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Breakfast tacos. The food of the gods. Delicious, hot warm flour tortillas filled with a variety of combinations of ingredients such as scrambled eggs, chorizo (spicy Mexican sausage), fried potatoes, refried beans, bacon, and cheese topped with real salsa. A staple of Texas cuisine, the breakfast taco is one of the foods that appear in my As The World Dies trilogy alongside peach cobbler, fried chicken, fajitas, and enchiladas. Since the trilogy is about two women surviving together in a zombie-infested apocalyptic Texas, I wanted imbue the story with the flavor of the state, both literally and figuratively.

Food is vital for life, but it can also be an essential instrument in storytelling.

One of my favorite scenes in Fighting to Survive (As The World Dies, Book 2), is an interaction that takes place as Jenni and Katie, our female leads, are on guard duty on the wall encompassing their safe haven. As they survey the grisly zombies below, Jenni happily chows down on her breakfast taco:

Katie wasn’t sure how Jenni could eat with that awful smell wafting up from below, but from her work as a prosecutor, she knew that abused women developed extraordinary coping skills. She’d seen how adept Jenni was at disassociating herself from bad things going on around her. Sometimes Katie wished she could do that, too, just step away from the horrible reality she now lived in.

Jenni eating in the gory presence of zombies serves two purposes: her breakfast tacos are a cultural reminder of the story stetting in Texas, and her disregard of the dead as she eats is a reminder that she’s acclimated to the dead world.

Besides, breakfast tacos are so good, how could you resist eating them?!

For a delicious breakfast taco recipe, click here.




Rhiannon Frater is the award-winning author of over a dozen books, including the As the World Dies zombie trilogy (Tor), as well as independent works such as The Last Bastion of the Living (declared the #1 Zombie Release of 2012 by Explorations Fantasy Blog and the #1 Zombie Novel of the Decade by B&N Book Blog), and other horror novels.

Her latest releases are In Darkness We Must Abide (self-published), The Mesmerized (Permuted Pres), and Dead Spots (Tor).


She was born and raised a Texan and presently lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and furry children (a.k.a pets). She loves scary movies, sci-fi and horror shows, playing video games, cooking, dyeing her hair weird colors, and shopping for Betsey Johnson purses and shoes.