As the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his estimable father. It’s not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it’s nothing a dash of laudanum from the high shelf, a summer stroll and idle fantasies about passersby can’t put in perspective. And then the world explodes. War devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for are the attentions of Osman, a fellow soldier who is his protector and lover. Together, they will escape the trenches, survive near-certain death, and tangle with spies and Bolsheviks.

Joshua Levin has a reasonably comfortable Chicago apartment, a mildly dysfunctional family sprinkled throughout the suburbs, a steady job teaching ESL, a devoted girlfriend who lives down the block, and a laptop full of screenplay ideas --- one of which he thinks might turn out to be good: Zombie Wars. But all it takes is a few unexpected events for his life to descend into chaos. As the stakes quickly move from absurd to life-and-death matters, THE MAKING OF ZOMBIE WARS takes on real consequence.