Zombie Book Club

We’re recording from a hotel bed at The Saguaro Palm Springs , hungover, sun-sensitive, and happy, after driving cross-country from Vermont for our friends Eric and Joe’s wedding. Zombie stories keep telling us the same thing: the monsters are never the point, the survivor group is. The wedding felt like proof, a tight-knit chosen family where everyone looked after each other. We briefly discuss w...

We’re recording from the least glamorous studio imaginable: a camper bed in Kansas, in full “dead bug pose,” while tornadoes, flooding, and rerouted travel plans turn the Midwest into a live weather report. Two weeks into our road trip, we’re tired enough to be incoherent and honest about it. We dig into what RV campground life is really like, from a party-heavy New York park with live music and s...

What if the apocalypse isn't a sudden event, but the slow breakdown of the systems we depend on to survive? In this episode, we look at what climate collapse could mean for ordinary people by 2050: failed crops, flooded roads, extreme heat, wildfire smoke, and a power grid that can't keep up. We dig into the 1.5°C target, climate tipping points, and the quiet loss of predictable seasons,...

Zombie Book Club is hitting the bad road for real. Dan and Leah are heading cross-country in their camper to a wedding in Palm Springs, with senior dog Ziggy, Rod Zombie riding shotgun, tiny chaos agents Lil D and Harmony Bear. They break down the route, the remote-work realities of camper life (antennas, solar, lithium batteries), and how they'll keep the podcast alive with bulk recording an...

Dan got his zombie novella, The Bad Road , back from a beta reader with thousands of tracked edits and lived to talk about it. We talk through the real, unglamorous mechanics of revision; accepting changes one at a time and building the instinct to write clean sentences from the start. We talk about why feedback stings, why "genius" is a myth, and why taking ego out of the equation is wh...

Bestselling zombie author Kate L. Mary returns to the podcast to talk through what a realistic survival plan might actually look like, how you'd know it's really happening, and why a slow, confusing outbreak is scarier than the instant-chaos version we usually see in movies. We talk about getting family together, avoiding major roads and cities, and heading for the coast to escape by sai...

We sit down with award-winning author A.M. Geever to talk Steel City Apocalypse , a slow-burn outbreak story that traps its survivors inside a Pittsburgh zoo built to keep dangerous animals in (and, as it were, zombies out). We talk about plotting with evolving outlines, killing your darlings (scenes and characters alike), sunk cost, and why denial is the most realistic thing about the zombie apoc...

At 17, illustrator Yuxel "Green Mann" G. has already built a distinct style out of zombies, gore, and dark humor. We talk about the childhood moment that turned fear into fascination, growing up during the Walking Dead era, and the artists (Tony Moore, Jhonen Vasquez, Aaron Alexovich) who shaped his eye for art that's equal parts creepy and charming.  Then we talk about making art i...

Jo Salazar is back to celebrate the biggest twist in her writing career: her self-published zombie novel The Dead Weight has been acquired by Sourcebooks Fire and relaunches as If We Survive the Night on August 25th. We talk through the wild, one-DM-at-a-time path from indie hustle to a traditional book deal, what changes (and doesn't) when a title and cover get a makeover, and why a title ma...

The open, weird, human internet you grew up on is dead, and most of us kept scrolling like nothing happened. From Web 1.0's personal sites and forums to today's "narrow web" of a handful of platforms, the internet had changed is big ways that shift ownership from the people to a handful of greedy tech billionaires. We talk about dead internet theory and the real Cloudflare data...

We're revisiting Will Smith's 2007 I Am Legend , theatrical cut and alternate ending both, to unpack why swapping the finale flips the whole film from action-hero sacrifice to something far more morally complex. We start with Richard Matheson's 1954 novel, detour through the earlier adaptations The Last Man on Earth and The Omega Man , and get sidetracked (as always) debating whethe...

We welcome horror author T.J. Payne to talk about Intercepts , a sci-fi horror thriller where a secret government facility tortures prisoners into becoming "antennas" who can hijack the senses of anyone on Earth. At the center is supervisor Joe Gerhard, a man who tells himself the work is necessary right up until his own daughter, Riley, becomes a target. We dig into the banality of evil...

Dan finally admits what he's been hiding: while everyone assumed he was still deep in his long-gestating zombie apocalypse novel, he secretly drafted an entirely new novella, The Bad Road , in two weeks flat. The origin story is almost stranger than the book itself; it started as a 3D-rendered, fake Instagram book cover of two bikers outrunning a dust-churning zombie horde down a dead-straigh...

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...

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 fo...

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...

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 journa...

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 des...

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...

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...

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 cu...

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 pe...

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 runn...

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 realit...

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; pro...