K. Marvin Bruce

I recently read a zombie novel.  That’s not entirely true.  I recently finished a zombie novel that I had been reading since last autumn.  Maybe late summer. Monster books have always been among my guilty pleasures.  The monstrous captures the imagination like no other topic, filling me with boyish thrills, frissons of possibilities unimagined.  I read vampire novels (drawing the line at Twilight) and werewolf books, when they can be found, are even better. Zombies, however, just don’t seem to work for me.   It’s not that I have anything against zombies.  My first piece of published fiction was a zombie story.  The problem isn’t the topic, but the suspension of reality.  Zombies are believable enough.  In my story the zombie identity isn’t revealed until the end.  There’s a reason for that. In a novel, where the story stretches on over many, many pages, your rational mind creeps in and thinks, this is impossib...

The first story I actually had accepted for publication was “Hide and Seek.”  It appeared in Danse Macabre XXXIII, Erzählungen (March 2010).  Danse Macabre subsequently changed servers, and my story is no longer available there.  I’m hoping eventually to have some of my short stories republished in a collection, but first I have to get more of my short stories published period. I remember clearly the inspiration for “Hide and Seek.”  One day during lunch I’d wandered to the space around a vacant building.  It was one of those single-story, multi-purpose monstrosities with no real character or charm.  The parking lot had weeds breaking through the pavement, and the building on either side, probably built by overly optimistic speculators, also stood vacant.  It was rather peaceful. Having been a writer since a very young age, I habitually carry either paper or a notebook in my pocket.  I found a bench with chipping paint, sat down...