Saline Author Carrie Harris Pens Young Adult Zombie Novel

Saline author Carrie Harris aims to make the solitary work of writing fun – duct taping herself to a chair in the name of research or acting out zombie combat in her backyard.

It’s all in a day’s work for this author of “Bad Taste in Boys,” a young adult zombie comedy that lurched into the marketplace earlier this month.  

Harris’ heroine, Kate Grable, is horrified to find the football coach has given the team steroids – that are turning hot gridiron hunks into mindless flesh-eating zombies. Kate’s got to find an antidote, and she and her friends stage a frantic battle to save their town, and stay hormonally human.

A launch party, complete with zombie door prizes, kid-friendly activities, and more, will be held 2 p.m. Saturday, July 23 at Nicola’s Books in the Westgate Shopping Center in Ann Arbor.

“I’ll be signing books and showing off my new zombie unicorn dress,” Harris says. “I’m really excited about this event! Anyone who participates online or in person can be entered to win one of two grand prizes—a Kindle or a six-month writing mentorship.”

Most days, Harris still can’t believe her luck at becoming a fully fledged writer.

“This is my dream job and always has been. But I always imagined that writing would be a hobby—after all, who makes their living telling ridiculous zombie stories? So I’ve really made it a priority to pay all that luck forward.”

She is particularly proud of her “Night of the Giving Dead" benefit for the University of Michigan C. S. Mott Children’s Hospital Giving Library. An online auction has over 80 items up for grabs including signed NYT bestsellers, advance copies of books not yet on the shelves, and manuscript feedback from authors, agents, and editors. The event runs through July 27. Harris will also collect books for Mott at her launch party. For information, visit

A Chicago native who grew up in Ohio, Harris has always loved books. A degree in English literature was followed by a graduate program in educational statistics, and jobs as a market research manager, an autopsy coordinator/statistician, and manager of the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center that researches Mad Cow disease in humans. 

“I spent a lot of time looking at brains there,” she says. “That probably explains a lot.”

In between autopsies and mad cows, Harris followed her passion for writing, doing spec work for role-playing games and textbook companies.

After her children were born, she decided to take the plunge and wrote a book about supernatural creatures.

Harris, who describes herself as “science-geeky,” says her “geekery” extends into every part of her life.

“When it came time for us to move to the Ann Arbor area from Ohio three years ago, I constructed a very elaborate spreadsheet listing all the towns in the area and rating them on a ridiculously long list of variables. I came up with a short list of five places we might live, and Saline was one of them,” she says.

“I’m the one with the zombie purse and matching wallet who’s yelling on the sidelines of a SASA soccer game and then clapping her hand over her mouth because she doesn’t want to be one of those parents.

“You can find me working the book fair at Pleasant Ridge Elementary, which is a very dangerous proposition because I usually end up buying more kids books for me than I do for my children — although I do share. I’ve jumped off train cars around Saline to promote a fellow author’s books and dressed a friend up as a zombie to make my book trailer at Liberty School. The other people there really didn’t know what to make of us.”

With three young children, finding writing time is always a struggle, Harris says. Nonetheless, her next book, “Bad Hair Day,” with a werewolf theme, is due out next summer.

“I’ve learned that you can in fact turn pages with your feet and feed a baby at the same time. I can cook and edit at the same time, although there is sometimes burning involved," she said. "But most interesting to me is that I almost never suffer from writer’s block. I used to, back when I was single. But now I’m always thinking ahead to the next time I’ll be able to sit down with my characters, and how I’ll make myself snarf things out my nose. I figure if I do that, it’s good enough.”

Her online community of fans is as “crazycakes” as she is, she says.

“They’ve sent me zombie penguins and sugar lip rings made out of sculpy. To celebrate the launch of ‘Bad Taste in Boys,’ a group of them zombified themselves and took me by surprise. I couldn’t decide whether to laugh because it was so funny or cry because it was so kind, so I did both simultaneously. It wasn’t pretty. At all.”

For more information, visit http://carrieharrisbooks.com and http://randomhouse.com/teens.