Once upon a time, I was the President of the HWA, and during my tenure I warned a lot of people over getting excited at appearing on the Bram Stoker Awards Preliminary Ballot. The Preliminary Ballot, I’d tell them, really doesn’t mean anything; you can’t say you’re a nominee yet (although a lot of people DID, receiving rather sterner warnings).
But yesterday my book The Art of the Zombie Movie appeared on the Preliminary Ballot…and I’m utterly thrilled, despite all those cautions I used to dole out.
Why? Because I may have never worked harder on a book than I did on this one. Unfortunately, due to weird issues with the publishers, it was dumped onto the market (in October 2023…or maybe September 2023, I’m not really sure) without review copies, so even this much of an acknowledgment feels significant.
Why was it such hard work? some of you may be asking. Isn’t it just a bunch of zombie pictures?
Given the imaginary voices arguing in my head, I trust you’ll indulge me here if I describe what goes into making a book like this.
It all started in 2021, when I was approached by a company called Elephant Books asking if I’d be interested in writing or editing a book called The Art of the Zombie Movie. Elephant Books is actually not a publisher; they are a “book packager” that specializes in putting together illustrated books that they sell to actual publishers, thus saving those publishers the work of having to oversee creation of the book. Many years ago, Elephant – who knew me through my work with Stephen Jones, who’d created the volumes in his Art of Horror series with Elephant – had asked me if I’d like to edit a book called The Art of Vampires. For that book, I would have acted as editor, assembling big name writers to contribute each chapter. I did just that, getting agreement from the likes of Leslie S. Klinger and Sir Christopher Frayling (yes, I really did that).
Then the book didn’t happen.
So, when Elephant asked me about doing The Art of the Zombie Movie, I said yes…provided I was the SOLE author, because frankly I didn’t want to again go through the embarrassment of inviting major writers to contribute to a book that might not happen. Fortunately, Elephant agreed. We assembled a few minor, preliminary pitches.
And they sold the book (to Applause Books). I signed a contract on 12/23/21 (talk about Christmas presents!). On 12/29, I received a detailed schedule of my tasks from Elephant.
The first item was “headword and detailed pic lists in” (by March 28, 2022). I had absolutely no idea what any of that meant.
Somehow, until that point, I’d had no idea that it would be up to me to deliver the illustrations…all FIVE HUNDRED or so. Because I had a small army of people I was working with – including a main editor, a layout artist, and a “picture editor” – I thought someone else did that part.
Ha. Haha. HAHAHA! Nope…that was me. I had to deliver all of the text AND all of the illustrations.
So I got to work.
I made two decisions immediately: 1) I wanted the text to really dig into the history of zombies, not just in film but also in the folklore leading up to the films, and I wanted the history to be full and real – in other words, I would not dismiss or ignore the colonialism of zombies, and how race absolutely played a factor (zombies, after all, came right out of Haitian vodou, a religion which combines Catholicism and indigenous African beliefs, and was the principle religious system of slaves who were forced to work sugar plantations and mills in the Caribbean); and 2), I wanted the art to not just reprise the usual well-trod realms of classic American movie posters, but to utilize some of the vibrant, exciting art found in both foreign cinema and the contemporary alternative movie poster world.
With those two goals in mind, I began. On one hand, I read everything I could find on the early, pre-1932 folklore of zombies (which always led back to William Seabrook’s 1929 book The Magic Island); on the other hand, I dug through sites like alternativemovieposters.com and Deviant Art, combing the internet for exciting images. Looking for those images became a kind of mad shopping spree, and I soon realized I’d need a better way of keeping track of my images than just dumping them all into one big folder.
So I created folders for each chapter of the book, and then added the images to a Word doc that also included links and facts about them (see illustration below).
Now, here’s a peculiarity of doing one of these Art of books with Elephant: they already had a template which included essentially an entire alternate text in the captions. Seriously – in addition to the main chapter text (and sidebar features), I was contractually obligated to deliver a whopping 27,000 words of just captions. Do the math (27,000 words divided by 500 captions) and you’ll see that breaks down to 54 words per caption. I wasn’t kidding when I said that the captions formed an entire alternate main text.
Work moved along. I kept digging for images (including a number from my own collection and from the bowels of the George A. Romero Archives at the University of Pittsburgh), researching, watching movies I’d somehow missed along the way (I really had already seen a LOT of zombie movies), writing text and captions, and generally designing the book in my head. I was thrilled to uncover some facts I’d been unaware of, like how Clarence Muse, who steals 1932’s White Zombie in an uncredited performance as the coachman, was actually a major figure in the history of Black American cinema, or how my favorite pre-1968 zombie film, I Walked With a Zombie, was actually co-written by a woman (Ardel Wray). I found new favorite films (the Japanese One Cut of the Dead). I discovered new favorite artists (I even shelled out for a signed and limited copy of this Dawn of the Dead poster by artist Elvisdead, which, sadly, we ended up being unable to use in the book).
The book progressed, I managed to meet all the deadlines…and then the small disappointments set in. The picture editor found out that some of the contemporary pieces I’d fallen in love with were unavailable, either because the artist no longer owned the rights (they’d worked as a “hired gun” and had given the rights along with the actual art to someone else), or because the artist asked for exorbitant licensing fees (we had like ZERO budget for that kind of stuff). I had to shuffle. I had to rewrite. In one case, I had to ask an artist friend for a piece when the things we tried to license were unavailable (fortunately, my dear friend Greg Chapman came through like a true champion with a splendid portrait of George A. Romero as the frontispiece for Chapter Three).
I was told to find someone to write a foreword. I asked Daniel Kraus, who’d co-written The Living Dead with Romero. Then I was told to find someone ELSE to write an introduction. I was ecstatic when Romero’s Night of the Living Dead co-author John Russo said “yes.” We moved Kraus to the afterword, and plugged in Russo for the foreword.
Layouts began to materialize. I worked through changes with my army. We soon had a rough draft of the book…but changes kept materializing up to the last second, mainly because of rights issues with various images. Every image change meant a new caption. Because I’d pictured the captions as having their own narrative arc, swapping out captions was seldom just a matter of replacing a description of the image. I’d done everything from extensively research certain vintage artists who reappeared over and over to provide in-depth facts on small elements of certain productions. At the same time I was working with the editor to make sure the text was both as factual and as entertaining as we could possibly make it.
The final book was delivered on time, in early 2023… in other words, more than a year after I’d signed the contract.
A YEAR. Let that sink in for a moment. During that year, I’d approached retirement age, my mother died, an estate was settled, I wrote other things…but that was over a year of my life I gave to one book.
I hope you understand now why I’m proud of the book, and consider it more than just a collection of zombie pictures. Although I hope it’s that, too.