David Wellington: The Book I Would Like To Be Buried With…
The fifteenth entry in the Bury Me With… series features a genre author who has utilised the power of the internet with his free series fiction, garnering word-of-mouth recommendations like no other: David Wellington came to prominence with his Monster Island zombie series. He’s thought long and hard about his choice…
“The answer to that question really depends on the context.
Assuming that I am cremated, as I would prefer, I wouldn’t like to take any books with me at all. I’m not in favor of burning books under any circumstances. Not even Twilight.
If I were to be buried in a traditional pine coffin, a circumstance which presumably would only happen if I died anonymously in some foreign land, perhaps a tropical country where bodies are required by law to be buried as quickly as possible, well. It’s unlikely that the kindly folks who bury unknown bodies would waste any more money on buying books for the anonymous deceased. If they did, I hope that some cosmic twist of fate would make sure it was one of my own books that I was buried with. Hopefully – and here we’re getting into the realm of extremely unlikely events – they would also seal the book in some kind of plastic that would last a very long time. The whole point of these improbabilities is that when my bones are eventually uncovered by some future society, the highly advanced energy beings who dig me up will either a) realize that these are the bones of a long forgotten but underrated author from another era, or b) be so confused that I will become one of those unsolved mysteries of history that bother people so much.
In the far more likely, if less sanguine prospect that I was somehow buried alive – that is, if I was to fall victim to some sort of deep, coma-like sleep but a (highly incompetent) doctor mistakenly diagnosed me as, in fact, dead, and the coroner, all the morgue assistants, funeral home director (too cheap to embalm my “corpse”), and family all failed to correct the mistake – then I would like to be buried with a blank book for use when I wake up inside my coffin. Given the conditions that I never obtained in life, i.e., peace and quiet, plenty of free time, and no high speed internet access, I believe I could finally write my masterpiece. Hopefully I would finish it before I asphyxiated.
Alternatively, if all of the above happened but – cruel fate – I was accidentally buried, alive, with a blank book but no pen or pencil to write with, I would at least be able to appreciate the terrible morbid irony of the situation.”
About David Wellington:
David Wellington is the author of seven novels. His zombie novels Monster Island, Monster Nation and Monster Planet (Thunder’s Mouth Press) form a complete trilogy. He has also written a series of vampire novels including (so far) Thirteen Bullets, Ninety-Nine Coffins, Vampire Zero and Twenty-Three Hours, and in October of 2009 began his new Werewolf series, starting with Frostbite (all with Three Rivers Press).
In 2004 he began serializing his horror fiction online, posting short chapters of a novel three times a week on a friend’s blog. Response to the project was so great that in 2004 Thunder’s Mouth Press approached Mr. Wellington about publishing Monster Island as a print book. His novels have been featured in Rue Morgue, Fangoria, and the New York Times.
- Visit David’s website at http://www.davidwellington.net
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