Zombie Book Club

We sit down with Robert de la Chevotière ahead of the August 25, 2026 release of his novel The Twelfth House; a literary work steeped in West African folklore and magical realism. At its center is Etta, an ogbanje: a spirit trapped in an endless cycle of death and rebirth, whose desperate will to live pulls her father Bako from the coast of Benin onto a slave ship bound for colonial Dominica. We talk with Robert about writing unfli...

We record this one crammed into a sweltering camper with the AC off during a heat wave, accidentally running the most honest apocalypse simulator we've ever tried and quickly learn the real survival threat isn't zombies, it's summer. Forgotten bug spray turns the outdoors into a West Nile virus exclusionary zone full of diseased monsters that want to eat us alive.

Leah apologizes for everything she said while she was suffering from ...

This is an unfiltered check-in where the laptops stay closed and we just talk like the two zombie-obsessed humans we are, and discuss an internet video of a man de-veigning a snickers bar to make Jesus happy.

We have two big community updates: a new Kickstarter for the Path of the Pale Rider trade paperback (issues 5–8), and our next book club pick, Intercepts by T.J. Payne; a novel that hooked us so hard we couldn't stop read...

Feed by Mira Grant promised us zombies and delivered a political thriller, and our book club had FEELINGS about that. Dan and Leah bring a full courtroom vibe to Newsflesh Book 1: praising its ambitious post-apocalyptic world where society survives by way of constant biosecurity surveillance, Romero-rules-as-cultural-canon, and bloggers covering a presidential campaign instead of mainstream journalists. The double meaning of "the f...

Dan and Leah survived an eleven-hour drive, a basement "murder bathroom" straight out of Barbarian, and the humbling reality of vending books at a zombie movie convention. Welcome to Living Dead Weekend 2026 at the legendary Monroeville Mall. They break down what indie authors actually face at genre cons: the economics of competing with $5 DVD stacks, the split-second power of cover design, and why one patron-saint reader buying fr...

Comic creator Laurie Calcaterra joins us to break down the world of Path of the Pale Rider; her genre-bending indie comic where death isn't a virus or magic, it's just broken. The "living impaired" keep rotting, brains decay at different rates, and even animals rise again, turning every meal and moral choice into a survival equation. We dig into what makes this series unlike anything on the shelf: QR code scavenger hunts, hidden vi...

We finally watch George A. Romero's Resident Evil — the 2025 documentary unpacking one of horror's greatest what-ifs, and trace the whole messy story: Romero hired by Constantin Film in 1998, his meticulous approach to studying the game scene-by-scene, the commercial footage that proves he could have nailed the tone, and the moment "creative differences" quietly buried a zombie legend's game-faithful script. Along the way we ...

This week we settle a burning physics question; can an inflatable pool "self-level" on a hillside, or is it doomed? To answer this very important question, we welcome scientist, science teacher, and zombie sci-fi author Jill N. Davies. Jill writes the kind of body horror that will make you cringe in her Kara Mason Story series, a world rebuilt after the outbreak where the promise of a cure becomes a power structure, fear becomes po...

We crawl back from the zombie plague with a fever-dream catch-up that somehow turns into a sharp conversation about power, autonomy, and who gets to make the rules. We dig into our HOA annual meeting; a real-life "Survivor" moment where alliances formed around one loaded question: do we leave each other alone, or do we pile on rules to control what neighbors do on their own land? From petty bylaw enforcement to short-term rental pa...

In this episode, we dig into the real-world tools for communicating and coordinating without cell towers or cloud services: Meshtastic mesh radios, ham radio via Winlink and JS8Call, GMRS repeater networks, and the more radical vision of Reticulum — a cryptographic network stack built for a post-internet world. We also cover the surprisingly active landscape of community mesh networks already running in cities like New York a...

Horror and zombie author Joseph Pesavento joins us to dig into what really drives undead fiction; the freedom, the collapse of rules, and the uncomfortable truth that the living are often the bigger threat. We trace his writing journey from a childhood journal inspired by Nickelodeon's Doug through film school screenplays to seven published books, and get into the practical, unfiltered reality of going indie. Joseph also breaks dow...

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 unity, and ...

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 mat...

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 Montgomery bus boycott ...

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 recognize...

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,...

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 dehumaniz...

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...