By Joanne Bailey-Boorsma
joanne@wktv.org
A lover of zombie movies, New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Armentrout admitted she was afraid of the walking dead until her teen years.
“As a child I was scared to death of them because my mom, in her infinite wisdom, let us watch horror movies, and my dad would come home and it would always be the worst scene of the worst movie on TV,” Armentrout said during a recent “Locally Entertaining” podcast interview. Armentrout was in town Oct. 10 for a book signing and reading at Kentwood’s Schuler Books & Music.
Some of “those movies were film in Pennsylvania and those areas where they filmed looked very similar to the areas we lived in. It just terrified me, the idea that dead people could just start to come out of graveyards. because of that, I would never live within eye distance of a graveyard.”
Her solution to eliminate her fear was to face it.
“The only way I got over it was by forcing myself to keep watching it,” she said, adding that the would watch such cult classics as “Dawn of the Dead” and “Land of the Dead adding that the process kind of desensitize me from the fear.
“I ended up loving zombie movies then.”
Half angels/half humans, gargoyles, and aliens are creatures that Armentout tends to feature in her books that have an underlying theme of acceptance and working together. Her latest book “The Burning Shadow,” is the second in the second series of the Lux series. This series is about aliens living amongst humans with an underlying theme of just how far people will go to help and protect each other.
“Once [the first] series ended I felt like that really opened the doors in a lot of ways,” Armentrout said. “A lot of times as people, if we don’t understand, we freak out and make things worst. So I really wanted to explore how humans would react to knowing that yes, there is a lot of aliens out there.”
Armentrout is a prolific writer with more than 50 titles all written in the last 10 years covering an array of genres: action, adventure, and romance for both young adults and adults.
In her young adult books, she has the second book in the Harbinger series, “Rage and Ruin” coming out in June. The series follows a half-human, half-angel and her bonded gargoyle proctor working to stop an apocalypse. The next book in the Lux series, The Brightest Night, will becoming out in October.
For more on Jennifer Armentrout, check out the “Locally Entertaining” podcast or visit her website, jenniferarmentrout.com.
