***Apologies!!***
If you're getting this post for the second time, it's because ... well, there's some new stuff going on here and when the new stuff happened, this post was lost. Now it's found. Notice anything, ahem ... a bit different? More to follow on that.
Meanwhile, back to the blog post.
I lived in Korea for a couple of years, living in downtown Seoul in an ultra-modern apartment, everything high tech and brand spanking new. Heated floors, heated toilet seats and push button custom bidet streams, for Pete’s sake.
To get to the subway, I’d walk by several small shops, often times places where the family lived in their place of business. I could see families sitting on the floor, gathered around a hibachi, eating noodles out of bowls held under their chins, or sleeping the way many Koreans do, curled up on thin mats on the floor. But that was Seoul. Ultra-modern next to traditional. High tech office buildings next to one of the ancient temples or palace walls scattered around the city.
For a long while, I didn’t have any English language TV channels. I quickly learned that, 24/7, you could always find a period show -- people in traditional Korean garb, intrigue in the royal palace, peasants starving and barely scrapping by and subject to cruelties from the ruling classes. There always seemed to be a love interest made impossible due to class or royal family. Like American soap operas, depending on the story line, people would discuss the shows, wonder what was going to happen next. It was clear the popularity of them was never going away no matter how many pop boy bands might emerge from the country.
When the world crashes, when everything you know disappears and you’ve lost what is most important to you, what kind of human will you be? That question is dissected and explored in the post-apocalyptic thriller, Wolves by bestselling author D.J. Molles.
I first started corresponding with Molles after I read book five of his The Remaining series. Of course, this was when he was still self-publishing and before his books finally rocketed to the New York Times bestseller status where they are today.
I’d been captivated by the bold way Molles operates within his stories. My initial intention was to post the conversation to this blog and to do what I could to draw attention to his work since he’d managed to change my opinion of the zombie genre in a massive way. The real reason I wanted to interview him was that I needed to find out what was going on in this guy’s head. (more…)