It’s time to clear the hotel.
The fort has grown crowded as survivors of the zombie apocalypse have found safety between its walls. Winter is coming; soon it will be too cold to live in tents and other makeshift shelters. The leaders of the survivors—Katie, Jenni, Juan, Travis, and Nerit—decide it’s time for an assault on the zombie-occupied hotel that looms over the town square.
A pitched battle in the banquet room is the start of a harrowing, room-by-room struggle from Reception to roof. As the sun sets, the people of Ashley Oaks gather in the hotel’s rooftop ballroom and gazebo to celebrate their survival. Gazing out over the beauty of the surrounding Texas countryside, it’s hard to believe that death and danger lurk around every corner.
The fort’s search and rescue teams have attracted unwanted attention from bandits who see the fort as competition for food . . . and as a ready source of women. The first attacks are minor, but everyone knows there is worse to come.
And beyond the fort’s walls, the zombies shamble, moaning, eyes fastened hungrily upon the living.
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*~*~*~*
About The Author
Rhiannon Frater is the award-winning author of the As the World
Dies trilogy (The First Days, Fighting to Survive, Siege,) and the
author of three other books: the vampire novels Pretty When She Dies and
The Tale of the Vampire Bride and the young-adult zombie novel The
Living Dead Boy and the Zombie Hunters. Inspired to
independently produce her work from the urging of her fans, she
published The First Days in late 2008 and quickly gathered a
cult following. She won the Dead Letter Award back-to-back for both The
First Days and Fighting to Survive, the former of which the Harrisburg
Book Examiner called ‘one of the best zombie books of the decade.’
Rhiannon is currently represented by Hannah Gordon of the Foundry +
Literary Media agency. You may contact her by sending an email to rhiannonfrater@gmail.com.
Women, Society and the
Zombocalypse
By
Rhiannon Frater
I honestly didn’t set out to write a feminist
take on the zombocalypse when I started writing AS THE WORLD DIES as an online
serial. I just wrote about the sort of people I that exist in my everyday
life. The characters all evolved
naturally as I wrote, as did their complicated relationships and sometimes
disastrous choices. It was only later
that I fully began to understand how ground-breaking having two female leads in
the genre actually was.
Admittedly, Jenni and Katie were born out of my
desire to read a zombie story that was from a woman’s perspective. AS THE WORLD
DIES was born as online serial in 2005. At that time zombie fiction was
inundated with the lone gunman wandering across the zombie-infested lands.
Women, children, and men who weren’t Rambo in disguise were merely zombie
fodder. The women played the roles of
the love interest (who often died), the victims, and the zombies. It became demoralizing to read over and over again
stereotypes that bore no real resemblance to any of the women in my life. So when the characters of Jenni and Katie
invaded my mind one day at work, I wanted to write their story and share it
with others.
When I started the serial, I wanted to write
about real men and women with flaws and strengths struggling to rebuild society
in the zombie wastelands. If history has
shown us one thing, it’s that humans survive in communities. I didn’t want to
create a world of alpha males and subservient women, or vice versa. I wanted to write about real people dealing
with real life issues while facing the undead hordes. I didn’t want to shy away
from the difficulties of creating a new community. Differences of opinion,
religion, culture, etc. were definitely going to cause problems at some point. Little
did I realize that the issues my characters tackled in the online serial (which
ran from 2005-2007) would become hotbed issues in 2012. Religion, gay rights, and gender equality are
all topics the people in the fort are forced to deal with while still dealing
with bandits and zombies.
STRONG FEMALE CHARACTERS
Oddly enough, I never thought about any of the
females in my story as being “strong” or unusual. The positive feedback to the
characters was definitely a reaction to all the stereotypical women in these
kinds of books. People were genuinely surprised to read such positive
portrayals. The readers weren’t surprised that the women were strong and
competent; they were surprised to see an accurate portrayal of themselves,
their wives, their girlfriends, mothers, and sisters. Quite a few male friends
have told me that they loved how certain female characters reminded them
strongly of the women they love. Female
fans have also shared how refreshing it was to see women doing the types of
things they would do in the zombocalypse—like killing zombies.
Jenni and Katie aren’t wonder women or
superhuman like Alice in the Resident
Evil films. They aren’t perfect either. Each has to deal with the aftermath
of the destruction of their lives and they don’t always make the right
choices. But they aren’t afraid to fight
for their own lives and those they love. They step up and take part in the
planning of the new community and fight for the survival of everyone.
THE REGULAR GUYS
Though I get a lot of kudos for my female
characters, I don’t feel that any of my male characters suffer from standing
alongside competent women. I didn’t want
to resort to the alpha male stereotype with my male characters, but I also
didn’t want to weaken them. Travis and Juan play vital roles in the story and
are just regular men facing horrible circumstances. They understand that to survive everyone has
to work together and have their own strengths and weaknesses. One of my greatest compliments was when
someone told me that he could totally see himself hanging out with my male
characters because they were just “dudes.”
THE BIGOTS
There are, of course, men that don’t like the
women playing such a strong role. One of them, Shane, becomes a dangerous foe
to Katie when she has to kill his brother after he becomes infected. It’s in Shane and his cohort that we see a
more dismissive attitude toward women and other people in general. Shane and Phillip are great at entering the
zombie-infested towns and salvaging for supplies and serve the community well,
but their attitudes toward women, especially bisexual Katie, creates serious
problems for the burgeoning society in FIGHTING TO SURVIVE. Shane and Phillip challenge the rules of the
new society with their behavior. One particularly upsetting scene between Shane
and Katie immediately causes a rift among the people in the fort as people take
sides in a “he said, she said” battle.
FRIENDSHIPS
One of the things that’s often missing in
fiction, especially post-apocalyptic fiction, is the strong friendship bonds
that exist among people. Often the
survivors are not really friends, but people thrown together that just barely
get along. In AS THE WORLD DIES,
I enjoyed portraying various types of friendship bonds. There are best buddies,
Juan and Travis, BFFs Ken and Lenore, and Jenni and Katie’s strong, sisterly
friendship.
Though people comment on all three friendships
as being refreshing and similar to ones they share in their real lives, the one
that stands out the most is the friendship between Jenni and Katie. Women are
not often portrayed as being friends in fiction. In fact, a lot of heroines are
often the only women in the book. Jenni
and Katie’s friendship was one of the things my editor at Tor really enjoyed.
It’s so rare to see female best friends who love and support each other.
Usually women are portrayed as rivals. Since I have close female friends in my
life it felt only natural to have Jenni and Katie be close.
In closing…I am very
happy that readers embrace the characters and feel they are an honest,
realistic version of people they have in their own lives. I am also pleased that readers have enjoyed
the dynamics of the new and growing society in the middle of the zombocalypse.
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