{"id":56248,"date":"2012-03-16T08:02:07","date_gmt":"2012-03-16T12:02:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=56248"},"modified":"2012-03-19T13:52:11","modified_gmt":"2012-03-19T17:52:11","slug":"dan-waters-%e2%80%9991-is-bringing-zombies-to-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2012\/03\/dan-waters-%e2%80%9991-is-bringing-zombies-to-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Dan Waters \u201991 is Bringing Zombies to Life"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"'Generation<\/a>
'Generation Dead: Stitches' by Daniel Waters, as seen on a Kindle Fire. (Peter Morenus\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It appears that zombies are back \u2013 and not just from the dead.<\/p>\n

As today\u2019s cultural landscape can attest, movies like Zombieland<\/em>, television shows like The Walking Dead<\/em>, and books such as The Zombie Survival Guide<\/em> \u2013 on The New York Times<\/em> Best Seller List for nine years \u2013 continue to feed the masses\u2019 seemingly insatiable fascination with animated, flesh-eating corpses.<\/p>\n

Luckily for Dan Waters \u201991 (CLAS), many of the main characters in his young adult Generation Dead<\/em> series are zombies \u2013 but not of the murderous variety. On the contrary, the undead teenagers in his books do not prey on the living; they are simply looking to be accepted by their peers and by society at large.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always been a horror literature and film fan,\u201d says Waters. \u201cIf they really existed, zombies would probably be one of the most oppressed groups in society. I thought writing about them would be a fun way of bringing up serious questions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stitches<\/em> (Disney Hyperion, 2011), published late last year exclusively as an eBook, is the fourth installment in Waters\u2019 Generation Dead<\/em> series. It is a compilation of four short stories that follow many of the teenage characters whom his readers have come to know and love, both living and undead \u2013 or, as they are more respectfully termed, \u201cdifferently biotic.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first book in Waters\u2019 young adult book series, Generation Dead<\/em> (Hyperion, 2008), tells what the author describes as a \u201czombie love story.\u201d Although plenty of humor finds its way into the narrative, the initial inspiration for the books had decidedly dark origins, stemming from one evening when Waters caught a news program about violence in schools.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe story was that kids were starting fights or committing random acts of violence in order to film them and put them online. There was this idea of getting notoriety for being a violent person,\u201d he says. \u201cThese clips brought up a lot of questions for me. What were the reasons these kids did this, at these ages?\u201d<\/p>\n

Through two different blogs \u2013 one of his own, danielwaters.com<\/a>, and one written from the perspectives of his fictional characters, found at mysocalledundeath.com<\/a> \u2013 Waters connects with his teen audience.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of the mail I get is from readers who feel excluded for some reason or another,\u201d he says. \u201cIn a way, a zombie becomes a universal metaphor for people. Anything that\u2019s different about you \u2013 that\u2019s what zombies signify in this story.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was only after he had finished writing the first book in the Generation Dead <\/em>series that Waters realized the start of a \u201cresurgence\u201d of zombies in popular culture. \u201cIt was just dumb luck. \u2026 I wanted to write a humorous story about people, but writing about dead people gave me that little bit of arm\u2019s length to treat the subject with a little more humor than I would have otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fortunately for his fans, Waters plans to return to the Generation Dead<\/em> series \u2013recently optioned by ABC Family \u2013 after completing a few other projects, among them his next book, a ghost story due out next fall titled Break My Heart a Thousand Times.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s something about working in that world,\u201d Waters says of the zombie realm. \u201cThere\u2019s so much cutting-room floor material. Every time another zombie walks on stage, even a minor role, some story about that person leads to another story.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CLAS alumnus Dan Waters sees writing about zombies as a fun way of bringing up serious questions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":56378,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[49],"class_list":["post-56248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-11 10:26:12","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56248"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56568,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56248\/revisions\/56568"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/56378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56248"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=56248"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=56248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}