Zombies. Vampires. Two familiar icons of the horror genre that by all accounts are in danger of losing their ability to instill terror due to overexposure. Enter David Wellington, an author devoted to changing that. You might almost say it was a role Wellington was born to play, considering his birthplace of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is where George A. Romero famously reinvented the zombie genre forty years ago with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and secured walking corpses a permanent place in the modern horror fan's psyche. In just the past two years, Wellington has had a whopping five novels published: his zombie trilogy, Monster Island (2006), Monster Nation (2006) and Monster Planet (2007), as well as the first two installments of an ongoing series about vampire-hunting Pennsylvania State Trooper Laura Caxton, 13 Bullets (2007) and 99 Coffins (2007). A third Caxton novel, Vampire Zero , is due in October 2008. Mr. Wellington took some time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions for FearZone.com about his life, his unusual writing process, and what makes his zombies and vampires stand out from the crowd.

Being born in Pittsburgh, how soon did you become aware of the city's zombie-related history? Ever try out for a role as background zombie #14 in any of Romero's sequels?

I never got a chance to be a zombie, no -- I was only fourteen when Romero made DAY OF THE DEAD, and there aren't a lot of teenaged zombies in that movie. I was aware of the films from very early on, however. In Pittsburgh George Romero is a local hero and they used to play his films on the local TV station, unedited. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was probably the first horror movie I ever saw. DAWN OF THE DEAD was great because we used to go shopping at the Monroeville Mall, so it plays out in stores where I used to get my school clothes.

How did you get into writing, and what drew you to the horror genre in particular?

I don't remember a time when I wasn't writing. At six years old I wrote my first story, which was called "Santa Claus vs. The Smurfs." I don't remember it very well but I think it was all over a horrible misunderstanding. Horror for me started with Peter Straub and Stephen King. My mother reads three books a week. When she finished a book she would put it on the coffee table and I'd be allowed to read it, and whatever interested her was bound to fascinate me. She's always been a staunch supporter of free speech and an enemy of censorship so when she read Salem's Lot or Floating Dragon she would put it on the table with the rest. "I won't tell you that you can't read this," she would tell me, "but it's going to give you nightmares, so maybe you shouldn't." Well, if your mom tells you that you shouldn't do something, that's the first thing you're going to do. So I read the books, and had nightmares, and went back for more. I couldn't get enough!

You received an MFA in Creative Writing from Penn State. Who did you study under? How did your teachers and classmates respond to your genre proclivities?

I studied under Charlotte Holmes and William Cobb, who were very good teachers but who had probably never read a genre novel in their lives. They didn't know how to teach someone who wanted to write that stuff. They had no respect for that stuff. They thought that stuff was taking away attention from the really important books -- you know, the ones about creative writing professors going through sad divorces and raising kids in a world they no longer recognized. They thought my stories were juvenile, and I thought their books were about as exciting as volumes of tax law. So there was some tension. I learned a lot in those two years, but mostly I learned it from the other students, who were much more open to what I was doing -- they recognized that good writing was good writing regardless of where it ended up on the library shelf.

You moved to New York City shortly after the events of September 11, 2001. How big of a role did that play in imagining the desolate, ruined New York City featured in the Monster novels? (You also worked for the United Nations, just like DeKalb, the hero of Monster Island!)

I came to New York in August of 2002, just before the first anniversary of September 11th. People were still scared, or at least anxious, and there were soldiers everywhere still, and certainly that had some impact on the book. I think it had more to do with the loneliness and alienation of being in a new place, though. I only knew a few people here, I still couldn't find my way around, and for a while I didn't have a job so I was reduced to wandering the streets all day when there aren't so many people around. New York was a pretty spooky place to me at the time and I started imagining what it would be like if I was the only living person there. When I got the job at the UN, as a sort of glorified librarian, that added a geopolitical angle to the book. Zombie apocalypses are supposed to happen everywhere, all over the world, but most zombie stories take place in very small locations, often in claustrophobic bunkers and small towns. I was meeting people from every country on Earth and I wanted to tell a story about what the end of the whole world was like, not just the end of one suburban neighborhood.

Your road to publication was a rather unusual one. Monster Island first appeared as a Web serial on industry insider Alex Lenciki's brokentype.com. How did this process start? Was it difficult to keep to a regular schedule for new chapters? Were there any problems selling Monster Island and its sequels to a publisher after it appeared online?

It started over a lot of beer and not enough sushi. Alex thought it would be a great idea to put one of my books on his website, and we hammered the plan out over a very long session of drinking Sapporo while the waiters kept asking us if we were done with the table or not. The whole time we were talking I was looking at this inflatable Godzilla toy on a shelf behind Alex's head and when he asked me what the title of the book should be I said, without hesitation, "Monster Island." It was my plan to take six months after that to work up an outline, to do some character sketches, and do a lot of research. Alex, who gets a little bellicose when he's drunk, said, "Screw that. You start next Monday." So I had to research, plot and proofread each chapter the night before it went up on the website. It was a hectic five months -- I worked on the book on my lunch breaks and after work and my wife -- my girlfriend at the time -- almost gave up on me, but it was so much fun I had to keep going. It must have worked out okay because suddenly I was getting a lot of hits and people were returning every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to read the next chapter. Before I knew it Thunder's Mouth Press was emailing me and asking if they could buy the book and print it. I said yes, but with the provision that it had to stay online, for free, forever. Or at least until I decide it's time to take it down. They had no problem with that.

The Monster universe is a very different one from what we find in other zombie novels. Whereas most zombie stories have a science-fictional explanation for reanimation, whether it's a virus or gas from the Venus Probe, you chose -- without wanting to give too much away here -- a more fantastical explanation, one that allows for characters like Gary, an intelligent zombie who can not only pass for normal but can also control the undead. Why zombies, and what inspired you to turn an entire subgenre on its head?

The book started with a very simple image, of an astronaut walking down 42nd street in a space suit after some catastrophe had killed off everyone else on earth. He wanted to be home, to find his place, but if he took off the suit he would die like everybody else. The zombies came in after I saw 28 DAYS LATER and the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake -- my astronaut needed some monsters to fight or the story was going to get very dull, very fast. Eventually I lost the space suit and it turned into something quite different. As to what made me want to do something different, well, any good writer wants that. Who wants to write the same thing somebody else wrote last year? They probably did it better than you could, anyway. So whenever I start a project I look for a way to tweak the source material, to find some new angle in it. My zombies didn't just eat brains, they ate everything. They would eat the bark off of trees. They would pry gum up off the street and eat that. Gary came about because I was thinking about the biology and physiology of zombies. Why are the dead so mindless? It occurred to me that when they died the oxygen supply to their brains was cut off and that caused massive damage to their cerebral cortexes. But if there was some way to die while keeping the brain oxygenated, well... it was an intriguing idea.

I could ask the same about the Laura Caxton series. What made you want to write about vampires in a market some might say is oversaturated with them?

It took a long time for the book of Monster Island to come out, almost eighteen months. I had nothing to do in that down time but wait for something to happen. I started reading a lot of vampire books and I noticed that the really popular ones were about vampires who dated and had sex with mortal women. That confused me. Dracula was not a sensitive, poetic soul you would want to date. He was a nasty, smelly monster who killed you. That was what he wanted, to kill you, and if there were repercussions he simply did not care. So I decided I would write a vampire story about vampires who were just predators, who were addicted to blood and didn't care how they got it. I went back to Central European folklore and found the vampires I was looking for -- they were a lot more like zombies back then, and you would not want to share a latte with one and talk about where you grew up and all your hopes and aspirations. Again, I guess it was just a question of not wanting to do what everybody else was already doing to death.

You seem to be having a great time playing with established vampire tropes. Garlic, mirrors, crosses, they all have no affect on your vampires, though at first Caxton thinks they will, and of course there's a funny scene involving a bat and a nervous, submachine gun-wielding cop. How did you decide which tropes to keep and which to bury at the crossroads?

It's funny. I get email all the time from people who are upset because my vampires don't "follow the rules." If you look at the actual vampire myths, and vampire literature written before 1930 (when Bela Lugosi played Dracula), there are all kinds of contradictory stories. Originally the only way to kill vampires was with a silver bullet (you burned werewolves at the stake), or by cutting their heads off and burying them with the heads upside down, or by scattering poppy seeds around their graves. Terry Pratchett has a great bit in one of his books where all the methods work, but only locally, so you have to ask a vampire where he grew up before you knew whether to cut his head off, burn him, or stuff a lemon in his mouth. I thought I would play around with the sillier vampire myths and just use the ones that made sense to me, the ones that made for a better story.

99 Coffins, the second in the Laura Caxton series, delves deeply into Civil War history. Are you a Civil War buff, or just a research junkie?

The latter. The Civil War part of that book was supposed to be a pretty minor subplot, but when I started doing the reading I got so intrigued by it that I had to keep expanding and expanding it -- now it's about twenty percent of the total book. I love reading history. It's full of all the best stories, and it gives you a great perspective on modern life.

The plot of the third book, Vampire Zero , is being kept pretty tightly guarded. Any scoop you'd like to give our readers?

Anybody who read 99 Coffins and knows how it ends can probably guess what it's about. There are going to be plenty of surprises, though!

You've serialized six novels online so far at davidwellington.net, including two that haven't been picked up by a publisher yet: Frostbite , a werewolf novel set in the Canadian north, and Plague Zone , a stand-alone zombie novel that takes place outside the Monster universe. Do you plan to keep serializing novels online now that you're in print?

I love serializing. You get instant feedback on anything you put online and it's a great way to get to know my readers in a way most authors never can. I have ideas for books all the time, and I can only publish, at most, two a year. I see the serials as a way to explore ideas that may not be as commercially viable as the books I sell. The serials will always be free to anyone who wants to read them.

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David Wellington's Website