Constructing the modern zombie novel: Boy meets girl. Girl becomes zombie. Can’t live with her. Can’t shoot her. Sometimes love is complicated.

Zombies are all the rage right now. Everyone, it seems, loves a good zombie story. And how can we not? Cue Barbara Streisand: “People. . . . People who eat people. . . .”

Even my cat Ellis loves zombies. (I kid you not.) Really, it’s no surprise. Cats love a good chase. Zombie movies have those out the wazoo, along with enough other plot elements to appeal across a wide demographic: crashing cars, falling planes, burning buildings, guns galore, explosions, action, danger and adventure of all kinds, political intrigue—you name it. The best ones even have a bit of romance.

And the good news for zombie storytellers is that creating a zombie character does not exactly present the most difficult of writing challenges. Zombies are not particularly complicated. Not a lot of deep psychological layers here. The toughest problem in writing zombie dialogue is figuring out how to spell “Graaaaarrrr!” Zombie needs are simple. They’re very direct. They know what they want, and they go for it.

In fact, zombies tend to be a rather homogenous bunch. Most of them have similar back stories. They wake up dead one day, and realize they’re powerfully hungry. Only one source of food will do. They have a hard time putting their needs into words. But they know what must be done. They set out to do it. And there you go.

Now, scratch a journalist, and you’ll probably find a frustrated novelist underneath. Most great journalists love a good story. It’s what drives them and brings the occasional buttercup of joy to their otherwise cynical, flinty, shriveled hearts. But there’s one thing about the traditional zombie scenario that, while compelling enough as a story, might rub a journalist the wrong way: it can’t happen. Most zombie plots are based on something that’s absolutely impossible—people rising from the dead. And really, there’s nothing wrong with that. A good horror story doesn’t have to have one foot in the real world.

But what if one did? In fact, what if it had both feet planted in reality?

In real life the dead are the dead, and short of divine intervention, nothing is going to bring them back. True, in not every zombie story are the victims “undead,” but those usually revolve around some fictional disease that makes victims crazy. To count as a plausible zombie story, the scenario must be grounded in actual science. This rules out the walking dead, but does leave room for a fictional disease that makes its victims violent. A handful of zombie plots have done that. But let’s see if we can take our tale a step further, and make it reality-inspired. For that, “plausible” isn’t good enough. We have to find not only a disease but a pandemic that actually has struck in the past with zombie-like symptoms. And, of course, there’s never been any such thing, has there?

As it turns out, the answer is yes, there has. A pandemic that struck a century ago, encephalitis lethargica, claimed about a million victims, making a small number of them hyperviolent. The disease was even known as “The Living Death.” Eventually the malady disappeared as mysteriously as it had arrived, leaving nothing but questions in its wake. The disease agent was never discovered. Was it a bacterium? A virus? A fungus? An auto-immune reaction? No one ever knew. Nor was the method of transmission ever identified. Very spooky. What if the pandemic, or something very like it, were to come back, only in a much more virulent form? Could it? Of course it could. What would the world look like then? That sounds like a great premise for a novel.

So let’s do it! And here’s where the fun begins. Basing a zombie story on a real-life pandemic, as it turns out, presents some unique problems, but also some unique opportunities. Here are some of them.

The plague is real. And this means the zombies can’t be dead. They’re sick, but they haven’t yet kicked. In fact, you can’t even call them “zombies.” They’re real people, and they have rights. This would present a unique problem for the unafflicted, one not contemplated in the traditional zombie story. Specifically, from a legal standpoint, you couldn’t simply shoot on sight someone suspected of being sick. What to do? Here they come! And by the way, Mom is looking a bit peaked. And come to think of it, Sis seems a bit twitchy, too. Think fast.

The method of transmission is unknown. The real-life pandemic did not appear to move directly from victim to victim. So, the same must hold true for our novel. Were this to happen in real life, scientists would no doubt assure the public that no one can get the disease from a bite or from zombie blood. Yet, everyone seems to be getting sick. OMG—you mean there’s no way to avoid it? Outrunning the zombies won’t help you? How in the world would people protect themselves? Would the scientists’ assurances that victims are not contagious even be believed? Would you believe it?

Will civilization fall? And what are the implications of that? A big enough outbreak—and yes, we’ll base our novel on a really big one—would put civilization on the skids. Which would raise a question: has this happened before? As it turns out, there’s substantial evidence to suggest that human civilization actually has risen to great heights in the distant past, perhaps more than once. Recorded history goes back about 5,000 years. In terms of the written word, the time before that is completely dark to us. But mankind certainly was around well before then, and was armed with the same amount of brain power. In fact, modern humans appeared in our present physical form about 200,000 years ago. You may believe, as most scientists do, that we spent much of that time in the hunter-gatherer stage of civilization, chasing rabbits with rocks, grubbing for roots, and barely staying alive. Look at mankind’s incredible progress over the last 200 years alone. Is it reasonable to believe that it took us nearly all of 200,000 years to learn to write our names in the sand? Could it be that our current level of advancement is a repeat performance, and that every time our species picks itself up, something comes along and knocks us down? Something strong enough, say, to nearly kill us while destroying all of our records? Something, perhaps, very much like our zombie disease? If we’re going to base our novel on reality, and if the novel is going to present the threat that civilization might fall, then it makes sense to look for evidence that such a thing has happened in the past. And there is some. Let’s throw it in!

Is there anything else associated with the fall of civilization that we can make use of? Well, I’m glad you asked that, because the answer here, too, is “yes.” That would be comets. Now, plots wherein comets or asteroids smack our planet are old hat in science fiction. If any big comet ever actually has hit the earth within the past few thousand years, the historical records don’t indicate it. But there have been plenty of fly-bys. Would it be possible for a comet to have an adverse effect on mankind without actually striking the planet? Maybe. Records going back to the dawn of history are replete with entries associating comets with mass, civilization-threatening mayhem. In fact, such associations extend well into modern times. In 1664, a great comet appeared in the skies over Britain. Londoners gaped up at it in awe. Within a year, 100,000 of those very same people would be dead. This is historic fact, as documented in Daniel Defoe’s classic novel, A Journal of the Plague Year. Was there actually some kind of connection between the comet and the plague that followed? In 1910, the approach of Halley’s Comet led some to panic, out of fear the comet’s tail would brush the Earth and inject poisonous vapors into our atmosphere. People were making cash money selling gas masks and renting out space in basements.

Could it be that ancient record-keepers knew something about comets that we don’t? It’s certainly true that science has found no such comet-mayhem connection. However, it’s also true that scientists don’t know exactly what’s in comets. But they do know that comets are filled with mysterious organic chemicals. Did you know that you almost certainly breathe in a tiny amount of comet dust every day? All of this makes great ingredients for a scary story.

It’s also fact that mass extinctions on earth appear to follow a cyclical pattern—and one possible explanation is that some kind of celestial body, such as a comet or dwarf star traveling in a very long-period orbit around the sun, occasionally makes an approach close enough to cause life-affecting mischief here on Earth. (For an interesting discussion on one such possibility, look up “Nemesis Star.”)

So, although this plot point requires the reader to put scientific skepticism on temporary hold, the idea that even fly-by comets really could be bad news for humans is not as far-fetched as you might think. So we'll do some research, and stir this into the plot as well.

And how weird of a coincidence is this: In the novel I write about a comet making an historic near-miss of the earth, at the same time a horrible plague breaks out. This summer I picked up my morning paper to read about a comet making an historic near-miss of Mars, which was happening while a horrible plague raged (in this case, Ebola).

Here’s an even bigger question: could the world-wide descent into madness envisioned in the novel be happening now, already? It’s not your imagination: the news has been getting more and more bizarre—one could also use the word “insane”—lately. We all know about incidents of mass unprovoked violence, which have been increasing exponentially. But that is not all. A couple of years before sitting down to write A Journal of the Crazy Year, a reporter friend of mind and I began a clipping file of “really weird stories.” Some were violent, such as the incident where a naked man attacked a stranger without warning and ate the victim’s face off. Others were just plain weird, such as couples making love in their seats aboard airliners and then refusing to stop when confronted, or strangers urinating on others at bus stations, and so on. I’ve been doing TV news for a long time but stories of this nature have begun to pop up only relatively recently. What could be next? In the first draft of the novel I wrote about a jetliner falling from the sky under mysterious circumstances in which it began to be suspected that the pilot had gone nuts and crashed the plane deliberately. This was months before the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. I wrote about flash mobs savagely attacking people at random, months before a mob did just that at a grocery store in Memphis. I wrote about terrorism flaring up again in the Middle East, months before any of us heard of ISIS. Let’s hope all these incidents turn out to be just coincidences. In the novel things get worse. Much worse.

And finally, if you’re going to write a novel about civilization ending because of what insurance underwriters would call “an act of God,” then you pretty much have to ask this question: Does God exist—and would He allow such widespread destruction to take place? A good way to explore such a thing in fiction is to have a character ask the question, and see what he comes up with. In our novel, John Cruz will ask it. John’s standing with God isn’t terrific. But knowing that time is short, John asks God for one thing: one good day with the love of his life, Maria. Just 24 hours. That’s all. Will he get it? And if he does, how will he repay the favor? John’s relationship with God forms the heart of our narrative.

When I sat down to write the novel, I had no idea that when the print edition came out (which it just did, with brand spanking new art) quotes would be available for the cover from some really nice reviews penned by well respected review outfits such as Publishers’ Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, but that has turned out to be the case. I hope you will check the novel out and find out why Publishers’ Weekly called it “a fascinating read all the way to its chilly, barely hopeful conclusion” and why Kirkus Reviews compared the writing style to Kurt Vonnegut and praises the novel’s unexpected ending, writing, “a truly unconventional ending makes for a worthy trip.”

Meanwhile, to the humble zombie, I say, “Long may you live!” Actually, that’s probably not the best choice of verbiage. But you get what I mean.