I did a guest post over at Suvudu.com called “The House of Corporate Horrors,” about the writing of my novel The Panama Laugh and what it all means! And also how my zombie novel is one of the extraordinarily few zombie novels (some would say “the only”) directly connected to Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Oakland, like, philosophically speaking.

Here’s an excerpt from “The House of Corporate Horrors”:

The important social observation that inspired The Panama Laugh is simply this, and I’m not the first one to have it: “By limiting the power of the public sector and privatizing things like the military, law enforcement and counter-terrorism, we as a globalized society offer a dangerous amount of power over to multinational corporations that are, at best, benignly amoral. At worst, they careen into soul-crushing evil.”

The premise therefore became, just how evil could they be?

This seems, in retrospect, like a straightforward premise of the sort that’s common in cyberpunk: “Heartless monolithic multinationals do awful things to the little people.”

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not actually 100% anti-corporate. I’m a passionate supporter of small business, and I think when small businesses get big(ish) that’s just dandy. But I believe what we have today is a grotesque conflation of the public sector and the private, where corporations have been allowed to get too big to fail, and therefore have been handed the keys to the kingdom. Public money should not be used to bail out private enterprises — certainly not unless there is some kind of accountability for providing long-term benefit to the people whose money that is, rather than simply the stockholders.

Read the rest at Suvudu.com, or buy The Panama Laugh at Amazon, or, better yet, at Biblio.

Yves Smith’s blog Naked Democracy linked to Destiny’s interview with me at 10ZenMonkeys in its links list today — and as Destiny points out, put us before links to Paul Krugman and the Washington Post. Huzzah!

For Halloween, I was interviewed by Destiny at 10 Zen Monkeys about my writing career and The Panama Laugh as well as politics, crime, and zombies in general. Here’s an excerpt:

10 ZEN MONKEYS: Is there something millenarian in the zeitgeist now — some universal sense of doom, or a desire to laugh and secede from humanity? I’m sorry — every question I’d ask you suddenly seems tainted with a dark obscenity whenever I add the word zombie. “Where do you get your inspiration for your novels…about zombies? Will you be writing a sequel…about zombies? How do you celebrate finishing your first novel…about zombies?”

THOMAS S. ROCHE: Isn’t everything about zombies?

I just go ape-shit over good zombie apocalypses. I love them; they’re one of my favorite genres. I read a lot and watch a lot and just completely groove on all the incredible creativity involved in zombie walks, all the viral zombie websites and social-networking stuff, all the in-jokes for zombie fans…I just love it. It’s a template that takes on so many wonderful forms.

I feel like some of the zombie novels published in the last five years were jumping on a bandwagon. But I’m not going to badmouth them because that’s essentially what I was doing, even though it’s a bandwagon I’ve more or less been on for 20 years ever since I read the first Book of the Dead, which is one of the two best zombie books ever published (the other being Max Brooks’ World War Z). I think Night of the Living Dead is one of the greatest and one of the most important films ever released. I love Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead. And I go nuts over the Resident Evil movies even in the slow parts. I adore Fido. I want to grow up to be Frankenhooker.

There’s plenty more — the whole interview is over 3,200 words, and was a blast to do. Check it out at 10 Zen Monkeys!