When Zombies Come to Town
Discover more from Morbidly Curious
It’s been minute since I posted. I’ve had a lot of exciting stuff happen in the past few weeks, so I thought I’d give an update.
Dark Minds, Soft Hearts
I recently finished the first full draft of my book, tentatively titled Dark Minds, Soft Hearts: The science behind our fascination with the darker side of life. Most of you probably know this already, but the book is about the psychology behind morbid curiosity; why humans are so intrigued by horror, true crime, and all varieties of the macabre. There are chapters on evolution, true crime, violence, the paranormal, anxiety, kids, and several other topics.
It still has to go through a round of editing and we have to get a cover designed. And I assume Penguin will want to release it close to Halloween, which means it’ll likely be a mid-2024 release. As soon as I know, you will know.
The Zombie Crawl
I thought finishing my book would be the most exciting thing that happened this year, but I may have topped it by becoming the new director/organizer of the Eureka Springs Zombie Crawl. If you don’t know about the town I live in, check out the brief intro that I wrote in this post.
Long story short, it’s a spooky mountain town, and the annual Zombie Crawl is the single biggest event of the year, drawing in up to 20,000 people (in a town of 2,000). And now, I get to organize it.
What’s a Zombie Crawl? That’s a great question that is better answered with photos and video than description.
The Zombie Crawl basically a giant city-wide Halloween party that centers around zombies. The Saturday before Halloween each year people show up in extravagant zombie costumes to crawl through the town. Busy years see over 15,000 descend upon the town. Next year, I think we’ll go for the Guinness World Record for most people dressed as zombies (currently 15,458).
Even if we don’t break that, we’ve definitely got the most zombies per capita.
This year we will begin the spooky festivities around noon with music, dancing, and make-up artists in the Basin Park. We’ll also have vendors and food trucks throughout the day. Then, just as the night starts to roll in around 6pm, the crawl begins. After the zombie horde takes over the town, many of them will head over to the official afterparty to keep the night going.
I’m obviously biased , but it’s a super fun event that I highly recommend you check out. I’d love if you could share the Facebook Event or EventBrite page with your friends on social media. And if you do come out, please reach out and let me know! It’ll be a busy day for me, but I’d love to say hello. We’re also currently looking for event sponsors, so if you or your business would like to partner with us, please reach out.
More to come
This was mostly a “sorry I haven’t posted as frequently, but I promise it’s because I’ve been working on cool stuff” post. I’ll be writing more stuff soon — and I have some other updates that I can’t talk about just yet, but I promise they’ll be cool.
In the meantime, you can catch me talking about True Crime on NPR’s All Sides on Monday, August 7th at 10am CT.
For those of you in the UK, I’ll be there in late September for a panel on true crime at the Leeds International Festival of Ideas. On the panel with me are investigate journalists, detectives, TV producers, and actors. It should be a lot of fun.
I’ll also be in St. Louis October 5-7th for the Haunted Garage Horror Film Festival. I highly recommend getting tickets to this if you’re in the area. I’ve been going every year the past few years, and I always give a talk on the science of horror. This year, I’ll be talking about why monsters look and behave the way they do. Similar to a previous post I published about why horror villains are cats.