Goodreads asked Jack Strange:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Jack Strange I was thinking one day that zombies always behave in a really stupid way.

They eat anyone they can get their hands on, or turn them into zombies by biting them.

Logically, that should mean that if the zombies succeeded in taking over the planet, then sooner or later there would be no people around, only zombies, and the zombies wouldn’t have anything to eat. They’d have guaranteed their own extinction.

Then I thought: what if you had intelligent zombies? What would they do? They wouldn’t want to eat everyone, or turn the population of the entire world into zombies, because they’d know that if they did, there’d be nothing left for them to eat except each other. They’d probably work out that their best course of action would be to enslave people and farm them for the table.

Then, after I’d come up with that idea, it occurred to me that the ideal cross-section of people to have as zombies would be a group that were involved in the food industry. I settled on chefs because I could see how I could have a lot of fun with that idea – I could describe how they enjoyed cooking people in elaborate ways before eating them. I don’t think that’s been done in zombie literature before.

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