I'm Alan Alder and this is Clear In Vivid, Conversations About Connecting and Communicating.

Welcome to our preview of season 15. I'm here with Graham Chad, our producer and we're

going to give you a little taste of what's to come on. Season 15. It's a really interesting

line-up grim. Yes, as always on Clear In Vivid, you've been talking to some really fascinating people.

And it's interesting, I think, that there's a sort of theme emerging. Subtly, anyway.

I can't wait to hear it. What is it? Well, several of the people you talk to are looking at how the brain

affects how we relate to others. And we'll come across those guests as we progress to the season in a few minutes.

Our first guest is Max Brooks. I've known Max since he was about three years old,

because my family has been friends with his family for a long time. His mother and father are the famous

male Brooks and Anne Bancroft. And that, in a way, was a little bit of a problem for him starting out in

his career as a writer. Max has become famous writing books in a serious vein about zombies.

There weren't comedy books. There weren't straight adventure books. He had a little trouble convincing

critics that he had something in mind that was more serious than what they expected.

The irony is, zombies made me and almost broke me. Oh, that's interesting. Why?

Because I wrote my first book, The Zombie Survival Guide, never to be published. I wrote it as an exercise for me

as an exercise in dealing with fear, dealing with demons. Because I was always a, I was an erotic kid, as you know.

I was nervous. God knows where I got it. But I was always trying to figure out problems.

And when I was young and I saw zombie movies, they scared me so much. I thought, how would I really survive it?

Forget Hollywood, forget movies and plot twists. If they were real, if the threat was real, how would I survive in the real world?

That became an exercise, The Zombie Survival Guide, which I eventually got published.

And what almost broke me was they tried to publish it as a comedy book and tried to market me as Mel Brooks Jr.

That was a disaster in the making and I tried to warn them. I said, this is not a comedy book. I'm not Mel Brooks Jr.

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