Over at Permuted Press, they’re releasing some great new books, especially some dark, apocalyptic fiction. I’m going to be doing some interviews with a few of the authors/editors there so I hope you’ll take the time to check out their work.

First up, Kim Paffenroth.

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To start, can you tell me a little about yourself.

I'm a professor of religious studies and at first I wrote theology books. But even in those, there was kind of a dark side – sin, theodicy, evil, doubt, that whole looking into the abyss thing. And I also wanted to look not just at scriptures and narrowly theological works, but at pop culture – movies and novels that affect more people than just believers. So I wrote Gospel of the Living Dead, a look at Romero's zombie films and their moral outlook and their critique of our society. And that made me think it was time for me start writing my own zombie fiction.

How long have you been writing and how did you get to this point in your career?

That's a really convoluted journey. I wrote a lot of fiction when I was in middle and high school. My mom died when I was 14, and that made me write even more, I assume as an outlet for a lot of the anger and hurt I had. I'm sure none of the writing was any good, but it was useful for what it was, at that point in my life. But when I went to college, I stopped from the first day I got off the bus in front of the dorm. I just didn't need to anymore right then. Instead I read everything I could, and kept on reading through grad school and my years of teaching. And somehow it was all preparing me for another crack at writing in middle age. I never could've planned it that way, but I'm glad it went the way it did, as I think the lull and the absorption and fermentation of all those ideas over a couple decades made my writing better (not that I say it's any good – but it's better than it would've been).

You have a new book just out, Valley of the Dead. Tell me what inspired you to write this?

I've been fascinated by Romero since I saw Dawn of the Dead in its theatrical release. When I read Dante in college, I found it matched up with a lot of the questions I was having about God and grace and evil at the time. So maybe it was inevitable the two come together – first in my analysis of Romero's films (which draws heavily on parallels with Dante), and then in this version of Dante (which draws on Romero's zombies as analogous to Dante's damned).

I have a keen interest in dark fiction. Tell me how you would classify this book and what’s dark about it?

Boy, that's hard, 'cause I think people sense and respond to different kinds of darkness. In other words, there's plenty of killing in this book, and then that gives way more to torture, sadism and cruelty – and I guess most people would call those things "dark." But for me, as I was writing it, those became (as I think they do in Dante's poem) just the landscape of Hell – you take them for granted. What for me was dark (and was an addition to Dante's original, though I'm willing to bet not totally unfair to him and what he went through in his real life), was seeing a man of profound faith come to the edge of losing it, to see him consumed by doubt and anger, until he repeatedly wishes he could just sit down and die. And I don't know that he ever regains his faith: he keeps a faith in beauty and love, he even gets back a little faith in humanity, but I didn't want to make it clear cut at the end that he's fully at peace with God, after what he's seen. There's a reason we use the phrase "child-like faith" – it's because it's the kind of faith we don't have as adults, but that faith we have as adults is a sometimes a grim, dark, most unsatisfying affair.

This book draws from Dante's Inferno. Tell me about that.

What I take away from Romero are three main things that I see meshing perfectly with Dante. First, both men are incensed against the society they live in (as are the Hebrew prophets, many of whom use ghastly and violent images in their works), and they use their fictions to castigate their contemporaries. So don't be surprised at my swipes at modern day American society (though I hope they're hidden enough to be subtle and fun). As to the zombies and the damned, there are two main resemblances. Dante says that the damned in the upper levels of hell are guilty of less serious sins, for they "made reason slave to appetite" and "lost the good of intellect": well, that's a zombie right there – a mindless machine pursuing its endless, unquenchable hunger. So I have Dante encounter mostly zombies first in his journey through the valley. But Dante claims that in the lower circles of hell, people are guilty of much worse things, sins that are not just appetites run amok, but are acts of deliberate, calculated cruelty and deceit. So in my story, Dante increasingly encounters more live humans and their perverted abuses of both the living and the dead. It's a wild ride that I think anyone will find dizzying and enjoyable, whether or not they know the original.

Sometimes we have to be ruthless in writing/editing. We cut scenes, eliminate characters or even kill them off. Tell me what was the hardest of these in this book.

I can think of lots of those instances in my other novels, so I know exactly what you mean. But this time – no, I'd read Inferno so many times by the time I sat down to write this that I knew exactly what was going to happen. I knew what sins I wanted to leave out and which ones I wanted to focus on. If anything, I had the opposite experience – this time, new ideas kept creeping in, and I kept most of them, because they enriched and complicated the story so well.

This blog is called Random Musings, so give me a random quote from the book – something you’re particularly fond of.

"And with an empty feeling in his chest, Dante wondered why such a cry did not bring the mountains' stones crashing down on them, if such pillars were held up only by love and justice, and not by the kind of brute, soulless force that could noiselessly withstand the assault of so much power, passion, and pain." Gives me chills every time I read it and I can barely get through it when I try to read it out loud in public.

What can we expect from you next?

This year has a lot coming for me. My first novel, Dying to Live, will be out in a new edition from Pocket Books this fall. My novelette, Orpheus and the Pearl, is also coming out at the same time in a new edition from Belfire Press, bound with a story by the fantastic Dave Dunwoody. Then the third installment in my Dying to Live saga will be out early next year. And I'm shopping a non-zombie novel at the moment: I think like every zombie author, I'm looking forward to publishing something without my favorite monster, just to prove to myself that I can.

Where can we find you on the internet?

Blog: Gospel of the Living Dead
Twitter
Web site: Just the blog. Updated regularly and I like to keep it nice and tidy with lots of links!

Book trailer:

Any final comments or thoughts you’d like to convey that you haven’t covered?

Just that I love to interact with fans, so please stop by, leave a comment, or if you see I'm at a con, come and chat for a bit!

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It sounds like you have a lot coming, Kim! Thank you very much for taking the time to answer these questions, I really appreciate it. Best of luck with the books and please feel free to drop by again with your next installment!