Three Influences on The Revenant Strain
I spent thirty-some years in corporate IT, and every new project started the same way. Somebody would pull the plan from the last project that actually worked — the charter, the RACI matrix, whatever artifacts had proven most effective — and we'd build off that instead of starting from a blank page. The best projects were those where we stole the best-in-class stuff and made it ours.
The Revenant Strain didn't come from nowhere. Three things fed it directly, and only one of them has anything to do with zombies.
World War Z gave me permission to remove the narrator
Max Brooks built World War Z out of interviews — soldiers, survivors, officials, all speaking after the fact, none of them able to see the whole picture. No character walks you through the war. You assemble it yourself, one account at a time, and the gaps between accounts do as much work as the accounts themselves.
I didn't set out to copy that structure. I set out to solve a problem: my original source material was an actual online RPG journal, one guy's first-person account of a hunting trip gone wrong. A single journal can carry a lot, but it can't carry everything. Arthur Harris doesn't know what's happening in Bekershtrit while he's at the cabin. He doesn't know what a lab tech recorded before the outbreak spread. He can't know those things — he's one man with one notebook.
Brooks solved that problem decades before I had it. Stack up enough partial accounts and the reader ends up knowing more than any single narrator does. Raj, my archivist, exists because somebody has to be the one assembling the accounts — collecting the journal, the voicemails, the incident reports, deciding what order they go in and what gets a footnote. World War Z didn't need a Raj because the interviewer stays invisible. I wanted mine visible, because I wanted the act of curation itself to be part of the horror — someone deciding what's worth preserving from a catastrophe, and what isn't.
Cloverfield taught me the document has to feel found, not written
Found footage works as long as you believe the camera is just there — someone's phone, someone's hand, catching whatever's in front of it. The second the framing feels convenient, like the shot was staged to catch the monster just right, you stop believing it's raw footage. You start seeing the filmmaker behind it.
I think about this every time I draft a voicemail transcript. A voicemail isn't a scene. Nobody's performing for an audience — they're talking into a phone, mid-panic, trying to get a sentence out before the signal drops or the thing in the hallway gets closer. It should feel incomplete. It should have dead air in it. If a voicemail in this book reads like polished dialogue, I've failed at the one job that format has.
Cloverfield handed me that discipline — the commitment to the bit over the monster or the shaky camera. The document is evidence, standing on its own with no idea it's part of a story. It's there to be found and shown, never written for anyone.
City Slickers gave me the guys, human and likable, before I broke them
Before World War Z, before found footage, before any of it — there's just four guys on a trip. Soft, funny, a little lost in their own lives, heading somewhere rugged to feel like men again for two weeks.
Billy Crystal's turning forty in City Slickers, his job feels pointless, and a cattle drive is supposed to fix what a good therapist could've handled for a fraction of the airfare. It's a comedy about guys who've gotten comfortable running headfirst into two weeks of dirt and cattle just to remember what discomfort feels like.
Art, Luke, Jimmy, and Mikey start there. An executive, a trader, a car salesman, a mid-level manager — four guys with too much money and not enough left to prove to each other, flying into a country they've barely researched to shoot boars with rented guns. I wanted that specific flavor of soft-man tourism before I put them anywhere near a zombie. The first few entries in Arthur's journal are genuinely funny, but the real reason is that softness is the baseline the collapse gets measured against. You can't watch someone get hardened by catastrophe if you never saw them soft.
City Slickers isn't in the DNA of the format — it's in the DNA of the men. Everything World War Z and Cloverfield do to the structure only matters because the reader spent time with these four guys before any of it went wrong.
Only one of these three works has a zombie in it. The scaffolding for The Revenant Strain came from an oral history, a monster movie, and a midlife-crisis comedy — proof that good structure and a good cast of soft, doomed men will carry you through almost anything you throw at them.