An early fascination with horror films and decades of teaching courses on Gothic fiction inspired Boston College English Professor Paul Lewis to write A Is for Asteroids, Z Is for Zombies: A Bedtime Book about the Coming Apocalypse (Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2017), a darkly comic fable that offers a vision of the apocalypse for every letter of the alphabet. Written in the popular genre of adult humor books that look like children’s literature, and accompanied by fantastically gory illustrations by Ken Lamug, the story begins when a young boy asks his father questions about asteroids and other global dangers. After the boy falls asleep, the father picks up and starts to read a book the boy was given that claims to offer “help for daddies and mommies [as] the first children’s book about end times and zombies.” The book-within-the-book, enumerates the many ways civilization might end and, according to the publisher, offers gallows humor for our doom-haunted times. An Edgar Allan Poe scholar, Lewis will give a reading from his new book at the Boston Public Library on Saturday, Nov. 4 from 3:30 – 4:30 p.m., in the Commonwealth Salon. He is also the author of Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict.