local author breaks zombie tradition with ‘Cluck’

The zombie genre has seen a tremendous influx of new twists over the last decade. What began as a fringe horror sensation with George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” in 1968 has spawned a creative wealth of movies, comic books, graphic novels and music videos about mindless, bloodthirsty, undead creatures.

The concept has spread far beyond plots that revolve around humans rising from the grave and staggering after their prey in a half-rotted, brain-obsessed stupor. Nowadays, just about anything can become a zombie. Last year’s “Black Sheep” pitted a swarm of zombie bovids against a handful of hapless citizens in rural New Zealand. In 2005’s “Severed: Forest of the Dead,” a group of loggers is transformed into zombies after coming into contact with sap from genetically engineered trees, proving that even vegetation is not immune to zombie infection.

Local author Eric D. Knapp has taken the genre one step further. In his new novel, “Cluck: Murder Most Fowl,” Knapp describes the terror that is unleashed when a flock of surly undead chickens inhabit a haunted farm. Released late last year, the 337-page novel introduces two new elements to the zombie mythos: 1) Zombie chickens. 2) A thoroughly developed premise and plot that combine humor with horror.

A horror film fanatic who lives on a farm in Milton, Knapp has considerable expertise in both the zombie and poultry fields. As cliché as it may sound, the idea for a book that combines these two fields came to him in a dream.
“My wife was away, and when that happens, I tend to stay up late watching horror movies. I did that on a night when there was a full moon, and I had forgotten to lock the chickens up, and a rooster ended up sitting underneath the bedroom window all night long,” Knapp said. “What roosters will do when there’s a full moon is they’ll think it’s a perpetual state of sunrise and they will crow all night long.”

The rooster’s incessant racket swirled into Knapp’s gore-filled dreams, and he awoke with a surprisingly vivid storyline. “I woke up and said, ‘Wow, that was kind of a cool dream,’ and I wrote down as much as I could remember,” he said. “Divine inspiration.”

As a freshman at the University of New Hampshire, Knapp studied film production, with a keen interest in learning about the special effects that bring the ghouls and guts of horror movies to life. He later abandoned that pursuit and turned his focus to writing, which he continued to study at the University of London. His first novel, 2003’s “Out of Place, Out of Time,” spins an unusual science fiction tale about a scientist who botches a time travel experiment and winds up lost in space. The book, written almost entirely in the form of a transcribed interview with the scientist, received an Independent Publishers Book Award.

Shortly after completing “Out of Place,” Knapp began work on “Cluck.” The process was slow, as the author was forced to balance his writing with his day job as a marketing executive for an Internet security company based in Portsmouth. In 2007, he began working on the novel in earnest. With the popularity of zombie stories growing rapidly in the wake of films like 2002’s “28 Days Later,” Knapp knew his book had to be different.

“I’m kind of lucky that the ‘zombie revival,’ if you will, happened after I had already done the majority of the work on the book. But, any genre that hits the height of interest immediately gets flooded with stories, and so the stories have to become more creative,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we see other zombie types. In fact, there’s a zombie chicken movie, believe it or not.”

That movie, “Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead,” is currently being screened at select theaters across the country. Director Lloyd Kaufman has already lauded “Cluck” as “The best undead chicken novel of all time.” (Knapp confesses that it may, in fact, be the only undead chicken novel of all time.)

“I never, ever, in a million years thought that there would be another zombie chicken story out there, but there is,” Knapp said of “Poultrygeist,” which he has not yet seen.

The idea of a zombie chicken book sounds ridiculous—and ridiculous it is. Knapp made a concerted effort to blend the horror and the humor without going overboard on either end. While there are moments of gore (a battle between the book’s “exorcist” hero and an evil undead rooster includes a segment in which the hero becomes trapped with his arms pinned down, leaving the zombie rooster free to peck away at the flesh of his face with a razor-sharp beak), the author did not want the story to be overly gruesome. Nor did he want it to be so silly that any semblance of seriousness was squandered. One of his great challenges with “Cluck” was to balance the seemingly opposite genres of horror and comedy in the vein of Bruce Campbell films like “Army of Darkness” and “Bubba Ho-Tep.”

“Obviously, I wanted the book to be fun. It gets classified as horror because it has zombies in it, but it’s really more of a comedy or a horror comedy,” Knapp said. “Fighting a zombie is not a funny thing, but I found ways to put little funny elements in there—at least I tried to.”

The book tells a surprisingly complicated story about a group of undead chickens that devote their twisted afterlives to tormenting the farmer who killed them with a suspiciously set fire. The farmer’s only hope is Armand, who specializes in doing battle with poultry that refuses to stay dead. But, when Armand arrives at the farm, he confronts the biggest challenge of his peculiar career—a dog-sized zombie rooster with deadly teeth and talons.

Each of the book’s 25 chapters begins with an illustration by New Hampshire artist Ian Richard Miller, who Knapp knew as a professional graphic artist. The two also collaborated on the book’s creepy cover design. Both members of corporate America, Knapp and Miller enjoyed working on something that helped them escape the banality of their day jobs.

“I do a lot of technical writing, and it’s basically the most boring stuff you can do. So, to get as far away from that as possible is a real escape for me,” Knapp said. “I think that readers respond to that, as well, because I think there are a lot of readers who want to escape the real world at this point in our history.”

Another one of Knapp’s missions is to promote independent fiction, which receives precious little attention in the literary world. Although Knapp and Miller wrote, designed and produced “Cluck” by themselves, they feel its professional quality merits attention. The author has at least three ideas for future independent books, including one that involves zombies.

“I just can’t get away from zombies, you know? They’re everywhere,” he said. “They move slow, but you can’t get away from them.”

For more information on Eric D. Knapp or to purchase the book, visit www.cluckthebook.com.