fun. I set out, all solemn, to write a zombie story not half as campy as many I’d seen, but it turns out there was more than a bit of camp and fun lurking between the lines after all. It’s all just another way of whistling past the graveyard.
View the trailers:
Visit Joan Frances Turner on the web.
