Leigh Radford’s much-anticipated debut novel, One Yellow Eye is set to be published on July 15th by Gallery Books. Drawing on her extensive background in broadcast journalism and literary publicity, Radford crafts a narrative that transcends typical genre boundaries, offering a profoundly human exploration of loss, obsession, and scientific inquiry.
Her novel reimagines the zombie mythos through the lens of a biomedical scientist confronting an outbreak that turns her husband into one of the last infected. As she conceals him within their home, Kesta Shelley’s desperate quest for a cure becomes a meditation on the fallout of terminal illness, where moral certainties blur and a myopic, self-justifying morality emerges — one that increasingly compromises the boundaries of harm in pursuit of a personal or perceived greater good.
In anticipation of the book’s release this week, CinemaChords’ Howard Gorman sat down with Radford to discuss her emotionally charged reimagining of the zombie genre. She spoke about how the novel uses the virus as a haunting metaphor for terminal illness — capturing the emotional weight, uncertainty, and slow unraveling that such diagnoses bring. Radford also reflected on the protagonist’s inner turmoil: a scientist who trusts in logic but finds herself undone by grief and self-doubt. This psychological tension adds depth and vulnerability to a story already grounded in a disturbingly plausible scientific premise. Layered throughout are intimate, nuanced depictions of how trauma reshapes our mental landscape — elevating the novel into something far more affecting than a conventional horror tale.
