Southerners will fry anything.
Those of us born and raised in the deep
southern states of the U.S. know all too well how true this is. My grandmother, who lived her entire
life in rural Alabama, deep-fried everything: meat, veggies, dessert, bread,
and even fruit, such as apples and green tomatoes. My family would travel up from the Florida Gulf Coast to visit
my grandmother and she would whip up a meal of fried catfish, fried hushpuppies
(a dumpling made out of cornmeal and onions), fried okra, lima beans drowned in
butter, green beans swimming in butter and salt, coleslaw, and blackberry
cobbler.
My grandmother lived to be ninety.
I’ve had deep-fried pickles, zucchini
slices, cauliflower (tastes like fried shrimp), potatoes, onions, eggplant, and
mushrooms. And don’t forget about
fried chicken, fried pork chops, beer-battered fried shrimp, and the enigmatic
chicken fried steak. To a tried
and true Southerner, everything tastes better when it’s been battered and deep
fried.
So what does all this Southern cooking have
to do with writing and reading?
Well, it inspired two pieces, as well as
the title, in my short story collection FRIED ZOMBIE DEE-LIGHT! GHOULISH, GHOSTLY TALES. First came the poem/song “Fried Zombie
Dee-light!”—accent on the dee in delight.
What if zombies really existed and what if a restaurant down in Alabama,
appropriately named Bubba’s Café, served a dish called Fried Zombie
Dee-light? How would they catch
the zombies? How would they
prepare the dish? What if the
recipe was so popular the restaurant decided to expand their menu and tried
frying up a different supernatural creature?
The second piece inspired by Southern
culture is “Zombie Hunting with my Mother” where a woman laid off by the
American recession takes up two new hobbies with her daughter: zombie hunting
and Southern cooking. And what if
she combined those two hobbies into one?
Ahhhh, the possibilities . . .
So, if you’re in between books and have a hankering
for a little Southern cooking, try some FRIED ZOMBIE DEE-LIGHT tonight. You know you want to.
Susan Abel Sullivan lives in a historic
Victorian house with two dogs, way too many cats, and a couple of snakes. When not writing she likes to get her
groove on by teaching Zumba Fitness ® classes. She is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop for
speculative fiction. Her short
fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous online and print publications,
including Asimov’s Science Fiction
Magazine, Andromeda Spaceways
Inflight Magazine, ASIM Best of
Horror: Vol II, Beyond Centauri, New Myths, AlienSkin, and
Writers’ Journal. She is the author of CURSED: WICKEDLY
FUN STORIES and the forthcoming novel THE HAUNTED HOUSEWIVES OF ALLISTER, AL
from World Weaver Press. She is
currently writing a Young Adult novel about the supernaturally challenged. Visit her website at http://susanabelsullivan.weebly.com/
or follow her on Facebook: http://facebook.com/Susan Abel Sullivan,
Twitter:
http//twitter.com/susan_abel and Pinterest:
http://pinterest.com/sullivansue/.
FRIED ZOMBIE DEE-LIGHT! GHOULISH, GHOSTLY TALES
Available on Kindle, Nook, and at Smashwords.com
A fun collection about ghouls,
ghosts, zombies, and an advice column featuring dead letters from the lovelorn!
You'll want to steer clear of Bubba's Cafe after you find out what they serve,
and if you teach Group X, you'll be leery of job postings for Certified Zombie
Instructors. Quiver, quake and chuckle at these quirky tales of the paranormal.
Delightfully fraught with humor and the macabre, Sullivan's FRIED ZOMBIE DEE-LIGHT masterfully mixes the mundane with the fantastic in her tales of the strange and ghoulish.—Heidi Ruby Miller, author of AMBASADORA and GREENSHIFT; co-editor of MANY GENRES, ONE CRAFT
"Susan Abel Sullivan's talent shines in FRIED ZOMBIE DEE-LIGHT!—a collection full of wicked humor and quirky charm."—Sherry Peters, author of SILENCING YOUR INNER SABOTEUR
“Eerie, delectable, and filled with Southern charm, Fried Zombie Dee-Light will leave you wanting more.”—Rebecca Roland, author of the forthcoming SHARDS OF HISTORY from World Weaver Press
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