Zombies: The Recent Dead (4 page)

Mr. Schow was, in fact, not only correct about not seeing the last of zombie fiction, 2003 turned out to be the dawn of yet another era in the popularity of the walking dead.

Despite the early 1990s boomlet in short zombie fiction, the icon’s popularity was confined primarily to diehard horror fans. By the mid-1990s horror itself, as a commercially viable marketing category, dwindled. New York publishers produced less horror while specialized presses published for what was evidently a niche market.

From 1993 through 2003, zombies still lurked in horror literature—popping up in the occasional short story or novella here and there. Zombies also shambled into a few novels. Outside of Eric Powell’s droll
The Goon
series (2003) and
The Walking Dead
written by Robert Kirkman with art by (originally) Tony Moore (series began in 2003) zombies weren’t notably present in comics. James Lowder teamed up with Eden Studios and their zombie-related role-playing game to produce three anthologies:
The Book of All Flesh
(2001),
The Book of More Flesh
(2002), and
The Book of Final Flesh
(2003).

Gaming, in fact, provided the prime conduit for zombies to continue eating our brains during those earliest years of the twenty-first century. The immensely popular video game
Resident Evil
debuted in 1996 and, by 2003, had been followed by three sequels, a remake of the original and a prequel. S.D. Perry wrote novelizations of the games and the first of the
Resident Evil
movies was released in 2002.

Further film success came in 2002 with Danny Boyle’s Romero-inspired film
28 Days Later
(2002).

But the true resurgence of zombie literature began in September 2003 when
The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead
, authored by Max Brooks, was released by Crown. With his parody of a survival guide, Brooks defined, detailed, documented “historical” encounters, and supplied handy tips and tactics for humans to survive—evidently inevitable—attacks by hordes of the walking dead. Zombies had escaped the confines of the horror genre and invaded the mainstream.

As Stefan Dziemianowicz summed it up in a
Publishers Weekly
article of July 13, 2009:

Three years and hundreds of thousands of units [of
The Zombie Survival Guide
] sold later, Brooks’s publisher . . . released
World War Z
, a no-bones-about-it serious horror novel chronicling a global zombie pandemic enabled by contemporary social and political intrigues . . . The success of Brooks’s books awakened the mainstream reading audience to the relevance of zombies. The same year that World War Z hit the bestseller list, David Wellington saw
Monster Island
, a zombie holocaust tale, published under the Thunder’s Mouth imprint. The book had begun as a novel serialized for free at the author’s blog site, and its instant notoriety netted him a print contract for the trilogy that ultimately came to comprise
Monster Nation
(2006) and
Monster Planet
(2007). By the time Scribner published Stephen King’s
Cell
(2006), which tells of all but a fraction of the world’s populace being turned into rampaging zombies by a sinisterly manipulated cellphone pulse, the zombie was well established in publishing culture . . . 

Then came Quirk Books’
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
, a tongue-in-(festering)-cheek splice of Jane Austen gentility with zombie cannibal shenanigans coauthored by Seth Grahame-Smith. With his outrageous riffing on Jane Austen’s painfully proper prose . . . [which] cut the velvet ropes keeping zombie genre fiction away from the literary classics . . . With more than 600,000 copies in print,
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
is a bestseller that has already inspired its share of genre splices and revisionist zombie literature.

Between
The Zombie Survival Guide
and the Austin/zombie mash-up (released in March 2009) the zombie icon has again risen from its (shallow) grave, infected the world, and attained unparalleled popularity.

The Dead Walk Among Us . . . Again!

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, zombie fiction became a force to contend with in both novel form and short stories. In the short form the walking dead started filling anthologies. The two most notable: John Joseph Adams selected some of the best zom-themed short fiction published 1975-2008 with
The Living Dead
(Night Shade Books, 2008). Stephen Jones complemented his 1993
The Mammoth Book of Zombies
(Carroll & Graf) with
The Dead that Walk
(Ulysses Press, 2009).

The hefty and stylish
Zombies: Encounters With the Hungry Dead
, edited by John Skipp (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2009) was another notable compilation. Skipp had earlier found specialty press publication for
Mondo Zombie
(Cemetery Dance, 2006), an anthology that had originally been planned as a third
Book of the Dead
in 1991.

Minuscule press zombie anthologies were numerous and the quality of most was, at best, mediocre. Three exceptions were Kim Paffenroth’s
The World is Dead
and
History Is Dead,
as well as
The Best of All Flesh
, a compilation of stories from the three earlier
Books of Flesh
by editor James Lowder. All three were somewhat uneven, but still stood above their competition.

Bentley Little published an “old school zombie” horror novel featuring mindless, walking dead zombies:
The Walking
(2002). Tim Waggoner and Brain Keene overcame a primary problem of developing novels based on zombies—mindless, empty husks, with no personality make for poor protagonists or antagonists—and introduced intelligent zombies in their novels.

In Keene’s post-apocalyptic world of
The Rising
[Delirium, limited editions: 2003; Leisure, mass market paperback (2004)] and its sequel,
City of the Dead
, a government-experiment-run-amok results in an opening to The Void which allows demons through who then possess the dead. The resultant zombies are swift, crafty, and prone to cracking morbid jokes.

Nekropolis
, which was underpublished in 2004 (by Five Star, which caters to libraries with no trade distribution) was, to quote its author “as much a mystery as . . . fantasy and horror (with a little science fiction, and romance sprinkled in here and there).” In the underground city of Nekropolis, the supernatural inhabitants include zombies. Most are enslaved and have no free will, but the hard-boiled, wisecracking private eye protagonist is an unmastered zombie. (A new and expanded version of
Nekropolis
was published in 2009 in the UK and Australia, and 2010 in the U.S, by angry Robot Books.)

The “modern zombie” literary icon was inspired by film, and film continued to feed the growing frenzy. Romero’s
Dawn of the Dead
was remade and released in 2004 as was the horror comedy
Shaun of the Dead
—both an
hommage
and a parody. Romero himself returned with the start of a new zombie trilogy,
Land of the Dead
in 2005 followed by
Diary of the Dead
(2007). The
Resident Evil
franchise was revived in 2007 as was
28 Days Later
, the sequel to Boyle’s 2002 hit. Romero’s latest zombie movie,
Survival of the Dead
, is, at this writing, playing in select cities.

Meanwhile, literary zombiemania—both good and bad—continued to grow, proliferating in fiction of all lengths, not only for adults but for teens and younger readers, cross-pollinating with romance, science fiction, mystery, steampunk, and other fantasy subgenres.

By the summer of 2010, zombies—in any and all media—were so prodigious that merely keeping track would be a full time occupation.

So, here we (and zombies) are now, more than a decade into the twenty-first century. As for zombie
literature
:

The “traditional zombie” is still with us—as social commentary; as a metaphor for individual emptiness; in some new configuration or with some innovative twist; or simply an aspect of the eternal story of good vs. evil.

We have Romero zombies—in general, a condemnation of late-twentieth-century values (or lack thereof) that project a bleak apocalyptic ending (probably deserved) for humankind—and post-Romero zombies that still focus on humanity’s flaws, but offer hope of our survival/redemption, usually through some embodiment of community.

There are also variations on both Romero and post-Romero zombies: zombies that are not mindless or do not shamble or have feelings or vary in some way from the “codified” zombie—but remain acceptable to modern zombie purists.

There are zombie stories that use the idea of the archetype in original ways that may cause aforementioned zombie purists to foam at the mouth and vent their displeasure that they are not “real zombies”—if they take the time away from their interactive games to read.

As much as I’d like to forget them, we also have zombie stories and books (print and electronic) that are mostly meaningless exercises in gross-out value. You won’t find examples here.

We also have zombies that offer comic relief—both tribute and parody to the trope—while still addressing societal concerns. As Simon Pegg (who co-wrote and starred in
Shaun of the Dead
, 2004) said in an interview: “The great thing about zombies is that they’re ever-changing—because they’re basically us. They can be employed to represent any facet of our development.” [Russell, Mike. “Interview with Shaun of the Dead’s Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright,”
CulturePulp: Writings and Comics by Mike Russell
. September 23, 2004.]

And combinations and variations and evolutions of all of the above. And more.

They Keep Coming Back . . . and Coming Back . . .

By now it’s pretty clear that the modern zombie mythos has a nasty habit of auto-cannibalizing itself to puke up new generations of dead, deader, and deadest—with the British being the first to port the phenomenon to commercial television in
Dead Set
(2008), which seems eerily like what might have transpired if Romero’s
Dawn
quartet had never left the TV station seen in the beginning of the film. Nothing succeeds like excess—where the concept of a “zombie TV show” was played for laughs in the original
Book of the Dead
(in Brian Hodge’s “Dead Giveaway”), now it has become assimilated. Some say zombies are the new vampires. And the new zombies? No doubt there: To quote the original
Dawn
again, they’re us. Can a Zombie Channel be far behind?

Like the hardiest viruses, the zombie subgenre has metastasized from trickle to torrent, and like the best phenomena, it has earned its right to historical documentation, starting with the fiction presented in this volume. All the stories included were published in this first decade (2000 through 2009) of what has become (so far) the Zombie Century—some of it influential, some of it overlooked, all of it worthy of your perusal and debate.

Even the dead crave entertainment.

—
Paula Guran

(with further thanks to David J. Schow)

June 2010

Addendum:
Following the author’s biography at the end of each story, you’ll find comments by the editor. Ignore them, enjoy them, hate them, debate them—just don’t peruse them
before
you read the story!

Kevin Veale

We were driving past Kalamazoo towards the edge of the desert when the withdrawal began to set in. I remember feeling light-headed for moments before phantom weevils scuttled down my spine. Caustic burblings oozed through my gut. Dogwood, my Minister for Lateral Problem-Solving, looked askance at me under his dust-encrusted ski-goggles.

“We can’t stop again, man.”

He left it at that, aware I understood the situation. The Minister had insisted on liberating a convertible and driving it with the top down across broken plains that required goggles to shield the eyes. Our holy mission necessitated a certain vibe, he’d argued, and felt this justified grit in the teeth and a car with a dying battery. Besides, it was all right for him: I’d been seeking gastro-intestinal regularity by varying the elements of my drug intake, producing gut-locked stony constipation on one side, and fluid Lovecraftian bowel-horrors on the other.