Confessions of my Past, Present and Future
by
Stephen Kozeniewski
The Past
The year was 2001. I was a young
college student, full of piss and vinegar, and a cadet in the US Army ROTC.
The ROTC program took a field trip to Antietam, site of a major Civil War
battle, and our major takeaway was that undulating ground had decided the
course of the conflict, though what, precisely, constituted undulating ground
remained a bit of a mystery.
The next day brought us to Harper's
Ferry, another important Civil War-related site due to John Brown's famous
raid. Far up on a mountain top lay the entrance to a mine, perhaps, or
some kind of door whose purpose was lost to history (at least, as far as a few
tourists from Pennsylvania were concerned.)
"Doesn't that look like the
entrance to a zombie emperor's lair?" asked Colin Chappell.
And with that, my interest in zombies -
emperors or otherwise - was ignited.
This was in the dark days, the long
long ago, before "The Walking Dead", the "Dawn of the Dead"
remake, or even "28 Days Later", (a movie whose status as
"zombie" horror will be left undebated here.) Zombies were
dead, so to speak, a relic of the '70s and '80s, remembered only vaguely and
mostly for being hokey.
But...something was happening. Something seismic. Perhaps at that same moment, I like to imagine,
somewhere in the central Pennsylvania countryside, a young author named Brian
Keene was working on the magnum opus of zombie horror, a little something which
at the time he called "More Than Infinity". I like to think maybe at that
moment when Chappell, who was always ahead of the learning curve, was pointing
at that strange door in West Virginia, Keene was sitting down and typing
"Chapter One" in the Pennsylvania mid-state. But no one will
ever know if that was the case, I suppose. No one ever can know.
