A wife confronts her philandering husband about his affair, but only in questions.

A toxic mother explains the origins of her own sins to her son whom she perceives as weak. 

A recently divorced getaway driver confronts her ex-husband about her missing car.

A husband and wife witness the destruction of a church as they go for an afternoon walk.

Mad sailors come in from the sea and, consumed with wildness, bust up a bar in pursuit of beauty.

A writer on the brink of a nervous breakdown takes refuge in a hotel.

A family man suffering an active sex addiction witnesses a violent crime and must confront his problematic past.

Fourteen-year-old Jeremy Barker attends an all-boys Catholic high school where roving gangs of bullies make his days a living hell. His mother is an absentee pillhead, his older brother a self-diagnosed sex-addict, and his father disappears night after night without explanation. Jeremy navigates it all with a code cobbled together from the zombie movies he’s obsessed with: Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, Planet Terror, Zombieland, and Dawn of the Dead among others.

The code is put to the test when he discovers in his father’s closet a bizarre homemade video of a man strapped to a bed, being prepped for some sort of surgical procedure. As Jeremy attempts to trace the origin of the video, this remarkable debut moves from its sharp, precocious beginnings to a climax of almost unthinkable violence, testing him, and the reader, to the core.

“Zombie will make you laugh, shake your head in recognition, and go for the aluminum bat in your basement.”
—NED VIZZINI, AUTHOR OF IT'S KIND OF A FUNNY STORY

“Zombie is one of the smartest, strangest, and most beautifully crafted coming-of-age stories you will ever encounter.”
—DONALD RAY POLLOCK, AUTHOR OF THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME

“It’s simultaneously a bildungsroman à la Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, an homage to zombies in pop culture, and a twisted mystery all wrapped up into one utterly original – and darkly delightful – novel.”
—BN.COM

“If you want to know how teenagers feel and what they say when adults aren’t around, Zombie–a funny and very authentic, well-written first novel by J. R. Angelella–should definitely be the next book you read.”
—JOHN WATERS, DIRECTOR OF HAIRSPRAY AND PINK FLAMINGOS

“Barker is clearly a spiritual successor to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield ... I haven’t finished a book this quickly since I first read American Psycho.”
THE LITPUB ON ZOMBIE

When an elite group of mercenaries prepare for a simple mission to recover a lost Civil War treasure, they learn of ungodly monsters that await them, but little do they know the monsters are already here.

TITLE

Negotiating Gun Violence in Student Screenplays: Teaching Young Writers to Examine and Develop Characters’ Unknown Needs in Their Narratives; or How to Fight ‘Cool Characters Wielding Weapons’ with Empathy and Understanding



BRIEF DESCRIPTION

Students love to write guns into their narratives. But just as tears can offer a less interesting shorthand to a character’s sadness, guns are often a poor substitute for something much more dynamic—a character’s root cause need. Through a series of repetitive exploratory questions developed by the Japanese inventor and industrialist Sakichi Toyoda, I guide young writers to excavate the interior lives of their characters through empathy and understanding, rather than defaulting to the easy, passive aggression of gun violence.



FULL ABSTRACT

In 1998, at the age of 17, I was a victim of gun violence when a man entered the video store where I worked and held my co-worker and I at gunpoint for over 15 minutes. In the subsequent years, America suffered a sharp rise in school shootings (sadly still rising), a terrorist attack, the beginning of a 20-year war in the Middle East, and the on-going political analyzation of violence in the arts, specifically in TV and film. The paper I am proposing examines the proliferation of gun violence in student screenplays and the iterative interrogative technique I’ve developed over the years to challenge the existence of such weapons in student work by focusing instead on characters’ root cause pain, digging deeper into character development as an alternative execution of their external actions. In short, these techniques encourage young storytellers to deploy empathy and understanding as creators over stylized violence, in pursuit of more compelling, authentic, and accessible human drama.