Hello listeners and welcome to After the Plague. By 2015 I'd received quite a lot of emails from

listeners asking me to have a go at the zombie genre, but I'd always felt that with so many zombie stories out there, what was the

point? What could I bring to the party that hadn't been brought already? The only argument I could see for writing one was that despite

being seemingly at saturation point, the public hunger for zombie stories didn't seem to be weakening at all.

The Walking Dead was still riding high in the TV ratings and had spawned its first spin-off series.

The comic book was still going strong, and there seemed to be a new zombie movie

in cinemas or straight to video every 10 minutes, so maybe there was room for another zombie story.

Certainly something like that could be just the thing to plug me into a whole new audience,

I thought.

So ignoring the sage advice of Sir James Goldsmith, if you can see a bandwagon, it's too late to get on it,

and with the support and encouragement of my patrons at Patreon,

I wrote and podcast After the Plague.

So how did it go?

Well, it was very popular with my patrons and it won the best novella Parsek Award in 2016 but after the plague never took off

like Underwood and Flinch had done it didn't make that wider connection that I'd been

hoping for so when it came to the question as to what I was to write next,

given the choice between more after the plague or more Underwood and Flinch, there was no contest. I embarked upon Underwood and

Flinch Underground and after the plague became a one-off novella. However, that's no

reflection of my own feelings for the story. I enjoyed writing it and I'm still very

fond of it. It's proper zombie stuff, violent, gory and hopefully suspenseful and scary too. But I'll let you be the judge of that. It's no good

me telling you that it's scary, is it? It's entirely a personal subjective type experience.

But one thing it definitely is,

...