My first novel is now out there! It’s called Bugbies, and it’s about wasps that have started zombifying people by laying eggs in their brains.
Yeah, that’s weird.
The idea came after I learned about how some wasps are parasitoid: they lay eggs in other insects (caterpillars, beetles, ants, cockroaches, etc.), so once larvae emerge from the eggs, they have food to eat.
So the book has zombies, but not traditional zombies who roam around in search of brains to eat. These zombies serve as hosts for wasp eggs and larvae, which aim to grow into adult wasps and find new hosts for the next generation.
Bugbies is about several people who are impacted by this fantastical shift of one wasp species to jump hosts. Charlotte, who was nearly turned into a host. Isha, the neurosurgeon who treats her. Lucia, an entomologist who is brought in as an advisor. Brock, who wishes to buy a bugbie and show it off to his friends. His wife Daniella, and their gardener Lewis, who deal with that decision and take action in response.
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The progression of the idea behind the novel:
When my twin daughters were much younger and reading books on the couch, I would sometimes stop on my way walking by and ask, “Have you gotten to the part in the book with the zombie butler at a pool party?”
I don’t know why that image came to my mind. It was strange and kind of amusing. But my daughters looked more irritated than amused after I asked the question many times.
During a weekend, our family was driving somewhere and listening to NPR, when Radiolab’s “Parasite” episode came on, and guest Carl Zimmer described a variety of creatures that use other creatures for sustenance. Gross and fascinating stuff.
I didn’t immediately put the two together. One day, a question rose: What if a wasp turned a person into a zombie, and somebody dressed him like a butler? (Asking “what if” questions can be helpful in generating ideas.)I wrote a short story of a zombie butler at a pool party, with a bit of background on wasps zombifying parts of the population. The story felt incomplete. I put it aside. Several years passed.
When I read Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend/Hell House (a collection with more than those two novellas), the story “Dance of the Dead” stood out to me. Matheson weaved mentions of World War III into the story of characters driving to see a performance of a loopy (nickname for LUP, or Lifeless Undead Phenomenon). He could’ve stretched the story to a novel by including scenes of the war. But he left hints to inspire readers to imagine how the war could’ve been.
Matheson’s story caused me to remember my zombie-at-a-party story, but I didn’t go back to expand it.
Perhaps a couple years later, I read Octavia E. Butler’s Bloodchild and Other Stories, a collection in which each short story contains enough world-building to fill a novel. The title story grabbed me even stronger than Matheson’s tale. A group of humans have left Earth, landed on the planet of the Tlic, were placed into a reserved area, and entered a symbiotic relationship with the alien species. Male humans served as hosts for Tlic eggs.
This story, along with Butler’s advice for writers in another chapter, inspired me to return to the zombie story. I wanted to see what I could come up with around the pool party. How did the zombie get there? What happened after the party?
I thank Butler for her creative stories and advice, including this gem: “Play with your ideas. Have fun with them. Don’t worry about being silly or outrageous or wrong. So much of writing is fun. It’s first letting your interests and imagination take you anywhere at all. Once you’re able to do that, you’ll have more ideas than you can use.” (Bloodchild and Other Stories, New York, NY: Seven Stories Press, 2005, p. 142.)
Also, thanks to Matheson for his suspenseful stories.
More thanks go to Jad Abumrad, Robert Krulwich, and Lulu Miller for hosting that Radiolab episode. And thanks to Carl Zimmer for guesting on the episode and writing Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures, which covers far more than parasitoid wasps. This book amazed me with the methods of parasites to survive and flourish.
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In the upcoming few weeks, I’ll be posting about the books I read in my research on wasps (and bugs in general). And posts about the zombie and virus novels I read in curiosity to see what other writers crafted in these topics.
Bugbies is available on Amazon on Kindle (and Kindle Unlimited), and as a paperback.
Dave Williams 