Did brain tumour spawn Okanagan writer’s zombie tale?

You may have noticed the recent craze in applying bacon to almost everything imaginable.

Little Caesars recently announced a bacon-wrapped pizza, there are bacon alarm apps for your phone — there’s even a bacon cat online that’s chasing Grumpy Cat’s popularity tail.

So what’s behind our sudden, overwhelming desire for bacon? How about zombies?

That’s the premise of Okanagan writer Adam Lewis Schroeder’s new novel, All Day Breakfast.

The book tells the tale of widowed father and substitute teacher Peter Giller, who leads a class on a field trip to a plastics factory — never a good idea, teachers! Things go predictably wrong when a pipe breaks and sprays the class with a mysterious pink goo that turns them into zombies.

Well, maybe zombies. The characters act like zombies and keep losing body parts, but they’re not dead — and they grapple with what’s happened to them.

Can you be a zombie if you actively wonder if you’re a zombie?

It’s the major philosophical question of the 21st century. The characters in the book certainly act like zombies, as they begin to rampage through their community, and the violence level quickly escalates.

The only thing that can appease them is — you guessed it — bacon.

The book is a major departure for Schroeder, whose previous books In The Fabled East, Empress of Asia and Kingdom of Monkeys are more traditional literary fiction set in Southeast Asia. It’s still highly literary in its style and approach to events, though — it sometimes resembles DeLillo’s White Noise and its Airborne Toxic Event.

So what caused such a major shift in Schroeder’s writing?

He traces the origins of All Day Breakfast back to the time he was reading the Walking Dead zombie comics on his couch beside his wife, who was reading a Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child. At some point Schroeder wondered what would jack-of-all-martial-trades Jack Reacher be like if he were a zombie?

“We’re always talking junk about what Jack Reacher would do in a situation,” Schroeder said during an interview at an arts café in Langley on a beautiful sunny day.

“Your parent teacher night — Jack Reacher wouldn’t have taken that! So the next inevitable topic was well, how would Jack Reacher react if he were a zombie?” In an eerie parallel with the book, Schroeder revealed he was in a strange head space while writing the book.

“Between the end of substantive edits and the start of copy edits, I found out I had a big tumour on my pituitary gland the size of a Rubik’s Cube,” Schroeder said. “It’s almost like the book prompted it.”

Schroeder spent a month in VGH to have the tumour removed, and he now takes various supplements to deal with the aftermath of it.

“My optic nerve was stretched right over the top of (the tumour),” Schroeder continued, oblivious to the sideways glances of the other café patrons. “My eyesight was in danger of being lost ... all the specialists were quite fascinated by that. They’d come in every day while I was waiting for surgery and say, ‘Can you still see now?’ ”

Schroeder can’t say for sure that the tumour had anything to do with writing the book — although he admits it is a good story — but he does acknowledge that much of the grief that colours the book comes from the death of family members, as he lost his father, father-in-law, stepfather and grandfather to various illnesses within a two-year period.

There are other personal connections to the book, too. Giller attacks people with his favourite shovel, and Schroeder admitted he has a favourite shovel in real life.

Schroeder may have picked up his affection for shovels from his mother, who was adept at killing rattlesnakes around their Vernon home with one.

“You bury their heads and bodies separately,” Schroeder said with a smile. “So they don’t come back.”