David Wellington's Backstory

The book came together over time, fragments and pieces coalescing slowly. I didn’t even know it was going to be a novel at first—I definitely didn’t know it would take the form of a serial.       

In 2004 I had an image I was toying with. That’s how all my projects start, with a single image that I can’t get out of my head. That’s how I know I need to tell a story. This particular image was kind of haunting. Maybe it came to me in a dream—I can’t remember. I knew it was inspired by all the zombie movies I’d been watching—the George Romero trilogy, 28 Days Later, the Dawn of the Dead remake.       
In this image a solitary figure dressed in a space suit was walking down 42nd street in New York. He moved purposefully but cautiously, careful not to snag his suit or in any way break the hermetic seal between himself and the world at large.

He had reason to be cautious. Around him, the once crowded city was deserted of people. Well, living people, anyway. There were zombies everywhere, crawling in the street, sitting in cars staring resolutely through their windshields. They stood on subway platforms waiting for trains that would never come, or pushed and pushed at revolving doors but never found the places they were looking for.

The man in the space suit was the perfect observer. He could walk through the midst of a world in its death throes, a place of enormous danger and horror, and yet be unharmed. He was sealed off from reality, and that made him safe. The zombies couldn’t smell him and they couldn’t process him visually as food. However, the suit also meant could never really touch the world he moved through.       
It was just an image. I had no idea what he was looking for or where he was headed. It kept coming back to me, though. It kept popping into my head at weird moments.

In the final version of Monster Island the image was changed significantly. The space suit was replaced with a bright yellow hazmat suit, the single, solitary figure was joined by a companion—though the gulf between them, in culture, race and age would keep them, perhaps, from true connection.

The characters came next. They were people I saw or read about every day. I was working as a librarian for the United Nations. My hero turned out to be a UN weapons inspector. He was joined by a third world alter ego, a child soldier with an AK-47. Then there were the New Yorkers, the survivors of the zombie epidemic: an actress who would hold the survivors together, an ex-soldier who would teach them how to fight. Finally came the medical student who would try to find the bright side in the end of the world.

For a setting I had only to look around me. New York City was the perfect backdrop for the story I wanted to tell. In the blackout of 2003 I had seen something primal and post-apocalyptic in my city, a vision of what it might be if one day it were abandoned by its population. I wandered through the city looking for locations for various scenes. Everywhere I went I saw chain link fences, for keeping the walking dead at bay, or wide open spaces where crowds of zombies might mill endlessly and mindlessly. Storefronts were judged by how well they could be barricaded and subway stations became rallying points for groups of desperate survivors. The Museum of Modern Art was a true inspiration. There are very few cemeteries in New York, where real estate is too valuable to be wasted on the dead. Yet the museum held a morbid kind of treasure. Seen through this new lens, it was full of dead bodies—most of them thousands of years old. I decided there would be mummies in the story as well. Mummies that could walk and think but make no sense of a world that had moved on without them.

I had what I needed. I hadn’t started actually writing it, however, when a friend and I went to dinner in a sushi restaurant in March of 2004 to talk about my next book. My friend was a blogger and we had talked of me putting something on his website, maybe a short story or two. We hadn’t thought at all of a serial novel.

Yet once the idea popped up in conversation, and once we began discussing it, the idea excited us both. It would be a book but it would be posted like a blog, with three chapters released each week as they were written. It was a writing exercise or maybe a dare and I don’t know if I took it all that seriously. I’d had a lot of sake, of course.

It was a new project. It would hold a lot of challenges and surprises and I was raring to go. I realized, though, that I was missing one thing every book needs—a title. What to call it?

Well, it was a sushi restaurant. There was an inflatable six-foot Godzilla toy on a shelf behind my friend’s head. I’d been staring at it for hours.

“What about Monster Island?” I asked.

Monster Island is a novel by David Wellington.

Comments

[Adrian, Champion of all things Wellington]

David started something amazing with Monster Island; his fresh take on a rotten subject had me wishing the days away for the next update. The characters feel real and when you read, you see through their eyes, smell the reek of the undead whilst feeling their terror of being hunted down by a shambling yet organised mass of bloated corruption. I dont want to give to much away but Mr Wellington’s twists and surprises in the Monster Universe (and no, Godzilla doesn’t make an appearance) have had readers hooked for over two years. His prequel and sequel are a match to the fantastic ‘Island’ and his current work “13 Bullets” takes the vampire genre, turns it on its head and throws it into a cold shower full of fresh ideas. If you have free time, or even if your like me and should be working right now, head over to http://www.brokentype.com/davidwellington/ where you will find out a little more about David and also the links to his excellent series, and remember its available to buy online with a free chapbook (worth the cost of the novel itself) and a new chapter.

Thanks for reading!
Adrian

[Senecal]

I agree whole heartedly with the previous comment.

Dave W. has jump-started the genre with innovation that is integrated into a mastery of traditional story telling. Excellent stuff all around. His readership which has grown easily beyond 40,000 will testify to the quality of his work.

It is wonderful to see Backstory feature his work!

[nathan welty]

I have gotten a couple books thanks to this site. I came here when barry eisler did his backstory for killing rain. I come here at least once a week to see what is new.

keep up the great work

[elle]

Hi MJ and Dave! I caught Monster Island when Dave was already starting to post the sequel, Monster Nation. So it took me a while to catch up, but I was definitely hooked, and got to enjoy the full ride through the third book in the series, Monster Planet. The comments on each chapter are just as worth reading as the chapters themselves - with fanatic people like our beloved Adrian above to keep life interesting. Adrian even has a character named in his honour, and one commentator managed to get Dave to kill off his ex-girlfriend in the story.

Dave's latest offering is Thirteen Bullets, a vampire tale also well worth a look.