MM: In a pop culture currently inundated with all-things-zombie, your debut novel is being promoted as a new take on the whole zombie concept. What is your new spin on the ambulatory dead?

JFT: Dust approaches the undead using the three magic words: "That's somebody's mother." Zombies are the monstrous reanimated but they're also our friends, our family, our loved ones, our children, they're not just living dead but our once-living dead and in this story, that matters. The undead have minds and memories, they have a "life cycle" of their own (rot to dust), there are emotional ties between humans and the undead though both sides are also consistently murderous toward one another, and zombies aren't a walking contagion – they've always existed, humanity has always existed in an uneasy détente with them, and nobody knows or can predict whether a dead body will reanimate or remain in the ground. Now, however, the numbers of the undead are increasing at a record rate, humans are feeling increasingly hemmed in and pushed out, and there's a race on to reduce their numbers by any means possible, before they reduce humanity to mere meat. (Shooting them won't work, either.) And some humans, knowing that what they're targeting is those they once loved, start getting some subversive ideas of their own.

MM: What was your first exposure to horror media – your earliest memory of a horror movie or TV show?

JFT: This doesn't fit the traditional notion of horror, I know, but when I was young I was allowed to watch pretty much anything broadcast on PBS – it was "educational" television, after all – and the uncensored I, Claudius was quite the education for an eight-year-old. John Hurt's Caligula scared the hell out of me right out of the starting gate, clutching his head and screaming about the horses' hooves pounding inside it, and then there was the infamous (and cut from future rebroadcasts) scene where he decides to do to his sister's unborn child what Cronus did to Jupiter, and honestly once you've seen that Bela Lugosi can't really compete. A couple of years later – this was back when VCRs were still novelty items – a friend rented the original Halloween and I remember her screaming out loud and me hiding my face during most of it, though it was downright decorous compared to the glut of slasher films that followed.

MM: What gave you the idea for Dust?

JFT: As I mentioned at the SDCC zombie fiction panel, it was a combination of a death in the family, subsequent nightmares about what must be becoming of their body underground, a great fondness for Night of the Living Dead and Carnival of Souls (the original versions) and the sudden realization that although there were a few books from the zombie vantage point, nobody – to my knowledge, anyway – had really addressed, without being campy about it, what it means if a monster is merely the corpse of someone's loved one, somewhere. If you're going to speak of zombies in relation to who they once were when alive, they pretty much have to have emotions and memories and lingering ties to life of some sort, despite their essential monstrosity, and that was the genesis of everything that followed.

Also, since zombie fiction tends to go hand in hand with apocalyptic fiction, I wanted to address the idea of "everything" ending in a slightly different way. In the Ray Bradbury story "The Highway" a gas station attendant in a very rural part of Mexico gets a carful of American kids stopping by, and they're in a screaming panic about nuclear war finally coming and they have to flee to parts unknown and oh my God this is it the big one it's the end of the world, and as they drive off the gas station attendant thinks to himself, in very sincere confusion, "What do they mean, 'the world'?" I loved that last line to pieces, when my high school English teacher assigned us The Illustrated Man, and so this is "the big one" as seen by a version of that character, someone who's already very far outside what everyone else thinks of as "everything."

MM: This is your debut novel – have you had any short stories or other works published?

JFT: This is my first. I've tried to write short stories but they don't seem to come to me naturally, and I was very worried my lack of a track record, as well as not having any personal connections in the publishing industry, would doom my chances right out of the gate. As it turns out, however, you really can get plucked at random from the slush pile at a fortuitous moment, so here we are.

MM: What's a typical day in your life like? Do you also hold down a job, and if so, how does your writing fit into your schedule?

JFT: I have a day job with a lot of immutable writing deadlines of its own (law), and so in order to work on fiction I get up much earlier than I'd like, sit in bed with the laptop and write or outline, no Internet or other distractions, until it's past time to shower, eat and run. The drive to and from the office is a good time to let my thoughts wander and the back brain work through ideas; I owe a lot of random bursts of inspiration to getting stuck in traffic slowdowns on U.S. 30.

MM: Let's hear about the book. Who are the main living characters? Who are the main dead characters? Where is the story set?

JFT: It's set in the Calumet region of Indiana, the industrialized northwest corner bordering Illinois and Lake Michigan (this geography is increasingly significant as the book progresses), in the here and now. Jessie, our protagonist, was killed in a car crash nearly a decade ago, rose up and is now a member of the Fly-By-Nights, a tiny, fractious undead gang whose territory is an abandoned county park. The Flies are her surrogate family, with an elderly paterfamilias (Florian, a centuries-old undead reduced to a walking skeleton), various "siblings" and "cousins" and a gang leader, Teresa, who's been vanishing for long periods amid rumors of a strange new disease that seems to target the undead. Humans barely figure at all in Jessie's life, other than as a meat-source everyone else seems to savor more than she does – until, one day, her living human family finds her again. And then everything really starts getting complicated.

MM: Zombie movies are pretty popular these days – would you like to see Dust on the big screen?

JFT: Given I like to joke that Dust is my big shot at "directing" a virtual B-movie I'd love to see a film version – though also given that one character's a walking carpet of maggots and another a full-on skeleton and pretty much the entire "cast" goes through profound physical transformation of one sort or another, you'd really have to pile on the CGI. Could I get Rick Baker to do the makeup, since this is all blue-skying anyway? It'd be an honor to get Rick Baker.

MM: Here's something I've always wondered: Was Frankenstein's Monster ... a zombie?

JFT: I was going to say he's not one because he required 50,000 volts to come to life, instead of spontaneously reanimating, but then a lot of "proper" zombies are also only with us because of top-secret medical experiments gone horribly wrong so I can't use that as the criterion. However, since Frankenstein's monster is a man-made aggregate fashioned from multiple corpses – not a singular corpse of a single dead person – I'll say no, he's not a zombie, any more than a hamburger patty slapped together from multiple meat sources is the same thing as a steak. (Of course, you do realize that since half of what lawyers do is sit around having arcane, insane discussions of how it all depends on what your definition of "is" is, it was unwise ever to ask me this in the first place – I'll be arguing it back and forth in my head now for hours.)

MM: Also: Is a mummy ... just a wrapped-up zombie?

JFT: A mummy is a right fool to leave behind a whole mausoleum full of fabulous wealth and luxury to go on needless killing sprees, ancient curses or no ancient curses, but as it's a "whole" dead human being (minus the innards in jars) restored to life you could certainly argue it fits the definition. I was never frightened of mummies, growing up, both because all the "King Tut" kitsch took the mystery out of them and because dealing with them was fairly simple: Don't become a greedy international grave robber and ninety percent of your problems are solved.

MM: Do you have another book, or books, in progress?

JFT: I'm well into a sequel, with the working title of Frail, which looks at the aftermath of Dust's events from the neglected human perspective – though as it turns out, defining "human" and "living" are much more complicated than it first appears. I'm also working on outlining several unrelated books, one of which I can already tell will be great fun because background research will require me to read both Satanic Panic and Helter Skelter. If I can somehow make the whole rhyming-research thing a theme then God knows what creative heights I could hit.

MM: Where on the Internet can folks find out more about your work, and where to get it?

JFT: My official website is at http://www.dustthenovel.com, with links to Amazon and Powell's and all the discriminating bookseller types. If you love reading writers saying interesting things like "I had soup today," or "Ow, my shinbone!" or "One-star book reviews are clear evidence of an international fascist conspiracy," you can also follow my Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/violetinbloom.

MM: Have I left out anything that you'd like to mention?

JFT: Just a plug for another book entirely: If you have any interest in the meat and drink, so to speak, of any thanatological issues at all – clinical and cultural definitions of death, the forensics of decay, step-by-step embalming, funeral customs, death-related superstitions and folklore, all of it – find a copy of Kenneth Iserson's Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies? I found a copy entirely by accident in my local library and it became my bible while I was researching Dust, as well as completely fascinating reading in its own right.

MM: Thank you for your time! :- )

JFT: Thank you for the chance to talk, and it's an honor to be featured on ChiZine!