My name is Bear Savo. I wrote River Zombies out of necessity, because like the novella’s narrator, Jack Gray, I have become an optimistic nihilist.
I composed an epitaph for myself when I was 31 years old. I wasn’t dying any quicker than most of us, but I was entrenched in my second decade of auctioneering. It was a profession into which I was born: a grotesque bazaar founded by my father. And so when I came of age in 1996, I took up my own gavel and followed him.
In 2010, Savo Auctioneers worked with Cosgrove/Meuer Productions to film and distribute a failed reality show entitled Auction Packed. One day, the director asked each of us — my father, my younger brother, and myself — to explain in one sentence our primary function as auctioneers.
I said, “I sell dead people’s shit to people who are going to die.”
Everyone laughed.
“Make it more eloquent than that,” I was told.
“I’ll get back to you,” I said.
So I thought about it. I really thought about it. How disgusting, I concluded. We all die, and along the way we amass trinkets and curiosities and why-nots and what-the-fucks. When we die, we are gone, but our things remain. Our shit outlives us, and those left behind are compelled to calculate our wholesale worth based on that shit’s value on the secondary market. The auction becomes our proving ground, the landfill our detractor. Who we were and what we did? That’s a separate ledger.
That epiphany led me to write my epitaph.
I will have been a cloud that, by some chance, was recognized by someone as resembling something until, by the same winds that formed me, I am dispersed.
I didn’t share that with anyone. It was, after all, the antithesis of the materialism that drives the auction industry. So I tucked it away next to my anxiety and made it the foundation of my existential angst.
The show was cancelled by National Geographic TV after only three episodes. It took another five years and the death of my father for me to renounce the folly that had occupied my whole life. It’s nearing a decade since I quit auctioneering, but the peculiar sense of irony and penchant for grim humor that I contracted from that abandoned vocation have not dissipated. In fact, during the COVID lockdowns of 2020, those maladies were exacerbated and this intrinsically null existence fucked with me hard. I began writing — out of necessity — to stave off madness, and River Zombies was born.
Like the story’s narrator, Jack, I have accepted that we are all fighting for survival during an absurd apocalypse, that life is only worth living if we make it so. And sometimes that pisses me off.
A Clip from Auction Packed
When the zombies came, they came from the rivers. These are the memoirs of Jack Gray, who fought for survival and sanity during an absurd apocalypse.
Thanks for sharing this. The auction house was so detailed and unique in the story I wondered if it had come from your own life
I love grim humor and weird origin stories. I'm in.