Interview with Author Joseph Hirsch: Scribe of Mutating Histories, Humanities, and Other Horrors

About the Author

Joseph Hirsch (he/him) is the author of several published novels and novellas and many short stories, articles, and essays. His new horror novel, Church of the Last Lamb, is available in print and eBook from Underground Voices. His nonfiction has appeared in Fight Hype and Film International. He holds an MA in German Studies from the University of Cincinnati. He is online at www.joeyhirsch.com.

About the Works

Stories in Horrific Scribes

“Red in Tooth” is in Horrific Scribes, June 2025. James Parkworth has waited almost a decade to get revenge on disgraced dentist Herbert Goss for what he did to his wife and countless other women. But just because James has the drill doesn’t mean he has the upper hand, as Goss has one last crime to reveal.

“Mama Bear” is in Horrific Scribes, August 2025. Grace is still grieving over the death of her son, Josh, by heroin overdose. Among the things he left behind is a stuffed teddy bear intended as a gift to his nephew for his upcoming birthday. Mom, rather than passing the gift on to its rightful recipient, keeps it for herself as a last memento of her deceased son. Soon, though, the gift reveals its malignant side. Or perhaps Grace is slowly losing her mind…

“Teufelsrad” is in Horrific Scribes, February 2026. Two young women from America are deep in Bavaria, seeking out the origin of the “Teufelsrad” (“Devil’s Wheel”), a ride popular on modern fairgrounds but with much deeper roots. The girls are about to find out just how deep those roots go.

Church of the Last Lamb

Church of the Last Lamb is at once a throwback to classic zombie horror works like Dawn of the Dead and more contemporary postapocalyptic fare like 28 Days Later. And yet, despite wearing its influences on its sleeve, it blazes its own trail and offers novel horrors that will surprise even the most jaded of gore hounds.

It’s been more than a decade since the dead rose from their graves and began feasting on the living. Thankfully, Professor Jonathan Greenway and the woman he loves were given the protection offered by the U.S. Army at Fort Sagamore when things went to hell. But with supplies running low, the soldiers are starting to grow dangerously resentful toward the civilians in their midst, especially the intellectuals.

If Jon hopes to make any kind of future for himself and the love of his life, he must do the one thing he dreads: put down the books and pick up a rifle. He must also leave the safety of the fort and venture out into the land where the zombies run free, and death by devourment is a constant danger.

The Interview

The Horrific Scribes Stories (linked to Church of the Last Lamb)

“Red in Tooth,” Humanity, Nature, Extremity, and Teeth.

LAC: The first story you published in the Horrific Scribes archive, “Red in Tooth,” borrows its title from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H., which describes “Nature, red in tooth and claw” in contrast to a perhaps naïve vision of “love” as “Creation’s final law.” This story is freakin’ nasty—of the two main characters, one commits heinous crimes, and one takes heinous revenge. What does this heinousness suggest about Nature and Creation? In our first correspondence, we also discussed Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, to which Tennyson might refer, as it famously describes a State of Nature as a “war of all against all.” Do you think the violence of this story suggests that humanity, when it slips the constraints of civilization, is complete brutality? Why or why not?

JH: I think I can’t simply take a Manichean view of man in a state of nature versus man in a state of civilization. Both nature and civilization can be brutal, and both can experience extended periods of peace. It’s mostly based on luck or caprice. One of my favorite books—bloody, scatological, profound—is Simplicissimus, believed by some to be the first German novel. It begins with a hermit who has been not just living in nature, but in communion with it (and God) for a long time. Nature for him has been very peaceful, a fount of beauty and a reinforcement for his faith. He takes a young man under his care and begins instructing him in Christian teachings, essentially civilizing the boy while both live in the wild. Then the man dies, and the Thirty Years’ War sweeps the protagonist up. War is a part of the civilizational project—”the pursuit of politics by other means,” in Von Clausewitz’s formulation, and of course it is brutal. But nature can be brutal, too. Thus I can’t really come down on one side of the Hobbes / Rosseau divide. I enjoy modern medicine, for instance, but modernity also gave us mustard gas. Hell, the German scientist Fritz Haber created both modern farming techniques—unlocking atmospherically fixed nitrogen— and Zyklon, a delousing agent that one war later was turned into a means of eradicating entire peoples. Haber (himself Jewish) would have likely gone to the gas chamber and perished by a modified form of his own invention had he not died of heart failure previously in Switzerland. Perils await, in both nature and in civilization. I guess I’ll move according to where I perceive the danger at the time. Revolution in the city = flee to the countryside. Forest burning down = seek sanctuary in the city, or at least a fire station. I’ll let my instincts call the audible and let my feet carry me where they may.

“Mama Bear,” Category Range, and Depths of Darkness.

LAC: Because it emphasizes family trauma and focuses on what might be a ghost animating a teddy bear, I put your Horrific Scribes story “Mama Bear” in our Domestic and Hauntings categories (each story gets two), but it has a better claim to a spot in our Psychological category than some tales there, and it’s a model for horror categories we don’t represent, perhaps Evil Doll and Addiction. How do you feel about my choices for categorization? What do you think about this story in relation to categories/genre/subgenres? More than anything, this story makes me think about the film Requiem for a Dream (2000), which most people don’t consider to be horror (they’re wrong). Why explore addiction in a horror story, and what’s the connection between addiction and haunting? In Church of the Last Lamb, addiction is a weapon used by people who worship death, which seems like a rather harsh indictment of capitalist opioid drug-pushers. Is there a conceptual connection here?

JH: I guess categorization is a necessary evil, especially when it comes to catering to fan interest. Horror fans aren’t anywhere near as churlish and unforgiving as hard SF fans, but they still want to know what kind of dance they’re being invited to before they accept the invitation.

I never saw Requiem for a Dream, and while I admire Hubert Sellby, I have some problems with his slapdash / experimental style of punctuation. It was an outgrowth of the way keys were arranged on typewriters, and thus an expediency for him. I used a typewriter in my teens, mostly out of curiosity, but didn’t like the action anywhere near as much as a keyboard and so put the Underwood in the closet where it continues to gather dust.

My own interest / obsession with addiction is unfortunately based on personal experience. I’ve never been an addict—despite being prescribed pain pills and enduring multiple surgeries—but many of my friends and family members were, and they still struggle. I think we all know someone (or many people) who’ve died from drugs, especially now that synthetics have taken over and the dealers cutting the dope don’t always do their due diligence.

Addicts say that they remain addicts for the rest of their lives and can never really let their guards down, get cocky about having beaten their demons. “Once the needle goes in,” Larry Clarke said, “it never really comes out.” To me that sounds a lot like being haunted. There’s only so much difference between that “monkey on your back” and the impish tormentor monkey in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Green Tea, or the raven that torments the narrator with memories of Lenore in the narrative poem of the same name. The fact that addiction is so pleasurable (initially) also makes it a bit like the vampire scratching at the door or the beautiful siren calling to you from the waters.

The scariest thing to me is when some people just outright embrace the abyss, take on a fatalistic view of addiction. The actress Zöe Tamerlis (Ms. .45, Bad Lieutenant) said she believed in heroin. She wanted it to kill her and offered herself up to it as a sacrifice, almost like a religious sacrament, and the drug obliged.

“Teufelsrad,” (German) Folklore, the Revenge of History, Feminist Perspectives.

LAC: You have an MA in German Studies—what attracted you to that pursuit, and what continues to draw you toward German language and culture? Without giving away too much, I’ll say that “Teufelsrad” is folk horror that involves ancient German (Bavarian) traditions, and perhaps something more, taking a toll on the present, a revenge different from that in “Red in Tooth,” the revenge of history. What does “Teufelsrad” suggest about our relationship with the past? The story, like Church of the Last Lamb, at least considers feminist perspectives in relation to the historically dominant culture it represents. Do you see these works as championing feminist perspectives? Why or why not?

JH: I ended up getting into German Studies as a matter of mere happenstance. I was in the Army and ended up stationed in Darmstadt, with the 22^nd Signal Battalion. I have German roots (the last name is a dead giveaway, and means Stag), and I’ve always felt a pull toward the literature, writers like Grimmelshausen (who wrote the aforementioned Simplicissimus) or Hans Fallada (a pioneer in writing about the terrors of addiction). Once I read the expressionistic poems by Georg Trakl, my fate was sealed. The images in his work—the “feces-flecked” wings of an angel haunting a small town—are striking, rich, unforgettable.

As for history and our relationship to it, it looks like Francis Fukayama got a little too confident with his “End of History” take. It looks like Thomas Friedman’s supposition that two nations that both have McDonald’s chains don’t go to war is also wrong. It looks like we are all still hostage to historical forces; even the Napoleonic “big men” of history only have so much agency. A king on the verge of conquering a continent can get a cold and die or choke on a chunk of beef at a meal organized directly before he was supposed to sign a peace treaty. I guess this is good from a horror writer’s perspective, as history—both myth and actual occurrences—provides a rich fount of nightmare to draw from.

I’m not quite sure, though, that I share the Joycean take that’s been popular in academic circles for decades, that “history is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.” I see an ahistorical Bauhaus construction of glass and steel, and it enervates me, depresses me. I see ionic columns and architraves and gothic tracery windows, and it induces pleasant feelings in me, despite all the connotations of empire or assertions of superiority a large, well-built structure implies. This is probably more a matter of pure aesthetics than politics, but it would probably get me pegged as a traditionalist, anyway. At least as regards the kind of hotel I’d like to stay at, or what kind of library I’d like to visit.

I wouldn’t describe myself as a feminist or as anti-feminist. I simply don’t think there is a dialectical route to solving the human condition, or the war between the sexes (if there is even one.) My own weltanschauung is probably close to what someone claimed of Dickens: that he simply thought people should treat each other better. Or the old Henry James line: “Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”

The problem always arises, though, that someone will always arrive to take that kindness for weakness and will not stop unless stopped. Then you must either be unkind or die.

The Church of the Last Lamb

Beforetimes, Aftertimes: Old History, New History, and 1968.

LAC: Jon, the protagonist of Church of the Last Lamb, was a history teacher before the zombie apocalypse that created the novel’s world, and when your story starts, he is teaching “New History,” or the history of the post-apocalypse, at the insistence of the military. Why might a military—in your novel or otherwise—be interested in a “New History” superseding the Old, and why does Jon seem to resent the emphasis on the New? In this “New” world, zombie fiction exists as it does in our world, and George A. Romero is considered the “Bard” of the silver screen. Why do you make other fiction prominent in your fiction? Romero’s foundational Night of the Living Dead was released in 1968, a tumultuous year in American and European history. To what extent is your novel’s “New History” parallel to the world post-Romero, post-1968?

JH: I think Jon’s resentment of being forced to teach New History stems from his simply not understanding what it means. It’s a vague catchall, and I believe he suspects that Colonel Blanchard has given him the job of teaching as make-work, or even to hold Jon up as an object of ridicule to the soldier-students. The Colonel’s sadism may in fact be pragmatic; like most who rule by force, he probably fears challenges to his rule and would prefer not to leave the “losers” under the current system time to contemplate how they might win. “Idle hands,” are not only the Devil’s playthings, but they are very useful to the political revolutionary.

As for mentioning Romero and his works, that was homage as much as anything else. You can point to proto-zombie movies before Night of the Living Dead—and the old Haitian voodoo ones, in which slaves are revived and controlled with blowfish extract or what-have-you. But the modern genre as we know it really began with Romero. His taxonomy is still the one I respect and follow. In Apocalypse Now, Lt. Col. Kilgore said, “Charlie don’t surf.” I say, “Zombies don’t run.”

Zombies don’t run.

– Joseph Hirsch, Undead Authority

Mentioning actually existing cultural artifacts in a work of fiction is not something I usually like to do. It dates the work too quickly, pulls the reader out of the fictional world. I prefer the technique of a Ligotti or a Borges to that of a Stephen King. Not to pick on King, but I told my brother it’s like the man lacks object permanence sometimes. If he’s binge watching Blacklist with James Spader, his characters in his most recent book are going to be binge-watching Blacklist. This is not to say that King is not a master; it’s just a peeve of mine, this encroachment of real-world pop culture into a fictional setting. With horror especially, a lot of times I like to not know exactly where or when I am. Eraserhead was shot in Philadelphia in the seventies, but it exists in its own netherworld, outside of time. As a sidebar, King and David Lynch actually met in the studio commissary when King was going through hell shooting Maximum Overdrive and Lynch was breaking the confines of film grammar with his Oedipal nightmare Blue Velvet. I like Maximum Overdrive, by the way, and hope King’s son (Joe Hill) actually adapts the Emilio Estévez-written remake. This one would feature Guy Fieri of Dives, Drive-Ins and Diners fame being trapped in a truck stop by the machines on the rampage. Hopefully they bring back the Green Goblin and stick with the AC/DC soundtrack. If it ain’t broke…

Soldier, Civilian, Warrior, Egghead.

LAC: Much like “Red in Tooth,” Church of the Last Lamb has a lot to say about the brutality that lies beneath the human veneer of reason—again, perhaps Hobbes’s idea that humanity in a state of nature is a war of all against all. The human society in the novel is almost caste-based, with the soldier caste enjoying status and resources withheld from civilians and warriors often denigrating “eggheads” like Jon. Why does such stratification occur, and do you think something like it is likely or inevitable in such circumstances? How much does your own military experience inform your representation of military life and attitudes? The novel refers to “Sandbox” wars and the War on Terror—to what extent do encounters with cultists and zombies in Church of the Last Lamb reflect on U.S. soldiers’ encounters with militants and civilians in the Middle East?

JH: The conflict between eggheads and the soldiers in Church of the Last Lamb is a conflict I harbor within myself. I hope none of the characters in the book come off as caricatures, but the truth is that most of us are neither wholly jocks nor nerds, soldiers or eggheads. I knew some brilliant autodidact soldiers in the Army who didn’t graduate high school but could school you in chess blindfolded. Some of them were also absolute whizzes with electronics and mechanics, visual-spatial and applied hands-on stuff that left me looking thumbless and confused when I attempted to replicate what they were doing. I think the dichotomy between nerds and jocks kind of went out in the eighties, but since I haven’t been in high school for decades, I could be talking out of my fundament. It’s entirely possible that kids with pocket protectors are still getting their books “dumped” by muscleheads in lettermen jackets, getting swirlies in bathrooms while the class-cutters look on, snicker and smoke their cigarettes. But most of the really good computer programmers I’ve known have also been athletic. Their sport of choice might have been something niche like fencing, but they got outside and sweated. And I suppose after Jon leaves the gated fortress in Church of the Last Lamb, he discovers he has greater aptitude for the physical than he previously thought. I guess he learns outside the wire that letting either atrophy—the mind or the body—is not wise. But somewhere in there he seems to have forgotten his soul and does it too much damage to reintegrate into his previous cohort.

Believe it or not, I wrote Church of the Last Lamb once in first person, from Jon’s perspective. There were things I liked about the novel, but ultimately I chucked it because I found it too relentlessly interior and reflective. Watching Jon think was simply not “cinematic” enough, even for a book. Watching him act then afterward think was more compelling. In the Army, they called that post-combat assessment the AAR—the after-action review. It mostly consisted of a prosaic rundown of what went right and what went wrong on a mission, what could be improved upon. Jon’s own AARs are a little more complicated. He’s killing people—admittedly already-dead people—then standing back to assess how much of his own humanity remains afterward. Killing a child zombie seems to take something out of him. He’s no Ken Foree; that man gunned those two kids down in Dawn of the Dead with no remorse, and in that kind of situation that’s how you would have to be.

Too much of my own experience in Iraq went into making the book. But some of its descriptions and characters are inspired by my jaunts to Ciudad Juárez when I was stationed at Fort Bliss, in El Paso. The crime rate there was out-of-control then—cartels warring in the streets, kidnapping people, entire families fleeing either north to America or south to small Mexican towns—and it was stupid of me to go there. But I was curious, and I had my curiosity satisfied, long and hard.

Linguistic Registers.

LAC: The rich and versatile vocabulary on display in your Horrific Scribes stories appears in the novel as well, mostly because the bulk of the story filters through Jon’s educated point of view. How did you develop such an extensive word-bank, and how would you describe your relationship with words? In Church of the Last Lamb, how would you describe your characters’ relationships with words? Specifically, I note that you have soldiers and civilians (especially Jon) use different vocabularies, and when Jon, traveling with a group of soldiers, comes across another highly educated man, Jon literally translates the highly educated man’s English into simpler English for his military comrades. Beyond the caste divisions we’ve already discussed, what do the uses of these different linguistic registers add to your characters, their relationships, and their attitudes? Considering that zombies don’t speak but arguably do communicate, what’s the significance of the nonverbal in this book? How, in general, does language relate to the human?

JH: I suppose I would say that my relationship to words is… ambivalent. On the one hand, I love words (what writer doesn’t?), but on the other I’m aware that my love of words can sometimes get me into trouble—make my writing a little florid or showy.

There’s something Orson Scott Card said in one of his great books on writing that always stuck with me: “You can either have people believe your story or admire your words.” There are exceptions—Lovecraft, for instance, in which the language in some ways is the main character,and acts in an incantatory way so that the more you admire the words, the more you believe the story (and fear its monsters.) But for the most part I think Card is right.

The weird thing, though, is that just because a writer is aware of their own flaws (or the potential pitfalls), they can’t always avoid them. You see yourself making the same old mistake and still can’t quite bring yourself to stop making it, probably because it’s fun. That’s when what Cocteau said comes to the fore and what Card says goes to the aft. “What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.” Going over the top is not always fatal, and even if it is, sometimes it’s more fun to go out in a burst of flames.

But I can’t help admiring the plainspoken writers, those who boil the sentence down to its essentials, a Sherwood Anderson or, in the modern context, a great memoirist like James M. Brown. I don’t like a lot of Hemingway, though, because the simplicity too often becomes a form of self-parody. And of course I like ornamentation, maximalism, even writing others might criticize as bad. These are my two eyes, and I’ll read what I want with them.

A good story could probably be done on a linguist doing some “field work” with the zombies, trying to translate their groans into a series of intelligible signals. I always think of that haunting scene in Dawn of the Dead in which Fran is alone, in that department store, and the zombies are on the other side of the glass, watching her. First that one with the baseball glove, sitting there and tilting his head to the side like a confused dog, then the nun who gets her habit trapped between the doors. I suppose there’s a desire in us to anthropomorphize other creatures, even ones that want to eat us, maybe especially them. And of course those creatures are always happy to play along until they get close enough to bite us.

Masculinity.

LAC: We’ve talked a little about feminism, and the plight of women in your post-apocalypse becomes especially important later in the novel, but most of the novel focuses on male characters, their relationships, and their actions. What does a shift in focus to the life-or-death struggle to survive do to men and masculinity? What particular problems and pressures does Jon, an intellectual without the survival training of his military comrades, face with regard to his manhood? What does your novel say about bonding between and among men who work together through intense trauma, including the trauma of low survival rates?

JH: There’s a part of me that regrets not letting the Gayle character come on the road with Jon in the novel. I suppose that would have been impractical, but it seems the story loses something at that point and alienates a lot of female readers, who have found the co-ed scenes inside the city more interesting. I did consider—and actually try—writing a zombie story with very few zombies in it. There’s something fascinating about what I call the “Prince Prospero” scenario, focusing on people trying to ignore some external threat and pretend it doesn’t exist. George Romero does some intriguing things with the concept with his “Fiddler’s Green” housing complex in Land of the Dead. I remember the critic Roger Ebert saying he would like to see a film that focuses solely on life inside that compound, where the people mention zombies and think of them, but they are still some kind of distant threat—“durch Abwesenheit glänzen,” as the Germans say, literally “glowing (or shining) by absence.” But that probably would not be feasible; what horror fans are going to watch a zombie movie with no zombies in it? Or read a zombie novel that features no zombies? I would, but I’m more than a little bent, as you already know.

In Coco Shrijber’s documentary First Kill (the best nonfiction film I’ve seen about war) she interviews Vietnam veterans. One talks about becoming “highly sexed” in combat. The nearness of death seems to tweak the instinct to reproduce—I’ve got to pass on my genes before I die, no matter what. Setting young, frightened and desperate men loose in the countryside is dangerous, and rape—in the literal sense or just in terms of “rape of the land” / rapine—is almost guaranteed to happen. I like strong women in fiction—science fiction / horror—but the fate of female fighters historically captured in combat, especially when they were in drag, dressed as male soldiers—was not pretty. Gayle—the female lead in Church of the Last Lamb—is pragmatic and undoubtedly recognizes this fact of a land without law. She’s named, by the way, as a nod to Gaylen Ross from Dawn of the Dead. Ms. Ross is now a successful documentary filmmaker, and she sort of changed the course of women in horror films. In the screenplay, there was a scene where her character, Fran, gets attacked by a zombie. The script said, “Fran screams.” But Gayle looked at that, shook her head, and told George Romero, “I’m not screaming.” Romero, ever-accommodating, agreed to try it Gayle’s way, found the scene worked better, and the rest is history.

The Existential, the Spiritual, the Need to Eat, and the Inevitable “We Are Them.”

LAC: Richard Matheson’s proto-zombie novella I am Legend (1954) and Romero’s zombie films from Night of the Living Dead forward never shy from tackling social and religious issues, and the best works about walking corpses have followed that tradition, Church of the Last Lamb included. Your novel, however, is even more philosophical than most. Jon seems to spend a lot of time at the edge of the Void, contemplating not only humanity’s possible end but its insignificance and his own insignificance within it. What’s your novel’s vision of humanity’s place in the cosmos, and how do zombies help communicate that vision? Other than the zombies, your novel’s major antagonists belong to a cult that worships death. Why? Characters reflect a great deal on religion, wondering especially how God could have allowed the post-apocalyptic conditions to have come to be. Are total human catastrophe and divine benevolence reconcilable? Do you see a coherent religious vision behind your novel, or do you see it as more focused on asking questions? The need to eat, a basic human drive that links us with the animals, is one of the zombie’s primary generators of existential horror—the drive to eat human flesh is the zombie’s sole motivation—but almost as often as you describe characters’ horror of being reduced to zombie food, you describe them satisfying their own hunger. What does your novel say about eating and hunger? How does it relate to an idea that comes up in a lot of zombie fiction, in the title I am Legend as well as The Walking Dead (2010 – 2022) and others, i.e., the idea that humans and zombies are the same… or at least two sides of the same coin?

JH: I grew up going to Catholic school, and, as the old saying goes, “There are no former Catholics, only lapsed Catholics.” You also hear a lot of people say they are “spiritual but not religious.” In a strange way I’m sort of the opposite. I’m religious but not spiritual. I pray, read the Bible, even sometimes go to church, but it’s like I’m tending a very wan flame, not quite just going through the motions but just about.

I look at people of strong faith very much like former drug addicts. They can’t get too overconfident, as the abyss is not only waiting, but sometimes chasing them. Some are unshakeable in their faith, but almost anyone can question God’s existence if something bad enough happens to them. The loss of a child can do it, I think. That said, there’s a whole subdiscipline in theological apologetics that deals with this issue called theodicy. How can an all-merciful, all-powerful God allow evil in the world? Does He have no control over it? Then we must concede He is not all-powerful. Does He allow it despite His omnipotence? Then He is clearly not all-merciful. One apologetic tract argued that God’s relationship with us is a bit like a parent bringing their baby to the doctor. The baby has learned in their short time on Earth to trust people, especially their parents, who hopefully tend to all their needs. Then, for seemingly no reason, this parent conspires with another adult to hurt them—jabbing them with a needle, sticking a wooden spoon down their throats until they gag, shoving some cold implement in their ear. The baby cries, and the words the parent and doctor say sound like echolalic babbling, nonwords.

Supposedly this is analogous to the suffering God allows to be visited on us in this world. It has a meaning, perhaps just to test our faith, allowing us to exercise free will rather than just being automatons. I say “supposedly” because I’m not much of a proselytizer (I’m barely a believer) and can’t make this kind of decision for someone else. The idea is out there, though, and has been out there for a long time. Some gnostics go even further, arguing that God is light but the world is surrounded by a dark caul through which that light simply cannot penetrate. It’s like the inverse-square law applied to a deity instead of the sun, unless you worship the sun, in which case you have a scientific explanation for your god’s grace or his neglect. I suppose the remaining members of the cult of Sol Invictus have it easy compared to the rest of us. To paraphrase comedian George Carlin, the sun is easy to worship, because it’s actually there.

Regarding our close consanguinity with our undead brethren, Romero, in one of his more candid moments, put it this way: “Everything that’s alive will one day die. We are the walking dead.” It’s even worse than that, though. SF writer and science populizer Ben Bova said that our cells begin making inaccurate copies of themselves—and telomerase problems begin appearing—as early as adolescence. The reason? Once we pubesce we can make copies of ourselves, at which point we’re redundant. “We” may not even exist. There’s an argument—related to Dawkinsonian ideas—that our genes just conspire to create the fiction of “Me” in order to make vertical transmission (i.e. breeding) easier. Zombies want to eat us from the outside while we’re already being zombified by our genes, who allow us to live with the fiction that there is even an us—rather than a them—to even defend.

Speaking of Walking Dead: The Post-Apocalyptic Road Narrative. (Un)Death. and Story Structure.

LAC: Speaking of The Walking Dead, after the introductory scenes at Fort Sagamore, Jon sets out on a mission with the aforementioned military comrades, and the novel’s form becomes, arguably, a road narrative with an episodic series of horrifying action sequences. Were you influenced by the travel-defined structure of The Walking Dead and/or other post-apocalyptic road narratives such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006)? Maybe a weird tangent, but Jon’s comrades call themselves “The Chum Bums,” which summons the horror of becoming zombie food but also makes me think of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958) and through that On the Road (1957). Why “Chum Bums,” and were you thinking Kerouac at all? To introduce possible contradiction, while I see an episodic road structure in your novel, I could also break it into five acts, following the classic Aristotelian structure with introduction, rising action, etc. How do you view your novel’s structure? Going back to the earlier question about Old/New History, in stories with a post-apocalypse such as Max Brooks’s Ward War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006) and Romero’s Diary of the Dead (2007), the question of how the apocalypse’s history will survive gets reflected in the form of the fiction. How does your novel’s structure reflect on the problem of post-apocalyptic history? How does your structure relate to the problems of written records that (avoid spoilers!) eventually become central to your story?

JH: I think I was more influenced by picaresque novels than by road novels. Not that Jon is much of a picaro—the soldiers mostly see him as prudish and a wet blanket. With McCarthy, I feel like a philistine confessing this, but he’s one of those geniuses whose style I just don’t like. The long strings of declarative sentences with multiple coordinating conjunctions in Blood Meridian hit my ear like a child banging pans against each other.

“You got to read No Country for Old Men,” my brother tells me, to which I always reply, “Seeing the movie spoiled that opportunity for me.” How do you envision anyone but Javier Bardem as Chigurh—those dark shark eyes and that ridiculous pageboy cut—when you try to imagine that character in your mind’s eye? I saw that movie at the exact right time and place, too, while living in El Paso, Texas just before getting out of the Army. After sitting in the darkened theater with my friend for about twenty minutes, I thought, So this is what it was like to actually be in the theater watching The Godfather when it came out. Catching a timeless masterpiece on its initial run is a rare occurrence.

As for Kerouac, I like some of his more traditional novels, but the “scroll ones” in which he writes in long, stream-of-consciousness flows influenced by improvisational jazz always left me cold. I’m with Capote there. “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” It’s just a personal preference and again a matter of aesthetics. Someone who finds that style liberating is likely to find my formalism stultifying. And it’s not as if these opinions are written in stone. Ten years from now I may go back and read Blood Meridian or On the Road and say, “These are incredible. I was truly a fool.” Most likely, I am a fool.

Regarding “postapocalyptic history,” I suppose it’s a question of faith, again, not necessarily religious but at least quasi-religious. If the civilizational project is coming to an end—if the only people who will thrive in this world burn books—should one even attempt to write books? Why bother? Most likely the military junta in my novel would prefer to put those pages to more practical use, which is to say, as toilet paper or fodder for a fire to keep warm. On the other hand, even killers and barbarians recognize the value of keeping a couple scribes and eggheads around. Scribes can write of your heroic deeds, even compose songs, which bards can sing to spread knowledge of your doings even to the uneducated masses. In Escape from New York, Brain made the gas that made the cars go. In Church of the Last Lamb, Dr. Warnocky is rumored to have created a chemical solution that can drop the zombies in their tracks, essentially killing the undead for good.

Recent, Current, and other Post-Post Apocalyptic Plans?

LAC: Since the release of Church of the Last Lamb, you’ve published the novel Animal World. What can you tell us about it? On the surface, at least, it seems very different (as each story you’ve published in Horrific Scribes has seemed very different from the last). What will fans of your Horrific Scribes stories and Church of the Last Lamb find as similar “Hirsch” elements to love in Animal World as well? Do you have anything currently in the publication pipeline? Current projects you can tease us about? In short, what’s next?

JH: I’m not quite sure where Animal World came from. I don’t always like thinking about works in terms of other preexisting works, but that kind of shorthand helps explain your stuff to others, and describing Animal World as an updated Dog Day Afternoon is not too wide of the mark. It’s about a preop transsexual who fell in love with a violent con while in prison. Now both are on the streets and trying to reconcile their love with the stigma it would bring down on the hardened con’s head if word got out that he was infatuated with a transexual. His peccadillos were overlooked in prison but won’t survive scrutiny by the streets. The solution the lovers hit upon is to pull off a job that will make them rich enough that they can create their own little world away from the streets. It’s sad, but I suppose that is in some ways the American dream. To retreat, build a big house, put a gate up around it, and ignore the suffering outside the walls, Prince Prospero-style, your own personal Fiddler’s Green. I’m guilty of wanting to do the same, and generally agree with Celine, that there’s only one reason to get rich, and that is to forget. I’ve got my sorrows to forget and would prefer to drown them in an infinity pool rather than a bathtub ringed with grime.

I’m not sure there’s much of a throughline through all of my works, a connection or a singular hobby horse than keeps me obsessed from project to project. Others would have more insight into that since they’re on the outside looking in. One of the Coen Brothers (I forget which) said someone came up to them and said, “Many of your movies like Raising Arizona or Barton Fink or The Big Lebowski are about the dealings of less powerful younger men interacting with more powerful, older men.” The Brother in question could only shrug and say, in essence, That’s true, but we didn’t conceive of it that way, or even realize it ’til you told us.

Is there thematic overlap between Church of the Last Lamb and Animal World? There may be, but someone who’s read both would probably be more qualified than yours truly to point out that overlap. I admire William Friedkin, who created both The Exorcist and To Live and Die in L.A. The former film is a horror masterpiece, the latter a neo-noir masterpiece, but beyond that I’m not sure what they have in common, except that Friedkin’s DNA is embedded deep into both, which gives those works their timeless quality.

I’m always writing, or editing, or researching a project. Most writers start out with the short story and move on to novels from there. I seem to have done it backwards, though that’s probably a good thing. I believe the short story is a much harder form, as you have less time and space, and it’s harder to lull the audience or head-fake them. I understand writers like Borges who regard the novel as moribund, but I still like the form. Someone—I forget who—once said a novel is a form of writing that has something wrong with it. That makes it ideally suited for me, since I have something wrong with me, too.

As to specifics, I just wrote a short story, “Binky,” about a bedwetter and his magical, urine-soaked blanket he uses to exact revenge on those who mock his condition. It’s horror, of course. Also “Selection,” a short about a high school student who discovers the locker of another student killed in a DUI accident is a portal to another dimension, not only one of sight and sound, but of mind.

Thank you, both for the interview and for reading Church of the Last Lamb. And the support and interest. It’s nice to know someone cares. But (and this is to any writers just starting out), don’t let indifference or even resistance get to you.

Remember what Kit Reed said:

“If you are going to persist, understand that there are people in hobnailed boots standing in line for the privilege of trampling the white flowers of your imagination.”

Just keep tending your garden, anyway. As long as the roots stay healthy, there’s only so much damage those boots can do.

LAC: Thank you for the fascinating answers!