Babel Clash

Zombies are today’s hot monster.

Well, okay, they’re dead, so they’re probably room temperature. But in terms of their presence in modern pop culture they’re red hot. I love watching zombie movies, reading zombie books and comics, and –yes, I’m a brave man, I’ll admit it—collecting zombie toys. I have a Jell-O mold in the shape of a brain, a radio-controlled robot zombie, zombie finger puppets, and even a bust of Zombie Elvis sitting on my desk.

The thing I love most about zombies is writing about them. So far I’ve written zombie short stories (“Pegleg and Paddy Save the World”, “Zero Tolerance” and “The Wind Through the Fence”), a zombie nonfiction book (ZOMBIE CSU), a zombie mainstream thriller (PATIENT ZERO), a zombie horror novel (DEAD OF NIGHT), two novels in a series of Young Adult post-apocalyptic adventures (ROT & RUIN and DUST & DECAY), comics (MARVEL ZOMBIES RETURN), and an essay for a book about Robert Kirkman’s THE WALKING DEAD (“Take Me To Your Leader”, which will appear in TRIUMPH OF THE WALKING DEAD).

So, yeah…I love my life-impaired fellow citizens.

Anyone who already digs zombies probably understands my fascination. However some folks just plain don’t get it. Especially those who wonder why a New York Times bestselling and award-winning author should (and I quote) “waste his time with that stuff”. Yeah, comments like that make ME want to bite someone.

Zombies have always been metaphors. Romero used his films to make significant points about racism (NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD), rampant American consumerism (DAWN OF THE DEAD), and the build-up of the US military-industrial complex during the Reagan years (DAY OF THE DEAD), and the de-personalization of our culture in the age of cell phones, texting, and computers (DIARY OF THE DEAD). In his brilliant novel WORLD WAR Z, Max Brooks speaks to our fear of a global pandemic and its mishandling by world governments; and Joe McKinney used his trilogy of zombie novels (DEAD CITY, APOCALYPSE OF THE DEAD and FLESH EATERS) to examine government mishandling of disasters like Hurricane Katrina. My novel, PATIENT ZERO is an allegory for the potential mishandling of bio-technologies; and the forthcoming DEAD OF NIGHT explores covert bioweapons research.

Over the years I’ve discussed the zombie genre with many of the key players; each of them was willing to share their insights.

“People like zombie stories because they like to be scared. I know I do,” Max Brooks told me. “Zombies scare me. No seriously, they break every rule of horror. You have to go find most other monsters, but zombies come to you –and not in ones and twos by the way!”

James Gunn, screenwriter for the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake, remarked, “Zombies bring up the fear of becoming paranoid –having the ones you love turn up against you; and they bring up our fear of disease. There’s no other movie trope that works on so many levels of the mammalian psyche. We’re hardwired evolutionarily to be scared of zombies.”

And Tony Todd, star of the 1990 remake of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, observed. “Romero’s zombies represented the silent and often vicious majority. That’s still true. Zombies are a metaphor for the faceless, emotionless, destructive mob that seeks to destroy everything vital, vibrant and alive!”

Zombies are perfect metaphors, and nowadays they offer greater storytelling potential than vampires. Before the vampires were humanized and romanticized, they were the Big Bad, standing in for anything that we fear, don’t understand and feel helpless before. But in recent years the vampire has become the story. They’re beautiful, tragic figures and much of the writing is about them. Not so with the living dead. Except in a handful of zombie tales, the walking dead do not possess intellect or personality and therefore all the writer has to do is establish that they are the threat. Once that’s done, the story focuses on the humans who are caught up in that threat, and from a storytelling perspective that’s a pretty deep fishing hole.

They’re mindless monsters, and there are a lot of them. Once we establish their presence in a story, the audience is encouraged to fill in the blank for whatever specific threat is most potent in their own lives. As a result the writer gets to use the majority of the word count to explore the dynamic of ordinary humans facing a shared crisis and how that crisis impacts them. Stress warps personality, changes relationship dynamics, allows hidden personality traits to emerge, and makes every character go through that process of change which is key to all good fiction. Zombies, in short, are good friends to writers. They allow and even encourage writers to dig deeper into the characters, their needs, their goals and their growth. Zombies help characters come alive.

They allow for the creation and sustaining of suspense. They are a constant and pervasive threat. Blood and gore, however, is not absolutely required. We don’t need to see a zombie chow down on someone to grasp how horrible that is.

Zombies also allow us to address our fears in a way which gives us a measure of control. Brian Keene, the author most responsible
for kicking off the current zombie fiction craze with THE RISING, agrees: “Our daily lives are filled with real monsters and real horrors. Monsters fly airplanes into buildings. These are dark times, and people want an escape. People are scared of everyday life. Sometimes, it’s good to curl up with a make believe monster, rather than the one outside your door.”

If you’re already a zombie fan, I encourage you to read the books as well as watching the movies. There’s some brilliant stuff out there. Stories that will chill you, stories that will shock you, even stories that will make you cry. All of them, though, are stories that will make you think.

If you’ve NEVER read a zombie novel…please, don’t be afraid. There’s a lot of literary richness there. You will be surprised. That’s an absolute guarantee.

As these blogs roll on, David Moody and I will share more and more suggestions for zombie books (and movies) for you.

Go on…take a bite.

World War Z - best zombie novel ever!

When zombies are so prevalent that they’ve even invaded Pride & Prejudice, you know that the Zombie Apocalypse has come.  One publisher, Permuted Press, specializes almost exclusively in zombie fiction, and I’m even hearing truly frightening rumors about zombies in the romance section.  That’s just plain creepy.  So, when picking a favorite tale of the zombie conquest, you have options.

My # 1 favorite zombie story is World War Z by Max Brooks.  With a sweeping and epic vision of a worldwide war, it focuses on the wildness and adventure of the situation without delving too deeply into the blood and gore.  Not to say that there isn’t a little blood and gore here and there.  WWZ cranks along at a rocket ship pace, and it’s one read that is pure fun.  If zombies do conquer the planet, then we can only hope that they do so with this much style.

Three trendy cataclysms in current speculative fiction disaster stories are zombie invasion, the 2012 “Mayan Prophecy” and the singularity (when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, which theoretically translates into Terminator-style Doomsday).

Each has been turned into some very cool books.  Max Brooks’ World War Z, Brian D’Amato’s In the Courts of the Sun and Charles Stross’ Accelerando, to name a few.

Zombie infestation feels more metaphorical.  2012 is more mystical, sort of like a prophecy in a fantasy novel.  The singularity is the only one that has a hardcore Science Fiction feel to it.  It feels like there’s some plausibility there.

Do you see the trends changing?  Are environmental disaster and resource limitations going to be bigger and bigger pieces of  Science Fiction in the years ahead?

On the other hand, maybe the environmental piece has been there for a long time, from Waterworld to Stephen Baxter’s Flood.  Paolo, do you have any favorites or recommendations, other than your own, for fans wanting to explore these issues in SF?