Former soap opera actor Brown pits zombies against a high school football team of drug-addicted hooligans in his explosive debut, Play Dead (Reviews, Mar. 1).
Do you have a background in football?
I went to a very football-heavy school in Texas. I wasn't a player, but I shot video for the booster club and the coaches, so I mostly observed it through a viewfinder. I never knew that nearly 20 years later I would be calling upon that experience.
Zombies are big right now. Was this on your mind when you set out to write Play Dead?
I started the book over two years ago, so they weren't quite as mainstream as they are at the moment. The steroid scandals in professional sports were breaking, and this bothered me a lot. I thought it was cheating and I thought it hurt the sport. We heard all these star athletes saying they used steroids because they felt like they had to do it in order to keep up with the other players that were using. That got me thinking, who could compete with these guys? They'd have to be monsters. I also loved the idea of making the zombies the good guys. What if these literal monsters aren't even as bad as the ones that are created by the steroids?
How did you move from television acting to novel writing?
As an actor you often have a lot of time on your hands, and I wanted another creative outlet. My degree in school was actually in film production, so my first instinct was to write a screenplay, but it just didn't work for me. I wanted to describe things that don't go into the format of a screenplay, so I decided to try and write a novel.
Why did you set the book in a small Texas town?
My father is from a very small town in Oklahoma and my mother is from a very small town in Texas about 90 miles outside of the Dallas/Fort Worth area, so I have spent a lot of time in these small towns. I love the microcosm of it. Everybody knows everybody. You have the crazy woman that lives in the town that everybody's frightened of. And the sheriff can look out across the bleachers and say “I've arrested some of these guys, I've helped others, and I've seen these kids grow up.” I love that. I also think there's a magic and a mystique to small town America. In the book they call my hero “trailer park trash.” I enjoy writing about these people and giving them dignity as well.
