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I'm Sick of Zombies

And that's why I wrote a book about them.

By Lewis ReesPublished 6 years ago 7 min read
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Okay, so the title is a little misleading.

It's not that I hate zombies, per se. If there's a movie about zombies I'll probably watch it, and have a really great time. I've probably played more video games and read more books about zombies than anything else.

I'm just kind of over them, I guess would be a better way of phrasing it. Zombies have just become the go-to horror villain, and whereas other stock villains like serial killers or vampires have enough individuality to make them stand out, the whole point of zombies is that they're homogenous. We're not scared of being eaten, we're scared of having everything that makes us us eradicated.

It's a classic "Us vs. Them" mentality. Smarter people than me have already written articles on this, and phrased it more eloquently than I could. In terms of politics, zombies are everything the left fear about the right, whereas vampires are everything the right fear about the left; zombies are mindless consumers who can't think for themselves and stamp out individuality wherever they go, whereas vampires are sexual deviants, parasites, and (at least historically) often immigrants from foreign lands, with dangerous new ideas that conflict with traditional morality. Each represents the worst of each political movement, as seen by those at the other end of the spectrum.

Out of the two, I've always preferred vampires, and I'm saying this as an avowed socialist; there's something so much more interesting to me about one vampire, or a small group of them, and what they represent. In classical literature (But not mythology, since the mythological vampires have a lot more in common with modern zombies than their own offspring) the vampire represents sex to a level that was downright scandalous for the day.

It's a sexually transmitted disease that changes the very fundamentals of who you are as a person. You invite the tall, mysterious stranger into your home and, you're infected, and all sense of propriety goes out the window. More modern takes on the vampire, like Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls, and Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles often take this further with the explicitly sexual — or at least sensual — vampires. They've evolved so drastically over time that even novels featuring a more traditional take on vampire mythology (Such as Rachel Klein's superb The Moth Diaries) feel fresh and intriguing.

With zombies, though, it feels like they've stagnated. Barring very rare exceptions, such as Diana Rowlands' My Life as a White Trash Zombie and the comic book/television series iZombie, there's no individuality, and without individuality, there's nothing about one zombie that makes it stand out from the others.

When somebody does do something different with zombies, it's often only a matter of time when it gains dozens of imitators to the point where you can't take it seriously anymore; for example, both My Life as a White Trash Zombie and iZombie feature young women who get infected with the virus, get jobs as morticians to feed their cravings, and solve mysteries. Both The Last of Us and M.R. Carey's novel The Girl with All the Gifts feature a mutated strain of the cordyceps fungus as the cause of the zombie outbreak, and both are absolutely phenomenal, but part of me wonders if they're only phenomenal because the ideas are still fresh enough to be a novelty.

10 years from now, if more and more people jump on the cordyceps bandwagon, I'll probably dismiss some absolutely amazing movies/video games/books as pale imitators, even if I would have loved them as much, if not more, than I love their inspirations.

And I think that's kind of it, I guess. Like a real zombie virus, individuality in zombie media is exceptionally rare. As soon as someone does something different, it's only a matter of time before the idea catches on, and more and more books follow the lead.

My problem with zombies, by and large, is that they're a monster you can really do anything with, but we restrict ourselves to so few images and concepts. There was a time when the living zombies, as opposed to undead ones, were a novel concept, but 20 years down the line and they're just as inescapable as their undead counterparts.

So why did I write a whole book about them? Honestly, I didn't even realize I was writing the book I was writing until roughly ten chapters in.

Wander was something I started on a whim; the basic idea was a girl in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, making her way to a quarantine zone, accompanied by her imaginary friend and, later, a dog, from whom she'd learn some valuable lessons about love and humanity. There were villains, sure, but they were just human survivors, or feral animals. The next thing I know, I was introducing the feelers.

I'm going to point out that they're not traditional zombies, to the extent that while I went out of my way to write an anti-zombie book the only reason I class them as zombies at all is at the insistence of more successful authors than I am telling me it'd be easier to market that way. The basic concept is that the virus locks those infected with it into a state of basic emotion; either happiness, sadness, rage, or fear. They're not mindless cannibals — they can eat people, but they can eat just about anything a normal human can.

I tried to focus on what the world would be like if we were corrupted by our own emotion. We've already seen the rage variant, admittedly, because rage is easy to do. Rage comes at you like a freight train, an unstoppable force that revels in destruction. Happiness, though, is something I don't think I've seen before, but to me, it's even more terrifying when it's corrupted.

Imagine happiness without context; when every single stimulus elicits the same emotional response, the same rush of endorphins, what would the world be like? Take all sense of morality or empathy out of the equation, and picture the result. The smilers are closer to zombies than anything else, sure, but they don't do what they do because they don't have a choice, because they absolutely do; they torture and maim their victims because it's fun.

I think that we've reached the point, as a society, where it's hard to take zombies seriously, and hard to be scared by them. There's a reason that so many zombie series introduce human villains; there's only so much you can do with a mindless horde before it gets stale, compared to a human villain who's more than capable of fighting on equal terms.

Sure, I don't doubt for a second that in the case of an actual zombie outbreak, we'd all be much more terrified than we think, but how many people have zombie survival plans? They're a monster we all like to think we could deal with, because their only advantage is their numbers. Sure, a fast zombie could take you by surprise, but the classic, Romero zombie? It has all the strength of a human, without the intelligence to actually formulate a plan, or even avoid danger. If the zombie's undead then it'd get weaker as it rots away, and it'd be easy prey for everything from insects to cougars. Even if the zombies are still alive, infection would be a very real risk, as well as starvation if there's no other available food source. Zombies are unique in that they're a monster that's actually weaker than an ordinary human.

Wander is a book I wrote because I wanted to see the zombies as a credible threat. There are human villains, sure, but I wanted the character's to dread the sound of laughter as much a the sound of a gunshot.

I'm not writing zombies off, by any means; I see stories the same way I see cakes. You have the recipe for a plain old cake and sure, cake's always good, but unless you execute it brilliantly, why would I choose it over a pineapple upside down cake, or molten chocolate lava cake, or any other kind of cake? Still, following the recipe and executing it well can still give you a cake so good that I'll wolf it down and ask for more.

It's just that, as time goes on, and the shelves of every bookstore fill up with more and more books that follow the same formula, it's harder and harder for the really good cake to stand out from the rest.

Am I saying that Wander is better? Hell no. What I'm saying is that it's new, it's fresh, and it's exciting, and that's something that's a lot rarer than it should be in a genre as popular as zombie literature.

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