And, just like that — *thunder rumbles* — IT IS DONE. We’re now two weeks past the Staircase in the Woods launch, and holy crap, was it good. The tour was great — last week’s events with Clay McLeod Chapman at Doylestown Bookshop and Nat Cassidy at Midtown Scholar were epic. Both were blowouts and at such great stores with such incredible staff, and bonus, Cassidy and Chapman are both great authors and it felt natural to hang with them. Honestly, same with all my conversation partners over the course of the tour — Cina Pelayo! Holy shit, Cina Pelayo, an honor to hang with her, so much goodness there. ML Rio! The best! Just the best. Lauren Thoman! Wonderful. I am fortunate that I get to hang out with such cool, talented writer folk.
And I’m fortunate to have such great readers who show up to these events and support myself, the other authors, and the stores.
Speaking of the stores, thanks so much to all the bookstores who hosted me — Parnassus, City Lit, Gibson’s (Ryan! Cordie!!), B&N Philly, Poisoned Pen, Mysterious Galaxy, Nowhere Bookshop (Jenny Lawson! Ahh!) and of course, Doylestown and Midtown Scholar.
Great stores. Go to them. They probably all have some signed stock left behind — and if you want signed, personalized copies still, Doylestown Bookshop can get you there, just click here and have at it.
It’s been an awesome ride so far and I look forward to more and more readers finding the book. As always, if you read it and liked it, please tell a friend, a family member, a cherished frenemy, a woodland creature, a supernatural entity, whatever. And do leave a review somewhere! Unless you didn’t like it, in which case, please gently deposit your bad review in the hollow stump in the dark forest where all the bad reviews must go.
(The moss-elves will handle it from there.)
If you would like more books of mine and don’t know where to start, there are a few sales afoot — Black River Orchard is on sale for $5.99 at your local ebookmonger, and Book of Accidents is $4.99 on digital, as well. And while my preference is always you buy from indie bookstores, for some reason the hardcover for Staircase is only $13.99 at AMZ right now, so for those who must be frugal, that’s certainly an option as well.
OKAY, thanks, all, more as I have it — keep on walking up the staircase, it’s totally fine, perfectly safe, there’s nothing worrisome at the top at all, nope.
So, I’ll do a proper tour wrap-up next week but — hey, whoa, what, The Staircase in the Woods is now a USA Today bestseller:
So that is very, very exciting. In addition, it’s also the top horror bestseller in audio at Libro.fm, which is surely in part due to the excellent narrators — Amber Benson, Jay Myers, and Xe Sands. Libro.fm is a great place to buy audio, as they are independent and give back to independent bookstores.
I also don’t have final sales numbers for the book, but it does look like it will have in its first week surpassed the first week numbers of my last two adult books, so that’s also a good sign. I’m hoping people keep finding this book or it keeps finding them by stalking them in the woods, where every time you turn around on the trail, you see the book just barely peeking out of a rotten stump, or up in a tree, or behind a pileated woodpecker.
Also, if you’ve checked out the book and enjoyed it, the greatest thing you can do is tell everyone! Leave reviews, tell your friends and family and even a few frenemies, carry the book with you everywhere and gently tap people with it and say “you just got STAIRCASED, now you have to go buy the book and if you don’t, bad luck will plague you eternally.” This cannot fail. These are good marketing strategies.
The book gets to live and exist thanks to readers reading it and caring about it and carrying on about it, so thank you in advance for doing that.
Beyond that — bookstores and libraries are where the book lives, if you care to seek its dark embrace.
Before we do anything else, let’s just do a little awkward whirligig dance, praising the dark gods beyond the steps and saying huzzah and hooray, The Staircase in the Woods is now on the shelves of bookstores and libraries and, ideally, on your bookshelf or lurking on your digital device. And so I offer unto you your procurement options —
Signed and personalized from Doylestown Bookshop, or from any of the stores I’m visiting on tour — but also?
There. With that out of the way, some brief thoughts.
It’s weird writing a book. You take all this time to write the first draft. Three months, six months, a year, whatever. Then it enters not one, but a series of chrysalises — subsequent drafts, developmental edit, copy-edits, page proofs, tweaks, covers, marketing plans, release plans, and then one day, in what feels like fucking forever since you wrote it, the book bursts free from that final chrysalis and — it’s the book! The one you wrote! It’s kind of maybe a butterfly now but it’s hard to tell because you’ve spent so long with it, and yet it’s been so long since you wrote it, it’s somehow both troublingly familiar and also alien at the same time? You hold it in your hands and stare it with an uncanny eye, whispering, “I know you. Don’t I?”
And then it gets weirder because while the first draft was for me, everything since then has been for someone else. And now, now, it’s all the way out there, in the world, and it’s not mine at all anymore, it’s yours.
Writing a book is this mad act of being lost and then finding your way but then getting lost again before getting found again before getting LOST AGAIN and around and around you go. Carousels and labyrinths.
And, one supposes, staircases to [REDACTED].
Anyway! It’s out! I hope you like it. Thanks to my agent, Stacia, for helping ensure it has its home — and thanks to Tricia, my editor, for helping shepherd me from what was a fascinating and essential Ship-of-Theseus-style edit, whereupon the second draft remains fundamentally the same as the first, yet also somehow, entirely different? And thanks too to the Del Rey team for helping make this book look as cool as it does. I’m a lucky boy.
What is it about?
It’s a book where I’m pretty protective of spoilers, so here I’ll just go with what the cover copy says, which is pretty much the core of it:
Five high school friends are bonded by an oath to protect one another no matter what.
Then, on a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something extraordinary: a mysterious staircase to nowhere.
One friend walks up—and never comes back down. Then the staircase disappears.
Twenty years later, the staircase has reappeared. Now the group returns to find the lost boy—and what lies beyond the staircase in the woods. . .
No, man, what is it really about?
Ohhh. I see what you’re asking. Like, what is it about about, right? Well. I don’t know! I mean, some of that is for you to decide. For me, at least, it’s about… friendship is magic? Friendship is also hard especially as an adult? About how getting lost is important, about how regret can be a terrible self-inflicted burden, about how how if we don’t unload our baggage once in a while it will probably kill us? I dunno. You read it and tell me. I’m still kind of dancing around it, seeing through different windows.
Why do I want it?
Because it’s guaranteed to make you happy and spiritually fulfilled and also if you don’t buy it I’ll cover you in ants OKAY FINE none of that is true.
It’s creepy, it’s escapist, it’s puzzley. It’s emotional and dark (maybe the darkest book I’ve written, though I never write without a gilding of some light, if only to frame out the darkness). It’s twisty and turny and weird.
Because it’s kind of a sister book to The Book of Accidents.
Because it has a few little… Easter Eggs connecting my other books.
Because horror is comforting, in its weird way?
Because books are a pretty good value in this economy, many hours of escape from the *gesticulates wildly* for a pretty low price?
BECAUSE I WORKED REALLY HARD ON IT OKAY
Are there trigger warnings?
Not formally, but I’m glad to offer what are, in my opinion, the triggers in the book, but I’m hiding them behind a ROT13 cipher so you can translate as you see fit in case you consider this stuff “spoilery” —
“Chuck Wendig’s The Staircase in the Woods (Del Rey) takes a seemingly straightforward format – ‘five teenagers went into the woods. Only four of them came out’ – and adds a healthy dose of horror to it. There’s the police investigation, of course, asking Lauren, Nick, Owen and Hamish what happened to Matty that night. But the four friends know that they’ll never be able to admit the truth – that a strange staircase appeared in the woods, and Matty walked up it and vanished at the top. Twenty years later, they have tried to forget what happened. ‘Don’t even think about it. Don’t think about that day. Don’t put his name in your mind.’ But they’re brought back together when the staircase reappears, and decide to go looking for the friend they abandoned years earlier. I won’t spoil what lies at the top, but it’s pleasingly nightmarish and very messed up. I’ll be honest: it’s more horror than thriller, so count yourself duly warned. But for all ye brave enough to enter here, it’s a deliciously scary tale of friendship and courage – as well as evil, murder and all that jazz.”
“The Staircase in the Woods is a shifty, shifting hodgepodge of inspirations that ultimately come together in unique, and uniquely infectious, ways, inside and out. It cuts and crawls its way into you, burrowing into your heart and mind, twisting and changing as it grows deeper inside you, and isn’t that just the best kind of horror?”
“To say this is a haunting novel is a vast understatement with every choice existing as a ghost that lingers much longer than the turn of the page.
In what feels like an autopsy of the idea friendship itself, The Staircase in the Woods leaves a resonant notion that speaks to each reader individually, a truly haunting narrative. This is a novel that revels in the darkest corners of any room, transcending the strange to deliver an emotionally tumultuous journey of complex friendship. While there is plenty to love on the surface of this story, the underlying tones, reckonings, and reflections of each character echo with a resounding force, compounding to form one remarkable narrative. Harrowing for all the right reasons, The Staircase in the Woods gives depth to the topics we would rather leave shallow.”
“Over the past half-decade or so, Chuck Wendig has risen to the very top of my must-buy, favorite horror writers (not that he writes only horror, but most of his stuff has at least a dark undercurrent to it). The Staircase in the Woods helps to cement his writing near or at the top of that list and is a delightful, emotional, resonant, terrifying novel.”
Oh and did I mention all the very lovely blurbs for which I am grateful?
“Chuck Wendig weaves his magic once more, turning a lonely staircase in the woods into a searing, propulsive, dread-filled exploration of the horrors of knowing and being known.”—Kiersten White, author of Hide and Lucy Undying
“Chuck Wendig is the Frank Lloyd Wright of horror, and here’s his masterstroke of malaise. The Staircase in the Woods is a true blueprint for terror.”—Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
“[A] masterclass in character . . . Unputdownable, with imagery that cuts like a knife—this is Chuck Wendig at the top of his game.”—Thomas Olde Heuvelt, author of HEX and Darker Days
“Chuck Wendig has given us another stunner. The Staircase in the Woods is as mysterious, alluring, heartbreaking, ever-shifting, and unnervingly powerful as the nature of friendship itself.”—Nat Cassidy, author of When the Wolf Comes Home and Mary
“Heart-wrenching and anxiety-inducing. Like if the crew from King’s IT were thrown into the chaotic hallways of Danielewski’s House of Leaves, The Staircase in the Woods will become lodged in your mind, if you let it in.”—Jenny Kiefer, author of This Wretched Valley
“Chuck Wendig has crafted a very sinister take on the familiar urban legend. Highly original and deeply disturbing, this one will stick with you.”—Gwendolyn Kiste, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Reluctant Immortals and The Haunting of Velkwood
“The Staircase in the Woods is delicious disorienting and deeply captivating. It will pull at the threads of your psyche in the best way until you feel like you just emerged from the most exquisite nightmare.”—Alaina Urquhart, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Butcher Game
“A searching portrait of four friends trying to find the things we all tend to lose as we grow older: faith, direction, hope, happiness, purpose . . . That’s the heart of Chuck Wendig’s work in these pages, and to read a book that illuminates such profound human truths is very rare indeed.”—Nick Cutter, bestselling author of The Troop
Supporting the book is huge, and that can come in a variety of non-exclusive, non-exhaustive ways — you can review the book, you can tell your friends and family and foes, you can ask your local library to carry it, you can order it from your local indie bookstore and buy 500 copies and then use those copies to build a staircase in the woods that you walk up and then jump off of into [REDACTED] and y’know, yeah, there are a lot of cool ways. Even just sharing this post around helps.
Whatever the case, I am grateful for readers like yourselves who read these books and care about them and share the book love around. I only get to exist by the fortune and grace of your reading attention, so for that — thank you so very much, and I’ll see you on the other side.
It’s an IndieNext pick for May, and a LibraryReads pick for May. Ahh!
I’m very excited for it to be out in the world.
I’ll post the book’s more official blurbs/reviews later, but for now, if you remain unconvinced, here’s a scattering of comments from early reviews from readers over at Netgalley and beyond:
“The Staircase in the Woods is a symphony of shadows, a haunting and unforgettable journey into the heart of fear. Wendig’s ability to conjure a palpable atmosphere of dread, combined with his talent for creating characters that are both deeply human and profoundly vulnerable, makes this an absolute must-read for anyone who craves a story that will linger in the darkest corners of their mind. Prepare to be captivated, disturbed, and utterly enthralled.” — Kori S, reviewer, 5/5
“The Staircase in the Woods isn’t just a story—it’s a sensory overload, a dark meditation, and a sprawling tangle of emotions you’ll feel long after you’ve closed the last page. Chuck Wendig takes a strange and chilling idea—a staircase in the middle of nowhere—and builds a whole universe around it, brick by unsettling brick.” — Tessa P, reviewer 5/5
“Eerie, beautiful, and utterly gripping, The Staircase in the Woods is Chuck Wendig at his best. A haunting mystery wrapped in folklore and fear, it draws you in with lyrical prose and leaves you breathless with its emotional depth. Strange, dark, and unforgettable.” — Trina B, reviewer, 5/5
“Chuck does it again. Another phenomenal book. This one has some House of Leaves in its DNA. Some FNAF. Lots of Chuck — and everything you’d expect from him. The characters are so good. The plot is awesome, full of twists and turns. And the emotional core of friendships lost after time + tragedy ties it all together. Love it. You should read it.” — Jeffrey W, librarian, 5/5
“Chuck Wendig’s novel reads like a cinematic fever dream, equal parts horror and elegy. This isn’t just a ghost story. It’s about the divide between childhood and adulthood, the secrets we bury and the truths we carry—often alone. It’s about the damage done in homes that looked perfect from the outside and the roles we adopt to survive what’s happening inside… Because at the end of the day, this is a story about truth. The ones we hide from others and the ones we hide from ourselves. As kids, we take on roles—athlete, brain, comedian—to protect ourselves. But eventually, if we want to live freely, we have to strip away those masks and face what’s really there. In the dark. At the foot of the stairs.” — Stella G., reviewer, 5/5
“What happens from there simply can’t be described to any justice without reading the book. This book is going to haunt me and give me what I am anticipating to be the worst book hangover that I can remember. I read this in one sitting and became so invested in these complex and layered characters that I could not wait to learn their fate.” — Reviewer 1316058 5/5
ANYWAY, hope you’ll check it out. Also today is my birthday so you’re obligated to buy me a present by buying yourself a present. And this present is this book. It’s just Birthday Law, I don’t make the rules, I only uphold them.
Jerry Campbell just wants to be left alone. Grief-stricken over the death of his wife Abigail, the elderly widower and recent retiree is desperate for a change of scenery. When his realtor suggests a new home in Fairview Acres, a retirement community in the Poconos, Jerry figures it will be a nice place to spend the rest of his days in solitude.
Until he moves in.
Weird neighbors. Nightly block parties. Strange noises across his rooftop at all hours. Worst of all is Arthur Peterson, chairman of the Fairview Acres Community Association, who seems obsessed with coaxing Jerry into participating in neighborhood activities.
At first, Jerry shrugs off the incidents and eccentricities, telling himself he doesn’t want to be the guy who complains about everything—but that all changes one evening when Katherine Dunnally appears on his doorstep with an ominous warning: “You need to leave. The worms…they dance at nightfall…”
His neighbors all say Katherine suffers from a form of dementia called Sundowner’s Syndrome, but as the weeks progress and the strangeness mounts, Jerry begins to suspect there is something else going on in his neighborhood. Something that has to do with the huge stone in the community park…
Heartfelt and unsettling, Todd Keisling’s latest novel, The Sundowner’s Dance, propels readers through a terrifying exploration of grief, dementia, and perhaps the greatest horror of all: growing old.
The story always knows, and sometimes you really have to get out of your own way to let it call the shots.
I’m one of those “plantser” sort of writers—I plot a beginning and ending, but pants everything in between. And let me tell you, when I started the story that would eventually become The Sundowner’s Dance, I did not want to write another novel. I’d just finished rewriting a doorstopper called Devil’s Creek and wanted to focus on nothing but short fiction for a while. This story, originally titled “Beneath the Eye of the Moon,” began its life as a novelette. All the dots were there, I just had to connect them—but around the 11k word mark, I realized this story wanted to be longer. Needed to be longer. So, I shelved it for about four years and wrote Scanlines instead. I won’t recap the whole process here. In a nutshell, I resisted this story every step of the way, until it became clear to me that I couldn’t anymore. Lisa Dunnally was the catalyst—the daughter of one of the protagonists. She showed up on Jerry Campbell’s doorstep one day, forever altering the course of what I thought would be the final act of the story, and added some much-needed dimension to her mother, Katherine. I realized I’d been holding the story back in my refusal to let it become what it wanted to be: a full-length novel. The experience taught me tough lessons in storytelling. Sometimes, the story knows better than we do, and it’s not the writer’s job to create so much as it is to record.
Dementia and Alzheimer’s are horrible, but “Sundowning” is worse.
I’m no stranger to dementia. My granny experienced it in her final years. Hallucinations, mostly. Irritability. Mood swings. I’d heard of “sundown syndrome” before writing this book, but I didn’t know what it entailed. Once the term found its way into the story, I had to do my diligence and research the topic so I could speak on it with some authority. For the story’s purposes, there’s an “illness” (for lack of a better term) that presents effects of dementia, and often in reverse of sundowning—the victim becomes a different, better version of themself at night. However, the real thing is worse. It occurs in the mid- to late stages of dementia, often triggered by insomnia and over-stimulation during the day, and wreaks havoc on a person’s psyche. Sundowning patients have good days and bad days, but every night is a bad night. They begin seeing and hearing things that aren’t there, suffer from body aches, everything irritates the shit out of them, and more. Imagine that you can’t tell the difference between reality and your dreams. Familiar faces look foreign to you; some even look scary to you. And you are certain that someone, somewhere, is out to do you harm. When you do finally sleep, your circadian rhythm is broken to the point of only allowing an hour or two here and there. You’re basically trapped in your malfunctioning brain. I can think of nothing more terrifying than that.
And then there’s cancer.
I was in the early stages of the second draft when my wife discovered a lump in her breast. She had it checked out and was scheduled for a biopsy. Then we waited. And waited. We tried to get things in order just in case. Both of us have lost family to the Big C. We’ve seen what it can do to a person. She’d lost a lot of weight in the months leading up to the discovery, and I think we both assumed the worst. Life was in limbo, and though rewrites were the last thing on my mind, I stuck with it because what else am I going to do, you know? I lost a lot of sleep. Spent a lot of nights at my laptop, spiraling to dark thoughts and possibilities. What would I do without her? How would I go on? We’re both neurodivergent in complimentary ways, handling things the other usually avoids, and the prospect of spending the second half of my life without her was the scariest thing I’ve faced. Like I said, I’ve lost family to cancer, but this hit differently somehow. It felt more personal, and I found myself grieving for her even when she was in the room. That was the longest two weeks of our lives, and I’m happy to say the lump was benign. As of her last checkup, she’s free and clear. But my god, the anxiety in the interim saturated my soul and wouldn’t let go. So, I channeled it into Jerry, the protagonist, who is a widower still grieving for his wife two years after her passing. He’s facing my personal fear: how to continue after such a loss.
Sometimes your characters have to blow something up, and I’m probably definitely on a watch list.
I don’t know a single writer who doesn’t have a suspect search history. For my novel Devil’s Creek, I had to research homemade meth production and cult mentality. The Sundowner’s Dance took me down a different online rabbit hole: homemade explosives. Ammonium nitrate, sometimes referred to as ANFO (ammonium nitrate fuel oil), the stuff farmers use to fertilize crops, is highly explosive. It’s what Timothy McVeigh used to perpetrate the bombing in Oklahoma City back in ’95. Like my research into meth production, I discovered the instructions on how to create a bomb (by accident, I swear) using ANFO. So, yeah, I’m on a watch list somewhere. Then again, who isn’t?
We need more elderly protagonists.
I grew up among the elderly, and was partially raised by my grandmother and great-grandmother. I was around for conversations involving prescriptions, elder care, and insurance headaches. I’ve witnessed strokes and their after-effects, and the depression that settles in as one realizes their body is failing them. Life doesn’t end at 65 and people don’t disappear when they retire. They go on living in partial invisibility, only visible when they become an “inconvenience,” seemingly separate from the rest of the society as they exist in their so-called “golden” or “twilight” years. I feel this whole facet of life is underrepresented in horror these days. Maybe it’s the social discourse pitting generations against one another—Boomers and Millenials, etc.—that’s made us hesitant to tackle the subject; or maybe it’s that we’re afraid to face the prospect of aging ourselves. But that’s the beauty of it, I think. Aging awaits us all. We can’t escape it. It’s ripe for horror based on these facts alone.
TODD KEISLING is the two-time Bram Stoker Award®-nominated author of Devil’s Creek, Scanlines, Cold, Black & Infinite, and most recently, The Sundowner’s Dance, among several others. A pair of his earlier works were recipients of the University of Kentucky’s Oswald Research & Creativity Prize for Creative Writing (2002 and 2005), and his second novel, The Liminal Man, was an Indie Book Award finalist in Horror & Suspense (2013). He lives in Pennsylvania with his family.
Zombies are all around us—insect zombies, that is. Zombifying parasites reproduce by infecting victims and rewriting their neurochemistry, transforming them into the walking dead. Ants, crickets, caterpillars, and other hosts helplessly follow a zombifier’s commands, living only to serve the parasite’s needs until death’s sweet release (and often beyond).
“Rise of the Zombie Bugs” explores the eerie yet fascinating phenomenon of real-life zombification in insects and other invertebrates. Zombification is one of nature’s most unsettling survival strategies, with zombifiers evolving over millions of years to become deft neuroscientists capable of reprogramming host behavior. Victims of their manipulation are found worldwide—from Brazilian rainforests to European meadows.
Why is a bug’s world full of zombies, and could parasites that zombify invertebrates evolve to do the same to people? “Rise of the Zombie Bugs” offers a chilling yet enlightening look at the hidden world of mind-controlling parasites. It’s a must-read for anyone curious about the true terrors lurking in nature’s undergrowth and the unnerving beauty of evolution’s darker side.
Parasitic worms turn snails into disco-eyed zombies.
Have you ever seen a zombified snail, its swollen eyestalks pulsing in a mesmerizing display of patterns and colors? Researching Zombie Bugs introduced me to parasitic flatworms in the genus Leucochloridium; when these worms infect a snail, they produce larvae-stuffed broodsacs that grow inside the snail’s body. Sausage-shaped and striped in shades of green and brown, the broodsacs migrate into the snail’s eyestalks. When they vigorously undulate there, they look like creeping caterpillars.
Leucochloridium hatches and matures in snails, but reproduces in birds. In addition to making caterpillar-like broodsacs, the parasites manipulate snail behavior so that the snails wander out in the open, where they’re more likely to be spotted by predators. When a bird pecks off an infected snail’s eyestalk and swallows the broodsac, the worms end up exactly where they need to be in order to reproduce—inside a bird’s gut.
In fact, lots of behavior-manipulating parasites cause wandering or light-seeking behavior in their hosts (hey, remember those fungal-infected sleepwalkers in Wanderers?), particularly during the late stages of infection. Zombifying fungi, worms, flies and viruses all benefit from their hosts’ walking, hopping or crawling under their own power, to find a spot that’s ideal for the parasite’s reproduction.
“Find Familiar” is an excellent D&D spell and very good writing advice.
One of my favorite wizard spells in D&D—”Find Familiar”—also turned out to be helpful guidance for writing a popular science book. When I started researching Zombie Bugs, much of the science was not familiar to me. So I read dozens of scientific papers. I spoke with entomologists, mycologists and parasitologists. I visited museum collections. I organized chapters based on who was doing the zombifying and how.
It was a lot to sort and process! I wanted to start the book with the origins of zombification, how it works, and what studying zombie bugs reveals about human brains and behaviors. But the scope of those questions felt overwhelming, and I couldn’t find an entry point for that first chapter.
So I set it aside and started a different chapter, about something that was more familiar to me: fungus-infected zombie cicadas. The fungus Massospora cicadina grows inside adult periodical cicadas, until their butts fall off to reveal a yellow plug of tightly-packed spores. Massospora also doses its hosts with a type of amphetamine that causes hypersexualized behavior, so they spread zombification like an STD. I actually found one of these drug-addled zombies in Princeton, New Jersey, during the Brood X periodical cicada emergence of 2018, and being personally acquainted with zombie cicadas made me more confident about diving into that chapter.
Re-creating the scene from that day in Princeton—the spring sunshine, the crunch of cicada exoskeletons underfoot, the surprise and thrill of finding my first zombie—was a joy to write. And once I had that under my belt, finding my way into the next chapter (and the one after that) was so much easier.
If you kick really hard, you can avoid being zombified.
Cockroaches are survivors. Still, it surprised me to find out that they have a special strategy for surviving zombifying attacks by jewel wasps. Female wasps sting roaches in the head, delivering a venomous cocktail that makes the roach as docile as a puppy. The wasp then leads its stung, passive roach to her nest. She walls it up inside with a hungry wasp larva, and the roach ends its life as a Happy Meal.
But unlike most insect victims of zombification, roaches often fight back and defeat their zombifiers! Researchers at Vanderbilt University’s Catania Lab captured high-speed footage showing that roaches defended themselves against zombifying wasp attacks with vigorous kicks. In about 63% of such attacks, the roaches escaped unscathed (unless they weren’t fully grown, in which case the wasps were able to zombify the roach youngsters 100% of the time).
Zombies? The CDC had a plan for that.
More than a decade before HBO’s The Last of Us introduced TV audiences to the Infected —zombies created by a fictional variant of the zombie ant fungus Ophiocordyceps—AMC’s The Walking Dead captivated viewers with its more traditional decaying zombies, created by an unspecified virus. Much to my delight, I discovered that the success of The Walking Dead inspired the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to launch a “Zombie Preparedness” campaign in 2011, which I was able to track down online because the internet is amazing. (Seriously, go look this up. There were posters! There’s a downloadable comic!) Obviously, the CDC wasn’t hinting at an imminent zombie apocalypse; they were using zombies as a way to get people to think about pandemics and disaster preparedness. At the time, CDC director Dr. Ali Khan wrote, “If you are generally well equipped to deal with a zombie apocalypse you will be prepared for a hurricane, pandemic, earthquake, or terrorist attack.” When the CDC launched this campaign, it was so popular that it temporarily crashed the agency’s website (they finally retired their Zombie Preparedness materials in 2021).
Since then, researchers have created mathematical models of hypothetical zombie outbreaks to study the spread of infectious diseases. Healthcare workers in hospitals and with the Red Cross train for high-pressure medical emergency scenarios by treating “patients” during staged zombie attacks. There’s even a scientific conference called the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Meeting, where experts from different disciplines meet to talk about a range of science topics related to zombification. The pervasiveness of zombies in pop culture has some unexpectedly practical real-world applications for science, medicine and public health!
A deep dive into Alien‘s backstory led to a gut-wrenching discovery.
If you’ve seen the movie Alien, the chestburster scene is probably seared into your brain. As soon as I learned about the original chestbursters—wasp larvae that hatch and grow inside zombified caterpillars, then chew through their host’s skin and pupate inside cocoons on the caterpillars’ backs—I knew that they deserved their own chapter in Zombie Bugs.
I’d heard rumors that the Alien filmmakers based their chestburster on these parasitic wasps, but though I combed through interviews, I couldn’t track down a solid connection. What I did discover was that Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon found inspiration for the chestburster from his own experience with Crohn’s disease, a gastrointestinal disorder that causes excruciating gut pain. It has no cure, and it eventually caused O’Bannon’s death in 2009.
While I was researching O’Bannon, I found something else that stuck with me: a scan of a sketch that he made before production began, of the xenomorph’s larval facehugger stage. His illustration wasn’t as terrifying as the film’s facehugger; the drawing, which looked like an angry cartoon crab, was actually kind of cute. As a writer working on her first book, I found reassurance in that derpy concept art, knowing that it would eventually transform into something unforgettably horrific. It reminded me that first drafts of anything don’t need to be perfect. They just need to be done.
Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and editor at Scholastic, Inc. and has written about science for CNN, Scientific American, Live Science and Space.com. Her writing covers parasites, new species discoveries, weird animal behavior, strange medical cases, paleontology, climate change, archaeology and space exploration. For more than a decade, Weisberger produced, wrote and directed media for the American Museum of Natural History, and she scripted and co-hosted the science podcast Life’s Little Mysteries. She lives on a cliff in New Jersey with her husband, two cats, and too many ukuleles.
