Author and artist Ben Tripp spent more than 20 years as an experiential designer for theme parks owned by some of the largest companies in the world, including Disney, Universal, Paramount, and Warner Bros. He later made a living writing unproduced screenplays. In 2010, Tripp began writing zombie novels, beginning with Rise Again: A Zombie Thriller and followed by 2013’s Rise Again Below Zero, both published by Pocket Books. The son of children’s book illustrator Wallace Tripp (Amelia Bedelia and dozens of other titles) has now written a YA adventure novel, The Accidental Highwayman: Being the Tale of Kit Bristol, His Horse Midnight, A Mysterious Princess, and Sundry Magical Persons Besides (Tor Teen, Oct.). Tripp has woven 25 original illustrations throughout the story. He lives in Los Angeles and will embark on a national book tour in the fall.

Your childhood was interesting, to say the least. Can you tell us about that?

I came from a family of artists, and we didn’t have any money. My mother was a painter and my father illustrated some of the Amelia Bedelia books among many others for children, and we lived in squalor in New Hampshire, where I was born. We left the U.S. in the 1970s and moved to England for a year and then to Europe, where we also lived in squalor. Then my father, who illustrated greeting cards, sold his Pawprints line to a big company. A lot of people still remember those anthropomorphic mice and rabbits. We came back to the U.S. and I briefly attended the Rhode Island School of Design. I’d had enough of school by then. If you drop out of art school, that gives you a special distinction that puts you in a class of students as bad as it is possible to be.

You were quite young when Disney recruited you to come to California and design theme parks for its Imagineering division. How did they find you?

A lot of animators would come up to New Hampshire to visit my father on the weekends because they liked his style of drawing. I guess my portfolio was out in the living room, and one of them saw it and said that I should work for Imagineering, which we’d never heard of. My parents phoned me, and I sent Disney some landscapes, character designs, and fantasy scenes. So they recruited me when I was 22, in 1989. It was an amazing experience that taught me everything that school couldn’t. I’ve always been an autodidact in the sense that no one could teach me anything. Just point me in the direction of the hard way. I still enter a restaurant through the back, so I can walk through the kitchen and see how it all works. It was fantastic to go behind the scenes of all the rides. We traveled the world doing research in the most extraordinary places. You show up and stay for a couple of weeks, and discover what the hopes and aspirations for the country are, and what the vision is of the people, and then you go back and put it into architectural terms with some rides, exhibits, and restaurants. It’s the hardest kind of storytelling there is. I was at Disney for five years, and then freelanced for them and the other companies for another 17 years.

Did this kind of work influence the way you write for teens?

Definitely. Designing theme parks puts you on a certain empathetic wavelength with people that’s hard to turn off. You absorb the lives around you, and when you’re writing, it comes back out because you’re storing it all up. Also, most of the work I’ve done has been for young people: babes in arms to people in their mid-20s. Writing YA is like coming home, because I’m talking to the very people I was trying to beguile in such a difficult medium.

You’ve published two adult zombie novels. What inspired this kind of fiction?

The film Night of the Living Dead changed me the first time I saw it as a kid. I had a wonderful conversation with George Romero [the film’s writer/director] at Comic Con five years ago, which was terrific. He did the movie when he was a student. So I wanted to write a zombie novel, and started to read a lot of them to get a feel for it.

The shift from designing theme parks to writing books is significant. What has this experience been like?

I grew up around editors and publishers because of my dad, in the old peaceful, lovely days when publishing was such a gentle art. I’m so nostalgic for that time. Dad was at Houghton Mifflin and Little, Brown for a long time. Those colleagues would come to our house on the weekends from Boston and lounge around, play croquet, drink gin and tonics until they couldn’t play croquet, and then take the train back. So I return to publishing and find everybody so dispirited. But I don’t care if I starve to death, or what the consequences are, I can’t do that other stuff anymore. I’m going to write books.

The Accidental Highwayman has two lead male characters, the mortally wounded highwayman Whistlin’ Jack and his young apprentice Kit Bristol. Which character are you more akin to?

My wife says I’m like Kit Bristol, but I’m pretty sure I’m more like Whistlin’ Jack – except I’m a miserable horseman. Kit is the kind of guy that I wished I’d have known when I was his age. If I only had, everything might have gone differently. He’s somebody I admire, and I wish I were like him. Whistlin’ Jack is probably a bit more like me in terms of cultivating a certain amount of dissipation and lounging about in a large drafty house all the time, but I live in Los Angeles in a bungalow with air conditioning, so it’s not that drafty. Kit is writing his story as an older man, looking back fondly at his younger self, thinking, “What an idiot I was.” Kit is naïve, and is willing to admit it. And he has a much greater store of knowledge than he thinks. His charm is that he doesn’t trust his own experience, and is willing to take a second opinion on it. Kids kind of like that.

The trailers for the book, in which you star with an assortment of monsters, sheep, and a Tinkerbell-like intruder, are very funny. How were they produced?

I made everything, and my friend Buz Carter operated the camera and kept my dogs out of frame. We used a green screen, which is a big piece of bright green fabric. You stretch it out behind your actors, shoot your footage, and later on you can drop the green bits out and add in whatever background you want. So I stapled the green screen to the back of the house, and performed my parts in the videos. Then I built digital backgrounds, including stock footage of sheep, composited everything together, and added special effects and all the sounds. It was great fun, and it’s a miracle any of it worked out at all.

Kit didn’t set out in life to become a highwayman, but fate had different plans for him. What’s your definition of a highwayman?

He’s not a desperate gentleman as we usually think they are, but simply a romanticized criminal who just lays in wait for carriages and travelers to do every conceivable horrible deed. They were murderers and thugs and thieves, but quite a lot of them were fallen gentry being louche. A couple of them got quite famous for it. When they were caught, they’d hang for their crimes. Dick Turpin was famous because he was so brave; he exemplified British valor even though he was a criminal. Highwaymen were romantic figures, icons of a sort during the incredible social stratification at that time when people were looking for a fellow on horseback sticking a pistol in the magistrate’s face. They were folk heroes, like Robin Hood.

What’s the moral of the story in The Accidental Highwayman?

The heart is wiser than the head. No matter how clever you are, there will always be somebody more cunning. You can’t win it. That’s the head. And yet every one of us has the capacity to be the kindest and most loving person in the world. What really matters in life is compassion, love, selflessness, and decency. That’s the heart.

The Accidental Highwayman: Being the Tale of Kit Bristol, His Horse Midnight, A Mysterious Princess, and Sundry Magical Persons Besides by Ben Tripp. Tor Teen, $17.99 Oct. ISBN 978-0-7653-3549-4