Kenn and Damion Varson

  One day when I was in college, a bunch of us student types drove over to Bisbee, Arizona to stay at the Copper Queen Hotel, which is said to be haunted.  On the counter at the front desk was a registry book in which guests could write in and recount their paranormal encounters.  I read a few pages and found a pattern of people seeing ghostly faces in reflections from TV screens, windows, mirrors and metal surfaces.  That fascinated me to no end and I spent the entire night looking at every reflective surface in our hotel room.  Never saw a dang thing.  That's not the point of this blog.
  Weeks later, back in Tucson, some of my college buddies and I rented some vampire movie to watch one night.  I don't remember the title, but in the movie, the vampire tried to conceal the fact that he didn't have a reflection so that he wouldn't be found out by people.  I thought to myself, he wouldn't have a problem if he just stayed at the Copper Queen Hotel.  That is what sparked an idea in my noggin.
  What if that's how a vampire keeps his secret is by using a ghostly reflection as his own to pass off as human?  I had to think up a plausible scenario to explain such an arrangement between a soulless body and a disembodied soul.  So what if two brothers were walking outside one night and were attacked by a vampire? Okay, so far so good.  Let's say one of them is killed and the other one is turned into a vampire himself.  That's how we can have this non-reflection concealment scheme.  Thus were born the characters of Kenn and Damion Varson who are two of the main characters in my first novel.

Body and Spirit

  In the Nocent series, both the bodies of the zombies and their disembodied spirits are a part of the story.  There is a psychic medium, named Sam, a psychic child and a talking parrot who can also communicate with the dead.  At different times, people are able to speak with their passed on loved ones through these mediums.  In one instance, the body of Lowe's mother is outside while Lowe is speaking to her through a medium.  Her spirit his helped to enter into the light, while someone performs a mercy kill on her body.
  An entire chapter of part 3 is from the point of view of the spirit of a teenaged girl who is watching her body, which is now a zombie, commit terrible acts which she has no control over.  All she can do is silently witness the atrocity.  In one of the sequels, there will be a man who is trapped in a house because a zombie has chased him there.  It turns out that the house is haunted by the very spirit of the zombie who is clawing at the walls trying to kill the man.  Boy, that would freak me out!
  I have really enjoyed writing these stories with the added dynamic of spirits which once possessed the bodies of the undead.  A hallmark of zombie literature and cinema has always been the person who has been bitten and doesn't want to end up as "one of them".  It's a deeply and richly emotional dimension that I've tried to add to my stories.  Zombie stories are, after all, human stories.  Beyond all the blood and guts has always been a heart that you rarely see in other monster tales.  Zombie stories usually explore human relationships and psychology under extreme duress in a way that most stories in any genre usually dare to.  They are usually a backdrop during which conversations of a deeply spiritual nature are shared without condemnations of whose religion is right or wrong.  Where else do you ever see that?  That's why I like watching, reading about and writing about zombies so much.