Zombie Interview: Brian Evenson

Tell us a bit about your story, "Prairie." What’s it about?

Explorers from an earlier time travel into a country in which the dead reanimate. They experiment.  As time goes on, starving, the narrator watches his companions and friends die and then come back into a sort of half-life, and the prepares for his own end.

What’s was the genesis of the story–what was the inspiration for it, or what prompted you to write it?

I’d been reading Cabeza de Vaca’s 16th account of crossing North America after being shipwrecked and also had been rewatching Werner Herzog’s movie _Aguirre, Wrath of God_ which has a brilliant, mad ending.  I was interested, too, in thinking about how certain places seem to have a dark but magical quality to them.  Where the idea of bodies reanimating came from I don’t know.

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