Wish I’d been paying attention to this before it happened so I could have gone, but the account by Bob Calhoun on the Open Salon site of the showing of Night of the Living Dead on the scoreboard at AT&T Park last Friday is still totally worth reading. Check out the appearance of Judith O’Dea, the film’s dumb blonde, who was interviewed at the event.

The first novel by S.G. Browne, who lives in the Santa Cruz area but has attended a writer’s group in SF for years, is called Breathers: A Zombie’s lament. The comic take on the undead, who shamble around a small California town, attend Undead Anonymous meetings, and try to stay out of the grips of the SPCA, is also a romance, between the main character and a recently suicided young woman. It’s also a story of temptation, once the zombies find out that the secret to fighting decrepitude is to comsume, yes, the flesh of humans, or “breathers.”

The book, which is being released today, was recently sold to Fox Searchlight with Diablo Cody slated to produce. Browne appears Saturday at Writers With Drinks. I spoke to him by phone yesterday.

My interview after the jump

Santa Cruz writer S.G. Browne‘s book Breathers, a comic zombie romance which he describes as “a classic story of suffering and redemption, like The Color Purple or the New Testament, only with cannibalism” has been sold to Fox Searchlight, with Diablo Cody set to produce. (Cody is last year’s slumdog millionaire, as it were — her Academy Award for the “Juno” screenplay vaulted her to fame and Hollywood power.) Browne, a former Disney screenwriter, will be appearing at next month’s Writers with Drinks as well as other venues after the March 3 release of his book.