Today we’re joined by author Scott Baker. Let’s take a few moments now to get everyone acquainted…

Scott M. Baker was born and raised in Everett, Massachusetts and spent twenty-three years in northern Virginia working for the Central Intelligence Agency. Scott is now retired and lives in Gainesville, Florida as a full-time writer along with his wife and fellow author Alison Beightol and his stepdaughter. He has written The Vampire Hunters trilogy, about humans fighting the undead in Washington D.C., as well as Rotter World, which details the struggle between humans and vampires during a zombie apocalypse. In early 2014, his fifth novel will be published; Yeitso is his homage to the giant monster movies of the 1950s that he loved watching as a kid. Scott is currently working on the next two books in the Rotter World saga and a series of young adult novels set in a post-apocalyptic world.

Scott has also authored several short stories, including “Rednecks Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things,” “Cruise of the Living Dead” (zombies aboard a cruise ship), “Deck the Malls with Bowels of Holly” (an alcoholic mall Santa battles zombie reindeer), “Last Flight of the Bismarck” (steampunk zombies), “The Hunger” (cannibalism during a zombie apocalypse), “Lebenden Toten at the Gate” (Nazis versus zombies in Stalingrad), and the novella Dead Water.

When not writing, Scott can usually be found doting on the two boxers, one house rabbits, and one cat that kindly allow him to live with them.

Welcome Scott! Now let’s delve into the questions… Tell us about your zombies? If the dead were to rise, do you think you’d stand a chance against them?

My zombies, for the most part, are the traditional Romero-style shufflers.  What makes mine menacing are the numbers.  I think having hundreds of the living dead converging on you in a massive horde is far more terrifying than being chased by a handful of fast zombies. However, in some circumstances fast zombies can be frightening.  In my novel Rotter World, I introduce swarmers, which are recently-turned zombies whose muscles have not yet decayed, so they maintain the speed and strength of a human. It is only after a few days when the body begins to rot that swarmers lose their agility and become the more traditional, staggering zombies.  I’ve also dabbled with zombie vampires – just imagine the living dead with the same strength and ferocity as the undead.

Would I stand a chance of surviving a zombie apocalypse?  Probably not because I live in a fairly large city, so unless I could pack up the family and head for the countryside within the first few hours after the outbreak, I’d probably wind up in the middle of a traffic jam that would eventually become a zombie buffet bar.  On the plus side, we live in an old cinderblock house in the suburbs, so it is possible we could ride out the initial outbreak, but in that scenario I’d be more worried about survivors attempting to take what we have.

Living in the city would be a detriment, but you never know, you may be able to get out in time. What was your first experience with zombie media (movie, book, comic, etc)? Was that experience was drew into writing the genre?

The first zombie movie I remember watching was Bob Clark’s Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things.  The movie is horribly campy and the acting is amateurish, but there are two scenes that always give me a chill.  The first is when the living dead rise out of the cemetery.  One of the soon-to-be-victims is backing away from a group of zombies when a hand beaks through the ground behind him and clutches his leg.  A female zombie pulls herself out of the ground, climbing up the victim hand over hand and dragging him to the ground to be eaten.  That scene still sends a shiver down my spine.

The second is during the zombie attack on the cottage.  Terry is standing by the doors to the kitchen when two zombies appear behind her, grab her, and drag her away.  The camera focuses on Terry being dragged screaming outside into the dark.  For some reason, that scene freaked the living hell out of me, and from that point on I was hooked on the living dead.

Now it’s time for the Pop Quiz: The item to your left is your only weapon during the Zombie Apocalypse. What is it and what do you think are your chances at survival?

I wouldn’t survive ten seconds.  It’s a figurine of Count Dooku from Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith with the box autographed by Christopher Lee.

You are screwed… Tell us about your five favourite pieces of Zombie media.

In no particular order:

Dawn of the Dead (2005)

Resident Evil

World War Z (the novel)

Dead Island (the video game)

The Walking Dead (TV series)

Great choices! We all know that we sometimes have bad luck. Keeping that in mind, what song do you think would get stuck in your head, playing over and over again on an incessant loop?

Tone Loc’s Wild Thing.  I don’t know why, but there’s something about the beat that makes me want to go out and kill the living dead.  It’s one of the songs on my iPod playlist “Music To Hunt Zombies By.”

Thank you Scott for taking the time to answer my questions!

If you’d like to connect with Scott, you can find him on Facebook on his personal page and his author page, Twitter, or his blog.

Not let’s take a look at Rotter World… Don’t forget that clicking on the cover takes you to Amazon!

Eight months ago vampires released the Revenant Virus on humanity. Both species were nearly wiped out.

For Mike Robson, the situation could be far worse. He’s joined up with a small band of humans and the last coven of vampires who are riding out the zombie apocalypse in an old fort along the coast of southern Maine.

The group’s uneasy alliance is strained by the arrival of the creator of the Revenant Virus. He claims there is a vaccine that will make them immune to the virus, but it’s located in a secure underground facility five hundred miles away.

To retrieve the vaccine, Robson leads a raiding party of humans and vampires down the devastated East Coast. Yet none of the horrors Robson has faced match what awaits in the underground facility…