Jo Pollock Salazar’s first novel hits the shelves this month
By Eric A Thomas
Using her upbringing in Central Illinois, her background in social work and her love for the written word, Jo Pollock Salazar has stepped into the literary world. It seems that teenage girls, zombies and a machete have proven to be a deadly combination.
Life for this recent author in the world of zombie books started in Bluffs and migrated to Jacksonville. “I graduated from Routt Catholic High School and moved away to attend Millikin University in Decatur,” said Salazar, author of “The Dead Weight.” “I then went on for my master’s at U of I Urbana – Champaign in social work.” By 2010, she was settled on the west side of Chicago.
Her first novel, ‘The Dead Weight,’ was released at the beginning of October. It is a book about 12 troubled teenage girls who are living in a locked juvenile treatment facility when a zombie apocalypse hits. It turns out, however, that the zombies might be the least of their worries. As the girls fight the zombies and wrestle with their doubts about each other, who will survive and who is dead weight?
Salazar got the original idea for this novel about three years ago. “I let it sit in my head for almost a year before I ever wrote the first sentence,” Salazar remembers. “Finally, I got the nerve to start.” She often would wake up at 4:30 in the morning just to write a few hundred words before going into work. Then, a few hundred words turned into a few thousand.
“Then writing, or thinking about writing, consumed every free moment,” she continued. “After two years of writing, I realized, holy crap, I think I might actually finish this thing!”
While getting her master’s, she worked in a residential treatment facility for adolescents. She drew inspiration from her time working there. The opening scenes of her novel take place in a residential treatment facility for adolescent girls. “The rest of the book takes place in various small towns along the Illinois River, which is where I spent my early childhood,” commented Salazar. “It was so fun to bring to life those places that meant so much to me as a young girl.”
As far as the plot of the book, she will never truly understand where that came from.
“Sometimes ideas just hit me out of nowhere and I run with them,” she concluded. The book is definitely a zombie horror book, but it’s also a thriller at its core and she leaves the reader guessing until the very end. It is like “Dexter” meets “Yellowjackets” meets “The Walking Dead.”
While “The Dead Weight” is her first novel, it isn’t her first book. Between 2020 and 2021 she published an adult social and emotional learning curriculum aimed at supporting teachers. The curriculum ended up doing very well and it was acquired by an education tech company called 7 Mindsets. It was this first book that gave her the confidence to try writing fiction.
Salazar has more ideas in the works. She currently is working on a sequel for “The Dead Weight.” She would love to write about a zombie series that takes place in Chicago, and maybe another that takes place at the youth camp at Lake Jacksonville.
Those interested can listen to a current interview on The Zombie Book Club podcast about “The Dead Weight” on YouTube. Salazar has also created a mini documentary of all the real-life locations from the novel. Find it on her website at josalazarwriting.com.
