Zombie Book Club

A Kimberly-Clark warehouse worker lit a 1.2-million-square-foot facility on fire and filmed himself saying "all you had to do was pay us enough to fucking live." Media coverage mourned the inventory. Dan and Leah come in burned out but reach for a comfort watch (V for Vendetta) and find it hitting like current events. The movie may be twenty years old, but the machinery it describes; propaganda, scapegoating, fear-based u...

Ray Jamison — writer, dungeon master, and creator of The Madcaps — returns to close out his medieval fantasy zombie miniseries in style. With his finale Kickstarter live for issues one through three, we dig into what it means to finish a story on purpose: one long night, four friends, and a necromancer standing between Ivywood and sunrise. We talk craft — how a DM mindset shapes pacing and payoff, why intrigue matters as much as ac...

Eight million people showed up, and many on the internet called it pointless. We don't buy the nihilism; but we also don't pretend a permitted Saturday rally is the same thing as disrupting power. This episode, we dig into what No Kings actually does well (making dissent visible, connecting you to neighbors and organizations, being the tip of a much larger iceberg), and what it doesn't do on its own. We talk Montgome...

Alice B. Sullivan is back, and this time she brought the apocalypse with her. We're celebrating the release of Tomorrow Never Came, Book 2 in her Aftermath series, and digging into everything that makes it tick; the virus science behind goners and vectors, infected animals that will haunt your nightmares, and get into the messy, beautiful question at the heart of this book: how far do you bend your morals before you don't...

The heart of this bonus episode is writing craft and writer mental health. Dan breaks down why it wasn’t “writer’s block” so much as an emotional block, what it feels like to stare at the page and produce nothing but an ellipsis, and how he rebuilt momentum with a routine, a weekly word-count goal, and permission to skip ahead to the scenes that actually matter. We also swap notes on writing books that help, revision realities, and...

Fifteen years after its release, Zone One by Colson Whitehead hits differently. We dig into the novel's fractured, nonlinear structure; where corporate-funded sweeper crews reclaim a zombie-plagued Manhattan, and unpack why Whitehead uses the apocalypse not as an ending, but as a mirror. From skels and stragglers to Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, we explore how the book blurs the line between the living and the already dehu...

We invited zombie author Sarah Lyons Fleming back to Zombie Book Club to tackle the most skipped-over survival problem in the genre: waste management. From bucket toilet setups and compost toilets to venting methane and humanure composting, Sarah brings the same practical, prepper-brained logic she builds into her fiction; because a believable survivor community has to solve what comes in and what goes out.

We critique the worst toi...

Meta just patented an AI that keeps your social media account posting, liking, and DMing after you die, and we have questions. A lot of them. We dig into the Necro Feed™ and what it really means when a corporation trains a language model on your entire digital life, then deploys it to simulate you indefinitely; with your family, your followers, and anyone willing to engage. We trace the booming grief tech industry (death bots, ghos...

What if the zombie apocalypse looked like a group hug? Pluribus imagines a world where 99.9% of humanity has joined a blissful, all-knowing hive mind, and only 13 people are left to decide whether individuality is worth fighting for. We're joined by media scholar and Texas Tech professor Dr. David D. Perlmutter to unpack why this "happy horde" story is more unsettling than any brain-eater we've encountered: from...

Dia VanGunten joins us to crack open Pink Zombie Rose, her decade in the making magical realism series where zombies don't eat brains; they walk off the job, listen to trees, and fall in love. Structured like a tarot deck, Pink Zombie Rose: Major Arcana is a rhizomatic, genre-defying mashup of queer love stories, Cotard's delusion, anti-capitalist rage, and prose so alive it hurts. Dia reads from "Sweetest Kill"...

This week indie comics creators Laurie Calcaterra (Path of the Pale Rider) and Brandon Starocci (Avalon Comic) join us to unpack Boner Temple™; our affectionate nickname (stolen from Wicked Words Book Club) for the newest entry in the 28 Years Later saga "The Bone Temple". Through Spike’s childlike perspective, we examine how spectacle becomes belief, belief becomes control, and why Sir Jimmy Crystal’s myth collapses the ...

In this episode of Zombie Book Club, we sit down with writer and death doula Sara Wuillermin of Bury Me in New Jersey Community to explore the emotional and human heart of 28 Years Later, a film that uses its post-apocalyptic world not just to terrify, but to ask what it means to grieve, to love, and to carry loss forward in community. From Spike’s perilous journey to save his ailing mother to the rituals communities invent to hono...

What if the best survival manual for a zombie apocalypse was written tens of thousands of years ago into our biology? This week on Zombie Book Club, we’re joined by Andie from Ancestral Habits to explore how our Paleolithic past still shapes the way humans cooperate, address unfairness, care for the vulnerable, and rebuild after collapse. From egalitarian small groups and complementary cognition to food sharing, justice, and ritual...

What happens when a Brooklyn drag show collides with a glitter-dusted zombie outbreak? We dig into Queens of the Dead; from rhinestoned drills and throwing axe gags to a soundtrack that slides from Romero-esque synths into club heat. We talk cast highlights; Nina West’s grounding presence, Margaret Cho’s physical comedy, Katie O’Brien’s steady cool, Jack Haven’s scene-stealing Kelsey; and why names, pronouns, and chosen family matt...

In this emotionally charged episode of Zombie Book Club, Dan and Leah unpack We Bury The Dead; a quiet, haunting zombie film that prioritizes grief, moral ambiguity, and empathy over action - and use it as a springboard to examine the real-world toll of trauma. We explore how the film’s focus on loss, PTSD, and complex grief resonates with collective experiences of institutional brutality, and why facing sorrow is an act of radical...

On this double date edition of Zombie Book Club, we sit down with married indie filmmakers Erin Áine and Kyle Valle of Big Squid Productions, the creative duo behind the cosplay-meets-zombie feature ZombieCON Vol. 1. From their Studio City meet-cute to a decade-long journey of crowdfunding, micro-crew shoots, DIY effects, and relentless post-production, Erin and Kyle share the unvarnished story of how a wild concept about assholes ...

In this episode we sit down with Rebecca Cuthbertson to talk about her debut novel Waves of Undead. Set on the surf‑soaked cliffs of Tofino, the story blends a tsunami and zombie outbreak with a gritty but sometimes hilarious take on the genre. Rebecca walks us through the twin‑bond of Anna and Paul, the multi‑POV structure that gives the narrative a cinematic pulse, and her own activism at the Fairy Creek blockade which informed t...

The horde keeps growing, and so does the heart. We’re kicking off season four by turning our loose, joyful shenanighans into a real book club you can actually join; slow reads, inclusive picks, live conversation, and clear values that put people first. Think of it like building a survivor camp together: strong walls, warm fires, and a shared map for what we read and why it matters.

Here’s what’s new: four to five community...

Texas Solves the outbreak in 5 minutes, sorry New York.

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. David Perlmutter, professor of Media & Communication at Texas Tech University, to dissect how societies record—and eventually lose—their histories when the grid goes dark. From ancient clay tablets to floppy disks, we explore why the very mediums we trust to preserve culture can become our Achilles’ heel. Dr. Perlmutter breaks...