One Bite And You’re Infected: Apex Book Company’s Jason Sizemore on Zombies

Jason Sizemore is the owner and operator of Apex Publications.  I first encountered Jason at a   bookstore in Lexington, KY.  I sat behind him in the audience at a fiction reading.  I knew Sizemore as “the guy who does the horror magazine” and I’d wanted to tell him how much I admired his work, but there was too much of a crowd.  I figured he was probably a pretty interesting guy—people who are that into horror fiction usually are.  So are people who start magazines.  Usually.

Since its inception in 2005, Apex has gone through a number of changes—a print digest, online, the book company, and now The Zombie Feed.  That’s right, The Zombie Feed, an Apex imprint committed to bringing “zombie fiction to the masses”.  Sizemore debuted the imprint with Mark Allan Gunnells’ novella, Asylum, Paul Jessup’s The Dead Stay Dead, and will be following the success of those novellas with a horde of shorter zombie tales in the forthcoming The Zombie Feed, Volume 1.

Magazine, book company, zombie imprint…  Sizemore has got to be an interesting guy, right?  As revealed below, he’s not only interesting, he’s… ahem… more than a little disturbed, too.

What is the appeal of zombies to you as a reader?

Jason Sizemore: They’re dead. Diseased (and contagious). Relentless. Emotionless. Hard to contain.

Zombies touch on many common human fears: crowds, death, disease, losing control of self. As a huge zombie fan, I have many fears, including these four, so a good zombie book kicks, punches, and dare I say… bites me right in the entertainment part of my brain.

What’s the appeal as a writer?

Jason Sizemore: For similar reasons as why readers dig them–their flexibility. Traditional zombies (think Romero) are a multi-faceted monster that have one motivation (hunger, generally), making them easy to write. At least, on the surface. Since there are so many zombie-related works available, you need to have an interesting angle on your zombies or even the most die-hard fan will yawn in your face.

Lastly, zombie horde vs. lone werewolf… who’d win? And why?

Jason Sizemore: Zombie horde. It only takes one bite and you’re infected. One against many? Are you kidding? Those zombies will be snacking away on the hairy beast. And even if the werewolf kills them all, he’s likely been bitten and he’s going to turn into an undead werewolf and the zombies win again!

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher.  He is the staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly.  He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.

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