Thanks thanks thanks

To Bobby Knight in Lubbock, Texas. You were a model. To Brenda Mills, for telling me this was too broken. You were right. To my agent Kate Garrick, for targeting the one broken place that could fix the rest. To Pablo D’Stair and Sarah D’Stair, for navigating some David Bowie/legal stuff. To Robert Gatewood, for working with me on draft after draft of this. To Jesse Lawrence and Christopher O’Riley, for early reads. To Max Brooks and Robert Kirkman and George Romero, for making the world a better place to not be dead in. To Karl Fischer, for relaying something he learned in Paul Youngquist’s class, that made me finally understand this story I was trying to tell here. To Paul Tremblay. To Adam Cesare. To Cain Marko, for being Cain Marko. To my colleague Charles Evered, for episode 5.10 of Monk. That could be where this whole thing started. But it could have been Bowie, or it could have been Metallica. To Joe Lansdale, for showing me how to be a writer. To Jerry Reed, for getting me through the hard parts of this, and to the Drive-By Truckers, for “Sinkhole,” and to Benjamin Whitmer, for introducing me to it. But Bob Seger’s “Beautiful Loser” helped as well, as it does with everything. And, without Don D’Auria talking to me in a lobby in New York once, saying I should send him something, then this wouldn’t exist, like this. And to Jory, for letting me write about him. I hope I got Linsey right, man. She can live forever now. And thanks to my kids, Rane and Kinsey, for tolerating me talking about zombies over dinner every night, and to my wife, Nancy, for getting up at so many three in the mornings, to walk them back to their beds, because they’d somehow got scared.

Me too, guys. Always and forever.

 

stephengrahamjones

boulder, co 2008 – 2013