zombies - WKTV Journal

Author Jennifer Armentrout with “Locally Entertaining” host Joanne Bailey-Boorsma. (Video by WKTV)

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.

World War Z

by Max Brooks

If you like history books, if you like apocalyptic scenarios, and especially if you like books about zombies, then “World War Z” by Max Brooks just might be the right book for you. Brooks writes as if he is interviewing various survivors from all over the world 10 years after the end of the Zombie War that almost wiped out humanity. From the mouths of the people who lived through it, we hear about the

first warning signs in China and South Africa, different ways the virus spread and how leaders in all countries refused to believe and then tried to blame everyone but themselves for the mass deaths and re-animations.

The narrator interviews key figures in the war, including such notables as the author of the South African scheme that started to turn things around and the leaders in charge of the ultimate “take back the world” strikes towards the end.

The book – was made into a movie in 2013 starring Brad Pitt – is full of both historically-accurate and invented details covering many countries and cultures and if you ignore the zombie content, reads just like a

collection of oral histories. I especially loved the section on Japan’s homeland evacuations, and the multiple viewpoints of how China, Russia and the

Ukraine all responded to the swarms of living dead.