Colin M. Drysdale's Blog, page 22

A Plague On Both Your Houses – A Shakespearian Zombie Story

Mercutio struggled to break into the crypt which held the bodies of Romeo and his young bride. The fighting between their two families had gone on too long and had cost too many lives, including his own. The need for revenge burned deep within Mercutio’s body and it was this which had brought him back when he should have remained still and lifeless in his grave. He knew he wasn’t alive as such, instead he was little more than a walking corpse; he couldn’t think clearly, he couldn’t speak but he could move and what was left of his mind was consumed with an overwhelming desire to wreak revenge on those he blamed for his untimely death. With his dying words Mercutio had sworn to bring a plague on both their houses and now he was able to move again, he was going to make it happen. This wouldn’t be a biblical plague of locusts or some creeping disease; instead it would be a plague of his fellow dead, and at their head would be the two young lovers who’d died because their families bore a grudge for reasons none of them could even remember.

Having been dead for more than a week, Mercutio’s muscles weren’t as strong as they’d been in life and he struggled to get into the crypt. Somehow he sensed that since he wasn’t alive he couldn’t heal himself, and that if he damaged his gradually-decaying body he might not be able satisfy the desire for revenge he felt burning through every fibre left of his being. He knew this meant he should be careful, but this hunger drove him onwards. Risking injury, Mercutio put his full weight to the door. With a sudden groan he finally broke through and he tumbled forward. Instinctively he put out his arms to try to break his fall, snapping off two fingers as he hit the ground. Mercutio stared at them for a moment, watching as they skittered across the earthen floor and came to rest against the wall of the crypt. He wasn’t alive so it didn’t hurt; instead it was just inconvenient. Leaving them where they lay, Mercutio slowly pulled himself to his feet and looked around. In the moonlight spilling through the broken door, he could see the bodies of the newly-married bride and her secret groom lying next to each other. Soon, like Mercutio, they’d move again, and then he’d send them to do his bidding, bringing the same havoc to the lives of their warring families that they had brought to his. When he was finished with them, the Capulets and the Montagues would be no more and Verona would be a better place for it. Then, and only then, would he let these star-crossed lovers rest, side by side, hand in hand, for all eternity.

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You can download a PDF of this story here.

Author’s Note: The idea for this Romeo and Juliet-inspired flash fiction zombie story was born out of a post by my fellow zombie author Jack Flacco on his blog. If you want to check out that post, and indeed the comments where the first seeds for this story were sown, you can find it here.




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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

What Is A Zombie Apocalypse?

I sat down today intending to write an article on the different ways a zombie apocalypse could come to an end, but almost immediately I ran into a problem: before I could consider how it would end, I’d first need to know what exactly what I was talking about when I said a ‘zombie apocalypse’. As I thought about this, I realised that even though I commonly use the phrase, I’d never come cross a definition of what a zombie apocalypse actually is. So, in this post, I’m going to try to come up with some sort of definition.

One Zombie Does Not An Apocalypse Make: The first thing to sort out is whether all occurrences of zombies are indicative of a zombie apocalypse, and I think the answer here is a resounding no. If you only have a single zombie or small groups of them then, while it might be scary, it’s not an apocalyptic event. For a zombie event to be apocalyptic, it needs to involve a large number of undead, shambling around, or, if you’re into the more modern zombies, running.

Contagion: The second thing to consider is how the number of zombies changes over time. If zombies are just the dead risen and walking around, but normal people are not turned in them, then I would argue it’s not an apocalyptic event. This is because it can only become a truly apocalyptic event if it spreads through the human population, bringing civilisation to its knees as it does so. This doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be an infectious disease, though, instead it could be caused by some sort of environmental contamination that increasing numbers of people become exposed to over time. This means that uncontrolled growth in the number of zombies over time is an important characteristic of a full-blown zombie apocalypse. This is number five of my phases of a zombie apocalypse.

Location: I think the third thing that is needed for something to be considered a zombie apocalypse is where the zombies are found. Just as zombie-ism has to spread to more and more people for it to be apocalyptic, it also needs to spread geographically as well. This means it can’t be something that’s contained in a single place.

In these three characteristics, we have the basis of a definition of a zombie apocalypse: it must affect a large number of people across many locations and there must be an uncontrolled increase in the number of zombies over time.

Based on this definition, some zombie events, such as that seen in Dawn of the Dead, are apocalyptic right from the start. This is because they start with many people all becoming zombies at the same time. However, others, while they may become them, don’t start out as apocalypses. Instead, they start as more limited events that develop into apocalyptic ones because we can’t get them under control. For example, in World War Z (well, in the book at any rate), the zombie outbreak starts in China with a single village. At this stage it’s not a necessarily an apocalyptic event. This is because it’s confined to a small group of people in a single location. Instead, it only grows to become a zombie apocalypse once it starts to spread in an uncontrolled manner through the human population and out to other locations.

When dealing with non-apocalyptic zombie events, if sufficient measures can be taken fast enough (such as containment, vaccination or treatment), it’s possible to prevent them turning apocalyptic. Indeed, attempting to stop a zombie event turning apocalyptic is often a key element of zombie fiction. For example, in The Crazies, the entire premise of the movie is the attempt by the authorities to contain an outbreak of a disease that it causing people in a single small town to go mad and start attacking each other. Thus, we arrive at the situation where we have to accept that not all zombie events are necessarily apocalyptic, although most may well develop into one if they are not properly controlled.

Of course, this is all academic, and if you’re being chased down the street by a pack of slavering zombies, it’s not going to matter to you whether the zombie event you find yourself suddenly thrust into is apocalyptic or not. Instead, all you’re going to care about is staying alive!




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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

Iain Banks 1954 – 2013

Recently I posted a list of six books I owned that I would recommend others to read. One of these six books was Espedair Street by Iain Banks, who was one of my favourite Scottish contemporary authors and one whose style has been an influence on my own. His writing is a masterpiece of story telling (I’d recommend his books to any budding author as examples of a good writing style), and he always came across as an extremely nice bloke. I’ve been to several author events where he was reading from his books and answering questions, and I always found him extremely entertaining. He had such a presence that I’m sure he could have made it as a stand-up comedian if he’d tried, or indeed an actor.

I was lucky enough to meet him in person just once at Weegie Wednesday (a group all those involved in writing and publishing which I attend in my home city of Glasgow whenever I can), but was so star-struck I managed to make a complete fool of myself. This was mostly because I had to drink quite a lot before I could pluck up the courage to speak to him (this is in Glasgow and it’s a meeting for writers so naturally it takes place in a pub!). He was very charming about this, and was very polite and engaging despite the state I’d got myself into before I felt confident enough to talk to him. This was only a few months ago.

Tonight came the sad news that, only two months after being diagnosed, Iain Banks has died of gall bladder cancer just a week before the publication of his final novel (which had been brought forward in the hope that he’d live long enough to see if published).

RIP Iain Banks, 1954 – 2013.

What Would You Do If … Dilemmas In A Zombie Apocalypse: No. 15 – The Pilot’s Dilemma

You’re heading home after a reconnaissance flight over a zombie-infested zone. The intelligence data stored in the memory banks of your instruments are vital for the army as they prepare to launch a counter-offensive against the undead. Suddenly you realise you’re running low on fuel. You do a quick calculation: you have enough fuel to make it back to the safe zone but not to land, meaning you’ll have to eject. You’ll float to the ground in the safe zone on your parachute but without a pilot the plane will then crash, destroying all the data you collected. This means the army will go in unprepared, many men will die and the mission will probably fail. You could, instead, send out a distress call and set the plane down in the zombie zone. The undead are everywhere and they’ll probably devour you before anyone can rescue you but they’ll be able to retrieve the vital data, saving many soldiers’ lives and ensuring the mission’s success. What do you do?

Take Our Poll

As always, this dilemma is just here to make you think, so there’s no right or wrong answer. Vote in the poll to let others know what you do if you were in this situation, and if you want to give a more detailed answer, leave a comment on this posting.

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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

The Labyrinth – A Short Zombie Story

A PDF of this story can be downloaded from here.

I stare at the row upon row of metal shipping containers stacked three high in the car park of the abandoned hospital. From within, rises a cacophony of banging and clattering, letting me know that those inside can sense my presence. When the disease first hit, before anyone knew it did more than kill, the city’s morgues had over-flowed with the freshly dead. For those in charge, the shipping containers must have seemed like an obvious solution: simply stack the bodies inside and then cart them away to some anonymous mass grave when the situation finally starts to ease. Only it didn’t; instead it got unimaginably worse. Not only did ever more people become sick and die, but those who were already dead started to come back to life. Well, you couldn’t really call it life but they started to move again; and to attack the living, biting at them, tearing their flesh, consuming them even though, being dead, they couldn’t digest what they swallowed. Instead, their bellies distended, stretching their sallow, waxy skin until it split, spilling their guts across the ground. You would have thought they might have noticed this, but they didn’t, they just kept on hunting and attacking and eating, dragging their insides behind them through the dust.

I know I shouldn’t be here, that it’s too dangerous but I’ve no choice. I lean down and gingerly peel back the bandage around my left calf. As I do the stench of rotting flesh hits my nostrils and I almost throw up. I can’t believe something so simple is causing me so much pain. All I did was catch my leg on rusty nail as I climbed through a gap in an old wooden fence. I wasn’t even escaping from the dead, I was just checking out a garden shed to see if it had anything useful in it, which it didn’t. At first I didn’t give it a second thought but within a few hours I could feel the wound start to burn as the infection set in. By morning, the lower half of my leg was red and swollen, and foul-smelling puss started to ooze from the gash. At first I feared I’d somehow caught whatever disease it was turning people into the walking dead, but soon I realised it was just your normal everyday infection. I was so relieved I whooped with joy, then the reality of the situation worked its way into my consciousness: I had what was rapidly developing into a severe infection and I needed to start treating it right away. I rummaged through my gear, looking for the old first aid kit I’d picked up in an empty house the previous week. When I finally found it, I was disappointed to find the only thing in it which was anything close to being useful was a bottle of iodine. Being careful not to waste any, I flush the wound with it every morning and night for the next two days. I hoped it would be enough to sterilise it, but it only seemed to make things worse.

Then I started to smell the characteristic odour of gangrene. It was faint at first but with each passing day it grew stronger and stronger until I could barely manage to remove the bandage and sluice out the wound without being sick. The scent of a gangrenous limb is one of those smells you never really forget, not once you’ve had your first whiff. Mine was back when I was a medic in the army. I’d entered a house with my platoon leader searching for insurgents, only to find an old man lying on a dirty mattress, his leg missing and the stump wrapped in crude bandages torn from the curtains. I don’t know how he lost it, probably an IED or a car bomb, or maybe even one of our shells; out there in those days there were countless ways to lose a limb. As the others searched the house, I knelt down beside the old man and slowly remove the makeshift bandage to see if I could help. He didn’t flinch, or even move, and I knew why – he was dying. It was just as well there was nothing I could do for him because the moment the stench of rotting flesh hit me, all I cold do was stumble from the house, desperate for fresh air, and throw up for ten minutes straight. By the time I’d got myself together and went back inside, he was dead but I knew I’d never forget that smell no matter how long I lived.

When I smelled it again coming from my own leg, I knew I had to do something or I’d die just like the old man in that house all those years ago. My first thought was to search the local pharmacies, but they’d been cleared of anything useful a long time ago. I double-checked just to make sure but found nothing stronger than a bottle of Paracetamol which had rolled under a shelving unit. I started going further and further afield, hobbling as far as I could each day, but it was the same everywhere. Finally, in absolute desperation, I started to seriously consider going to the hospital. I’d worked there a few years ago and I knew where everything was kept. I also figured the threat of the dead that undoubtedly lurked there, waiting for the living, would mean it might not have been cleaned out yet and there might still be something useful left; may be some docxy, or amoxicillin or even good old penicillin, any of them would do. After all, you’d have to be mad to even think of going in there. Mad or have absolutely no other options. I put it off for as long as I dared, hoping against hope that my immune system would somehow be able to fight off the infection that was eating through my flesh at an ever-faster rate, but deep down I knew it wouldn’t. This morning when I woke, I realised I had to face up to the reality of the situation I found myself in and do what had to be done: I’d either have to try the hospital or amputate, and there was no way I was going to survive in a world where the dead walked again with only one leg, even if I survived doing such an extreme operation on myself.

***

I search the spaces between the containers, wondering how many lie in wait for me there. Maybe they’re all safely locked away and there’s nothing to worry about. Then again, what if someone had got careless and hadn’t close a door properly on one of containers after they’d put the last body inside? What if some of the containers were so old that the metal had rusted through? What if in the two months since it all started, the dead inside had managed to buckle the walls and break the welds with their perpetual assaults, freeing themselves from their metal coffins? If any of these, or a hundred other possible scenarios that ran through my head, had happened, the labyrinth between the containers will be crawling with them. Once I enter, there’ll be no turning back and all I can do is hope there aren’t more than I can handle.

I flinch as I slip the bandage back over my festering wound. It blocks some of the stench, but not all of it, and I can still smell the distinctive odour of my own rotting flesh. Pulling my pistol from my waistband, I remind myself that if I don’t get some antibiotics soon I’m going to die anyway. I limp forward, trying to put as little weight on my injured leg as possible. The noise from the dead coming from the containers builds in intensity and ferocity as I draw closer and closer. Slowly I pass into the shadows between the first of the containers, the banging and moaning echoing all around me, not knowing if I’ll live long enough to make it to the other side, but knowing I have no other choice.




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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

Has Google Earth Caught Someone Disposing Of A Dead Body … Or Is It An Elaborate Hoax?

Is this someone disposing or a body, or is it a cartographer’s ‘Easter Egg’?

As some of you will know, I’m a bit of a fan of Google Earth. Indeed, I’ve even gone as far as providing interactive Google Earth layers to accompany my book For Those In Peril On The Sea. When I was messing around on it today (as I often do when I’m procrastinating rather than writing), I came across something very disturbing. If you zoom to 52° 22.594′N 5° 11.899′E (which looks like it’s somewhere in the Netherlands), there appears to be a man who is preparing to dispose of a dead body by dropping it over the side of a pontoon into a lake. There even appears to be a blood trail along the dock leading to the pontoon. I’ve added a screenshot here, but if you want to check it out for yourself, click on this link here (Note: This will only work if you have Google Earth installed on the device you’re using to view this).

The question is, what’s actually going on here? It could be what it seems, that Google Earth actually managed to capture someone just as they were getting rid of a body, but it could also be a practical joke. If it is, it’s a very well-planned one and it’s unlikely it could have been perpetuated by a Google Earth outsider. Instead, it could be technologically-advanced version of something that has been going on for as long as people have been making maps. This is that map-makers have a tendency to include ‘Easter eggs’ within their maps (these are little surprises for those who look especially carefully).

The most famous example of this is the ‘elephant’ contour on a map of the Gold Coast in Africa that was added as a bit of a joke in the 1920s. A more recent example, is the words ‘Oh Yuck’ on a map provided to West Point students.

It may be some time until we find out the truth behind the Google Earth ‘body disposal’ image, but whether it’s a real event or a practical joke, either way it’s pretty creepy!




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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

Six Books I Own That I’d Recommend To Others

I enjoy reading (which is probably not surprising for a writer) and at any one time I usually have several books on the go. These tend to be a mix of fiction, popular science, travelogues and occasionally a biography or two if it’s of someone I really respect. Other than a few trash fiction paperbacks I’ve picked up when stuck in airports or when I’ve been looking for a quick, mindless read to kill some time, I keep almost everything I read and this means I have shelves groaning with an eclectic mix of books. I was looking through these the other day for a specific book to recommend to someone and it got me wondering, out of all the books I own if I had to recommend just five to other people, which five would I pick?

It took me a while to whittle it down to a final list but here they are (there’s actually six on it rather than the intended five because that’s as short as I could get it!):

1. The Day Of the Triffids by John Wyndham: The is the grand-daddy of modern post-apocalyptic fiction and more than fifty years after it was written it’s still relevant. Don’t get fooled by any of the attempts to turn this into films or TV mini-series as, with the exception of the one the BBC did in the 1980s, they’re pretty awful and miss much of the point of the story. Instead go back and read the original book. If you read it and find yourself thinking that it reminds you of the film 28 Days Later that’s because it’s a homage to this book with the eponymous walking plants replaced with rage-filled infected.

2. What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Feynman: Richard Feynman is one of my heroes (and I don’t have a lot of them). He was all a scientist should be: intelligent, rebellious and curious about almost everything. I could have chosen either of his autobiographical volumes, but I went for this one because in it he discusses his role in the investigation into the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster. In particular, he discusses how he had to fight against many of those higher up in NASA to both find out the truth and make sure it was revealed to the world, and it casts a light on the ineptitude that seems to be prevalent in most governmental organisations. The way he demonstrated exactly what went wrong with nothing more than a glass of ice water and a piece of rubber in the middle of a live a press conference was truly brilliant and ensured no one could cover it up.

3. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: This book explores the impact that highly improbable but hugely influential events can have on the world. We’re all still feeling the effects of one of these events (the financial crisis that started a few years ago) so such events are something which affects all our lives. This means we should try to learn a little more about them. However, ‘Black Swan’ events can be positive as well as negative and we need to be able to identify the good ones too so we can make the most of them when they happen too. And of course, you could argue that a zombie apocalypse is the ultimate ‘Black Swan’ event so if you’re into you post-apocalyptic reading and writing, this book provides some interesting insights.

4. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us by Robert D. Hare: We all think we’re familiar with psychopaths from films and books, and indeed from news stories about real life serial killers. However, not all psychopaths are killers. In fact, it’s reckoned that 1 in every 100 people are psychopaths (and something like 1 in 10 CEOs of big companies) so you’ll probably run into several during your life. This book written by the world’s expert on psychopathy will help you learn how to spot them and how to stop them from ruining your life. This is important because while psychopaths are rare, if they get their hooks into you the effects can be devastating to say the least. It will also allow you to play ‘Spot The Psychopath’ amongst the celebrities, politicians and businessmen you see on TV screens demanding they are listened to and respected (this can be a real eye-opener!). Finally, as a writer, I’ve found this book to be invaluable resource when writing believable characters, especially the nasty ones!

5. The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner: This book provides an introduction to the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant have been doing in the Galapagos islands over the last 40 years. It’s a book that’s part biography, part popular science and it not only provides an insight into the day-to-day work of two world renown scientists but also provides a great introduction to anyone wanting to really understand what Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is and how scientists think it works.

6. Espedair Street by Iain Banks: This has been described as the greatest rock biography ever written but it’s entirely fictional. It tells the story of a small-town lad from Scotland who, more by accident rather than by design, becomes a member of one of the world’s greatest and most famous rock bands. It’s probably my favourite book by Iain Banks, a great contemporary author and one who has done much to inspire my own writing, but it only just edged out The Crow Road to make it onto this list. Any would-be writer can learn a huge amount from this author’s writing style. It was recently been announced that his next book will be his last due to the devastating news that he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and has been given less than 12 months to live. Even from the announcement of his condition we can all learn a lot about how to face life and all it has to throw at us.




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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

What Would You Do If … Dilemmas In A Zombie Apocalypse: No. 14 – The Scientist’s Dilemma

You and your team have been working away in the lab for months and you think you’ve finally had a break through. None of the monkeys you injected with the vaccine you made from the zombie extracts died this time round; and more importantly none of them came back. They also survived being exposed to the disease itself. Finally, it seems like you might have a weapon to fight the undead plague that’s over-running the world, but you can’t rest yet. The next step is to try it out on a human yet no one’s keen on volunteering to go first. Instead, they point out that if you’re so sure it’ll work, you’d be willing to try it on yourself. What do you do?

Take Our Poll

As always, this dilemma is just here to make you think, so there’s no right or wrong answer. Vote in the poll to let others know what you do if you were in this situation, and if you want to give a more detailed answer, leave a comment on this posting.

This dilemma was inspired by a real life medical scientist called Dr. Barry Marshall who proved that H. pylori caused stomach ulcers by purposefully drinking the contents of a petri dish containing the bacteria. He went on to win a Nobel prize for discovering the role that bacteria play in causing ulcers and other stomach problems. However, developing stomach ulcers to prove you’re right is one thing. Would he have been so keen if it had been an experimental zombie vaccine? Who knows!




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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

Sorry, Do I Know You?

I woke up this morning next to a woman I didn’t recognise. Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it sounds, I knew exactly who she was, I just didn’t recognise her. Also, this happens to me pretty much every day. The woman in question is my girlfriend and we’ve lived together for more than a decade yet still I can’t recognise her. Actually, that’s not quite true, I recognise her voice, her hair, her body, the way she walks, I just don’t recognise her face. And it’s not only her, it’s pretty much everyone I’ve ever met. I even struggle to recognise my own face if I unexpectedly catch a glimpse of it in a mirror. I know this sounds odd, and it is, but it’s just the way I am.

The official name for this is prosopagnosia. There’s a common name too: face blindness. Until last week, few had ever heard of this condition; then in an interview with Esquire magazine Brad Pitt mentioned he has trouble recognising people and wants to get himself tested for face blindess. Suddenly, it seems like the whole world’s talking about it. This increased awareness can, I suspect, only be a good thing.

While I’ve almost certainly had face blindness all my life, it’s something I didn’t realise until quite recently. In fact, I didn’t even know it existed as a specific condition. I’ve always known I wasn’t good at recognising people by their faces, it’s just I didn’t realise this as unusual. I’d always been mildly surprised when people recognised me when I’d only met them once or twice or even when people could recognise actors in films, but it never crossed my mind that they were doing something different than I was.

About 1% of people have what I have and many, like me, won’t even have realised they have it until they stumble across a reference to it and go ‘A-ha, that’s me!’. However, looking back I can see it’s shaped a large amount of who I am. I take a lot of photos (I’ve even had my fair share published commercially) but rarely do I include people in them. This makes sense because if I did, I’d just find a bunch of people I didn’t recognise staring back at me whenever I looked at them. Where possible, I avoid social situations where I’m likely to meet people I’ve met before but who I don’t know well enough to recognise by non-facial cues and when I have no choice but to go to such events, I worry about offending people by not recognising them. I think it even influences the clothes I wear: I dress very distinctively (a lot of people know me as ‘the man in black’ – it’s not original but it’s apt) as if I feel this is a way I can make sure I’m recognisable to others.

So what’s it like living with a condition that means you don’t recognise other people’s faces? Well there’s two parts to it. The first is that I don’t recognise people when I should. If I see people I know out of context or if I’ve only met them once or twice or if they’ve change their hairstyle or grown facial hair, I’ll fail realise who they are (for this reason, I really hate Movember!). People always seem hurt when they see the blank look on my face and have to explain to me who they are. Then they see a smile of recognition spread across my face and all is forgiven. I think a lot of people assume that I’ve just forgotten them, but in reality I struggle to recognise pretty much everyone, including myself. When I first grew a beard, it took me about two years to recognise myself in a mirror. I was fine if I knew I was looking in one, but if I caught sight of myself unexpectedly I’d find myself thinking ‘Who the **** is that?’ before realising it must be me.

The flip side of the coin is that I’ll think I recognise people who I don’t know. Since I found out I have this condition, I’ve worked out why this is. It’s usually because they have a similar hairstyle (they’re not as unique as you might think they are and I’ve grown to realise that almost everyone has several ‘hair doubles’ wandering around in their local area). This means I frequently smile, or worse, at complete strangers only to find myself mistaken and cringingly embarrassed by what I’ve just done.

So where does this leave me as a writer? Well, firstly, I think it explains a lot about why I primarily write in the post-apocalyptic genres. I find myself in a world of faceless zombies every time I step out my front door. By this I don’t mean that they act like zombies but rather that all I see is a mass of people who all look the same to me, and lack the basic facial features that make them human (well, to be fair, they don’t lack them, I just don’t really see them). I also need prompts from other people to include descriptions of facial features in my writing but this is exactly why I get other people to read over my work and why I work with a professional editor when I’m working on books.

I know my own limitations and for the most part I can deal with them. Once I explain things to people, most accept what I say, although there’s still one or two who know me that think I’m making it up or that I just not don’t hard enough. My biggest problems have come when I’ve had brushes with the criminal justice system – not as a suspect, I hasten to add, but as a witness. The entire system is set up around the ability to recognise people by their faces. This is how victims identify their attackers, how police issue announcements of who they’re looking for and how things work when they get to court (just think of the question ‘Do you see that person in the court today?’). How can you work within such a system when you struggle to even recognise yourself? This is a theme that I’ve specifically explored in my writing and you can find a short story based around this here.

So, the bottom line is that I’m really bad at recognising people from their faces. This means that if I know you and I fail to say hello to you when we run into each other on the street, don’t be offended: I’m not giving you the cold-shoulder, I’ve just not recognised you. Similarly, if I don’t know you and I say hello to you in an overly-friendly manner, don’t worry I’m not some weirdo – it’s just that you happen to have the same hairstyle as someone I know!

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To test your facial recognition abilities, click here. To find out more about research into face blindness, click here.




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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

Is Entomophagy The Secret To Surviving In A Post-apocalyptic World?

We all need food to survive, and whatever cause (be it the dead rising, environmental crisis or nuclear Armageddon), getting enough to eat will be a major hurdle to keeping yourself alive if civilisation collapses. Yet this is an issue which is glossed over in most post-apocalyptic books and films. In them, getting food is portrayed as a simple matter of raiding a warehouse for canned goods or shooting the occasional deer (or in the case of The Road having a basement full of captives!).

This, however, is woefully unrealistic. Few of us have the skills to successfully track a deer and unless you are already well-practiced in the art, shooting one isn’t as easy as it might appear to the uninitiated (you really have to get it through the heart or the lungs with the first shot or it’ll be off – as will every other animal in a two-mile radius!). What does that matter, you’re thinking, there’s still the supermarkets and store rooms, except that’s what everyone will think and warehouses will become battle grounds that are best avoided if you don’t want to end up dead. So what else can you do?

Lunch anyone? Mealworm beetle larvae can make a nutritious addition to any diet

The thing is, there’s plenty of food out there; it’s just that it’s stuff you’re not used to eating. Yet, in a post-apocalyptic world, you can’t afford to be picky and you’ll have to adapt your expectations of what is and isn’t food. This is where entomophagy comes in. ‘What the **** is entomophagy?’ I hear you cry. Well, it’s the eating of insects as food. Insects are high in protein, full of the vitamins and minerals we need to stay healthy and, since 70% of all animals on the planet as insects, you can find them pretty much everywhere. I know what you’re thinking: insects, urgh – I’m not eating them! I can understand this disgust, but if you think about it, insects aren’t that different from the shrimps and lobsters you happily munch on without a second thought.

There’s something else which might help change your mind (or put you off eating altogether!). Even though you might not realise it, the chances are insects already make up a portion of your diet; a small portion, but a portion none-the-less. Did you know, for example, that the regulations from the US Food and Drug Administration mean that wheat flour can contain up to 150 insect fragments per 100g and still be considered safe to eat? Similarly, canned citrus fruit juice can contain up to 5 fly eggs per 250 ml or 1 maggot per 250 ml before being considered contaminated. This means you’re probably already eating insects (or more likely parts of them) on a daily basis without even realising it!

So, how can you shift insects from a small, and unintentional, part of your diet to a major component? Well, first you need a way to catch them. Luckily, you can do this very simple equipment. One of the easiest ways is called beating. This is where you put a large sheet under a tree or bush and then shake it or beat it with sticks. Get the right tree and within minutes, you’ll have enough insects to make a tasty meal for the whole family. If there’s no bushes or trees nearby, you can take the same sheet, form it into a kind of net and drag it through areas of tall grass, scooping up all the insects as you go. This is a particularly effective way of catching crickets and grasshoppers which, with their large fleshy abdomens are especially ‘meaty’.

If you don’t want to go to all that effort, you can also use pitfall traps to collect beetles that scurry over the ground as you simply sit back and wait. At night, you can set up a light trap (simply a light shone onto a sheet) which will attract all sorts of insects that will mistake it for the moon. Of course this assumes it’s safe to have a light burning at night – after all you only want to attract insects and not things like zombies, nuclear-powered mutants or whatever else might be wandering around your own particular post-apocalyptic world! If you can’t get outside, there’s no need to worry: the chances are there will be a smorgasbord of cockroaches scurrying around in the darker recesses of whatever building you’re holed up in. Just put some food scraps out, turn off the light and then scoop them up as soon as they appear.

If you’re dedicated and organised enough, you can even consider farming insects. In most cases, this will involve eating the larvae rather than the adults. For example, you can eat the nice plump maggots of various fly species, or grow your own beetle larvae. In particular, mealworms (the larvae of mealworm beetles – pictured above) are easy to keep as a self-sustaining culture as well as being very versatile when it comes to consuming them.

This brings us to the next issue. What do you do with the insects once you’ve caught them? At the most basic level you can simply toss them into a pan over an open fire and cook them until they’re crispy. However, if you so wish, you can get a lot more adventurous. How about sautéed crickets, or mealworm french fries? These are two of the recipes foun on the Insects Are Food website. You can even grind up mealworms and use them as a flour to make bread.

You might be surprised (or then again, given the wonders of the internet, you might not), but there’s plenty of sites that actively promote entomophagy as an environmentally-sustainable alternative to eating meat and fish, and they are full of advice about farming and cooking them. There’s even recipe books out there. The one I’d recommend (and indeed that I have a copy of myself) has the charming title of Eat-a-bug Cookbook: 33 ways to cook grasshoppers, ants, water bugs, spiders, centipedes, and their kin. This means there’s plenty of information out there where you can learn all you’d need to know to live off insects once the world as we know it comes to an end.

So what does all this mean? Well, if you preparing yourself to survive whatever type of apocalyptic event that you think might be coming to wreak havoc on the world around you, don’t just think about stocking up on the canned foods and the freeze-dried ready meals. As part of your preparations, learn how to catch insects and how to farm them too. You can also start practicing your entomological culinary skills. Next time there’s a sunny day, break out the barbecue, invite your friends and family round, but rather than the traditional burgers and hot dogs, treat them to something with a few more legs!




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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.