The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse

Lots of zombies. No guns. No problem. That’s the basic premise of Roger Ma’s The Zombie Combat Manual, an in-depth analysis of the tools, techniques and concerns inherent in facing the living dead mano-a-corpso.

Presented in the same faux-nonfiction style as Max Brooks’s wildly popular Zombie Survival Guide with a much more specific focus, th ZCM offers 300 pages of detailed instruction on every aspect of combat with the undead. The books starts with a couple of brief chapters on the zombies themselves, quickly outlining the type of zombie we’re talking about by outlining people’s misconceptions about them, their anatomy and a catalog of their strengths and weaknesses. In summary, these are very like the aggregate ideal picture most fans have of zombies — slow moving, killable only by destroying the brain, completely mindless and highly contagious, spreadable by bite or scratch. In other words, nearly identical (with a few specific changes/details) to Brooks’s conception, or to the zombies found in Lucio Fulci’s Zombie for that matter.

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Philip Nutman was writing zombie apocalypse novels before zombie apocalypse novels were cool. These days, it seems like we get a new one once a week or so, but back in 1993 when he published Wet Work, they were pretty scarce on the ground. The book is held up as an exemplar of the “splatterpunk” movement, meaning it’s gore-drenched and relatively depraved. If you like your zombie fiction that way, then by all means, dive right in.

When comet Saracen unexpectedly shows up in a remarkably close orbit, it’s bad news for life as we know it. Some unknown radiation from the comet has a couple of nasty effects — effects no one notices until it’s too late. First, it raises the dead. Second, it thoroughly fucks the immune system of nearly everyone it touches, turning even common infections into deadly killers. That’s a nearly unbeatable combo and in no time at all, it’s hell on Earth in the form of a full-blown zombie apocalypse.

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Bitten by a zombie? You need help. The kind of help offered by Zombies for Zombies: Advice and Etiquette for the Living Dead by David P. Murphy. Aimed squarely at those who prefer their zombies with a twist of humor – and there are plenty of those folks out there, especially among casual zombie fans – Z4Z is a “Dummies”-style self-help book for the newly turned (or, more precisely, about-to-be-turned) zombie.

In Z4Z’s world, a mad-cow like disease called the Provo virus has created zombies and a massive corporate-government conglomerate has taken drastic steps to stop it – and profit from it in the process. If it sounds like the world of Fido, you are not wrong, although this is more modern and Halliburton-y. In this world, the moderately zombified get shipped off to special “retirement” homes, while the full-on zombies are the Horde, kept at bay (barely) by high fences and intense security measures.

With chapters such as “The 14 Habits of Highly Effective Zombies: Etiquette and Behavior” and “You Are Who You Eat,” and detailed suggestions for medication options, sex tips (yes, there’s an entire chapter on zombie sex, if you like that sort of thing) and even post-life fashion, Z4Z takes a much broader, frequently silly look at the undead world than, say, Max Brooks’s work, which is humorous without being precisely funny.

The brief looks at the behavior of the Horde and the effects of the zombie virus on society were fascinating – there’s a more serious (although probably somewhat light hearted, still) book in there if Murphy wants to write it. The book would have benefited by including more of that sort of material and a little less of some of the other, less-zombie specific humor. The few serious elements work really well.

The problem is it’s more than a little drawn out at 230+ pages. It would have been twice as good at half the length, most likely. The zombiecentric humor gets stretched plenty thin (seriously, the brains thing is done in just about every possible way) and too much non-zombie humor gets thrown in, seemingly at random. Z4Z is funny – there are several laugh-out-loud moments and plenty of chuckles to be found, and it’s a decent read. It just run out of steam before it runs out of pages.

It’s always nice to see someone taking a fresh approach to the zombie apocalypse. In the young-adult novel The Forest of Hands and Teeth, first-time author Carrie Ryan’s tactic is setting her story so long after the rise of the dead that no one living remembers a time before – indeed, many people doubt there ever was a time before. In this genuinely post-apocalyptic world, society has reverted to a simpler way of life, much like the modern-day Amish. No lights, no phones, no motorcars – just farming, fence-mending (to keep those pesky walking dead out) and lots and lots of religion, courtesy of the Sisterhood. The sisters of the Sisterhood run things with an iron fist, maintaining order and security in a draconian manner—albeit an arguably justified one.

It is this world that our young lead, Mary, lives in. And after her father and mother both fall to the zombies, she find herself unwillingly forced into the Sisterhood. There she discovers something strange – an outsider has come to her village, but is hidden by the Sisters. Later this outsider becomes a zombie – a special one, extra ferocious and capable of running. As this unfolds, Mary’s life becomes complicated by love, obligation, her natural curiosity and need to break free of the stifling constraints imposed upon her by life in the village. And she gets her chance to break free when all hell breaks loose and the Unconsecrated, as Ryan calls her zombies, flood the village, forcing Mary to flee with her would-be lover, her betrothed, her best friend, her brother, his wife, a young boy and a dog. And in classic zombie-tale fashion, this group begins shrinking almost immediately and what limited safety they find along the way turns out to be not as safe as it seems…

Ryan shows some skill in the crucial areas of characterization and plotting. She crafts a bunch of well-realized, believable characters (especially Mary) and sets them loose in a nicely plotted, page-turning story. Of course, I did have some minor quibbles. The first-person, present-tense style (as in “I’m walking to the door, I feel its rough surface on my skin”) felt a little odd to me and was somewhat distracting, especially at first. The pacing also felt a bit off, almost as if it had initially been planned to be a longer, deeper novel but had to be cut short for some reason – perhaps a looming deadline? To be clear, it moves along at a brisk clip, but it feels like the first half or two-thirds was building to more than the final bit paid off. In particular, there were a couple of intriguing passages hinting that the Sisterhood had a much better idea of what was going on than they revealed and suggesting something of an explanation for the outsider/super-zombie character, but they weren’t followed up on, which was a bit disappointing. I’d have preferred a bit more of that and a bit less of the love quadrangle between Mary, her best friend and the brothers, but hey, I’m not a teen girl either.

Apart from those issues – and be sure, they are minor issues – this is a novel that’s easy to recommend, especially to younger readers (12 to 16, say) but enjoyable by all who love zombies. Between her fresh setting, solid characters and compelling plot, Ryan has crafted an excellent debut novel. If she chooses to stay in this world for her future works, there’s plenty of room left to explore. The ending is practically begging for a sequel and I would read it without hesitation. If she moved on to some other subject – Yeti or robots, say — I’d still be inclined to pick her next book up – she’s a good writer that seems to be headed toward being a great one.

Zombies, as a rule, are more at home in film and video games than in literature. There’s no grand literary tradition stemming back hundreds of years, or even decades for that matter, as there is with vampires. The truth is, the vast majority of zombie novels are utter shit. Even among the good stuff, there’s no single great work, apart from very recent works from Max Brooks arguably, to point to as sterling examples of the form. Well, folks, in a decade or two that will change as David Wellington’s Monster Island becomes recognized for the masterpiece that it is.

Monster Island‘s story revolves around two characters, Dekalb and Gary. Dekalb is a former UN weapons inspector leading a mission to retrieve a stash of priceless drugs for a Somali warlord in exchange for a place for himself and his daughter in the new world order. Gary is a rather unusual zombie – a zombie who can still think, thanks to a clever plan devised while he was still alive. The paths of these two intersect fairly early on, with devastating consequences for Gary, then split, taking a number of fascinating individual twists and turns before meeting again for a satisfying climax. The surprises on each characters path are so integral to the story and so inherently satisfying it would be a travesty to spoil any of them, but suffice it to say that both must face dire circumstances in pursuit of what they desire, circumstances that change them and their initial goals.

Both characters are exquisitely wrought and developed throughout the story. Wellington manages to make them both sympathetic, even as they do terrible things. Making a zombie sympathetic to any degree isn’t an easy task, but Wellington isn’t your average hack horror writer. Surrounding these two characters is an excellent supporting cast, on both sides, alive and dead. Not surprisingly, since most of Gary’s companions are mindless dead, the bulk of secondary characters that get attention interact with Dekalb, from the teenage soldiers accompanying him in his mission to the survivors they meet in New York City.

The cause of the zombie plague is not revealed, but it appears to be supernatural for a number of reasons (again, revealing those reasons would spoil some excellent surprises). The average zombie is very similar to the zombies of George A. Romero’s Dead series – slow, nearly mindless (due to brain damage from asphyxiation as the person dies but before the zombie rises, it is explained) and always hungry. These zombies eat anything alive though – not just people, but animals, plants, even grass. And when they do, it fills them with vitality in undeath, healing wounds and giving them strength to go on. If they don’t eat, they slowly wither away and rot like normal dead things (well, normal dead things don’t walk, but you know…).

This is one of the finest zombie stories ever told, in any medium. It’s written in a spare, deft style that manages to pack maximum impact into minimal verbiage. There’s rarely a single word wasted throughout the story, from taut action sequences to tender, human moments to mind-blowing metaphysical revelations. Wellington’s mythology is well-developed, fully compatible with the popular view of the zombie and yet strikingly original in the realm of zombie fiction – I can’t wait to see how it develops in the two sequels. His characters are believable, his settings are real and his prose is gorgeous. This is an essential book for zombie fans – don’t pass it up.

You can read it online at the Monster Island website or purchase it from fine booksellers everywhere.

If the somewhat scholarly Zombie Movie Encyclopedia wasn’t quite the right zombie movie guide for you, then Glenn Kay’s Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide may be a better fit. Kay chronicles more than 300 zombie movies and TV episodes from the original 1932 White Zombie to the 2008 feature Diary of the Dead.

Kay’s book takes a more laid back, film-fan approach to the genre than Dendle did, making it an easier book to read straight through. Interestingly, he starts off with a lengthy and fairly detailed history of  Haiti that seems a little out of place considering the tone of the rest of the book. Still, it’s an interesting read that offers some insight into the origins of the zombie myth in our culture and a little history never hurt anyone, right? Kay organizes the book by era, breaking it into roughly decade-sized chunks. This organization makes it easy to follow the development of the genre, lending the book some of its linear readability, but it necessitates a trip to the index to find a particular film you may have heard referenced by name without knowing the era it is from. Kay doesn’t offer a lot of detail about what criteria he uses to select a film as a zombie film, and although he clearly takes an expansive view of what is or isn’t a zombie, there are few, if any, selections that will upset anyone but total purists.

Most of the entries are given a third to half a page of discussion, with more important works (Romero’s films, for example) receiving as many as several pages and lesser works covered in one or two paragraphs. He rounds up lots of minor films with a mere mention in end-of-chapter lists. Though he doesn’t cover video games with their own entries, he does discuss their impact on the genre at several points. Each movie that gets a full entry is also rated, but he uses an obscure set of symbols to denote their rankings, making them a pain to use. A simple one-to-four star rating system would have been preferable to trying to remember what a zombie figure with a stick through its midsection denotes. Like any review, some of his takes seem spot on and others earn a puzzled “WTF? Is he serious?” He does a good job justifying his positions, for the most part, so at least you’ll know why he likes that turd you hated so much.  He wraps the book with a chapter on the 25 greatest zombie movies of all time, a list that is sure to cause some contention among serious fans. For what it is worth, I agreed with about half his list, the rest ranged from debatably justifiable to sheer insanity.

As a bonus, Kay has included Q&A format interviews with various directors, special effects people, extras, etc. These are fairly interesting, but seem slightly out of place and don’t really add much, in part because none of them is particularly insightful. In addition to a generous amount of black-and-white photos of film posters (many of them foreign) and production stills, there is a nice full-color set of images in the center that adds to the visual appeal of the book. The index, appendices and bibliography are a little anemic, but most readers won’t even notice. All in all, it’s a nice, casual reference work that is worthy of consideration from any fan.

Every zombie scholar needs reference books and Peter Dendle’s The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia is a solid work that deserves the consideration of any serious zombie researcher. Covering more than 200 movies, from the 1932 Bela Lugosi classic White Zombie through the 1998 body horror of I, Zombie: A Chronicle of Pain, Dendle does an admirable job of collecting nearly every significant zombie work in film (and a few from TV as well) within that time frame into one convenient, easy to read volume. He strikes a nice balance in tone between scholarly and enthusiast, admittedly leaning more toward the scholarly.

He starts with an introduction that provides a succinct history of the zombie in film, broken up into eras such as “The Early Film Zombie (1932-1952),” “The Golden Age (1968-1983)” and “The Mid-’80s Spoof Cycle.” Following that, he spends a couple of pages delving into the significance and meaning of the zombie before wrapping it up with an explanation of his definition of zombies and criteria for movie selection. These elements, especially the definition and selection criteria, are crucial to understanding which films are present and which are omitted. He does a good job setting his boundaries and stays within them for the most part, with a few exceptions. Notably, he says that reanimated humans that retain their personality are not zombies, then goes on to include several movies that feature zombies that retain personality. There are a few other minor “rule bendings” but nothing egregious. The biggest absence some might note is his exclusion of demon-zombies: no Evil Dead here! Wisely, he limits himself to movies he has actually seen. Luckily, this man has seen an awesome amount of zombie movies.

Dendle organizes the movies alphabetically, so it’s easy to find any given entry. Since so many of these movies have numerous alternate titles, he puts in entries referring to the location of a given film’s actual entry under the alternates. The write ups for each movie are fairly concise, although some of the more important movies (and some pretty minor stuff he seemed especially taken with) get several pages of their own. Many of the films’ entries are illustrated with crisp, black-and-white production stills, which helps the overall visual appeal of the book. He comes off even handed and knowledgeable without seeming stuffy for the most part: scholarly yet accessible. At the same time, he does offer what are more or less reviews for these movies, so they are subjective. And like anything subjective, sometimes you’ll agree and sometimes you’ll have to ask, “WTF is he on about?” I don’t want to call him out on too much, but I have to say: Shock Waves? Seriously? That movie was trash and I will never understand why anyone gives it any credit at all.

The book closes with a solid, usable index, a thorough bibliography and a couple of very handy appendices: one lists the movies of the book by country,  the other by year. These are all crucial to make this an actual reference work and they are well done here.

My only real problems with the book can’t be laid at Dendle’s feet. The first is that it cuts off before the 2000s, which turned out to be a crucial decade for zombie cinema. Of course, I recognize that every book has this problem to some degree, unless they are covering a dead art form — it’s not a real complaint, just a disappointment. The real issue is the binding, which split on my copy after relatively minor and careful use. For a work I plan to return to frequently, it’s a real bummer. I wish it had been released in trade paperback instead of hardcover, frankly. It would be cheaper and possibly less fragile to boot. Despite that issue, I have no problem recommending this book to anyone who wants a hard-copy reference work on zombie film. It’s easily one of the best available.

Edit: Added line to indicate book is ordered alphabetically.

Mario Acevedo’s Jailbait Zombie is based on the can’t-miss premise of vampires versus zombies. You have Felix Gomez, a lecherous, snarky soldier turned vampire enforcer, facing off against an army of rotting, walking dead. Along the way, the plot is thickened by the addition of a precocious, troubled teenage girl with immense psychic powers and a burning need to become a vampire. She latches on to Gomez, occasionally aiding his search for the zombies’ creator but mostly just getting in the way. Her family are bush-league Mafioso, which adds another complication, as does the need to keep the existence of the supernatural — including vampires, zombies and psychic teenage girls — a secret from the mortal world.

The books starts strong with a fight between Gomez and a zombie and proceeds to go on a twisty, page-turning journey that reads like a contemporary detective yarn heavily laced with supernatural elements. In interviews, Acevedo has called his genre urban fantasy, and that works as well as any descriptor for the mix of familiar fictional tropes from horror, hard-boiled detective stories and the new wave of supernatural fiction. Acevedo does a good job of mixing things up with some original ideas about his creatures of the night while sticking closely enough to the classics to not upset anyone’s apple cart. His vampires suck blood, get burned by sunlight, can control the minds of mortals, are immortal themselves, etc. At the same time, they can operate in daylight with the aid of sunblock and makeup, eat food as well as blood and even have a sense of morality. Of course, given the nature of this blog, it’s the zombies we’re more interested in here. These are the work of a reanimator who comes off a bit like Herbert West of Re-Animator mixed with Dr. Frankenstein. They’re rotting, shambling messes but the “best made” can manage some pretty advanced tasks, like driving. They’re pretty much impossible to kill and share some kind of group consciousness. Oh, and they love brains.

It’s not great literature, but no one picks up a book called Jailbait Zombie looking for deep insight into the human condition, now, do they? The book delivers what it promises: an action-packed tale of the supernatural, laced with humor and gore. There’s never a dull moment and Acevedo knows how to pace a story. Characters such as Gomez and his teenaged stalker are well-developed and satisfying, but in a few cases, especially the Red Bull-swilling mad scientist reanimator, I felt like there was a good bit of potential left on the table and I wish he’d done more with them.  I also can’t help but wish there were more zombies in the book; the climactic battle between Gomez and the zombies was great but left me wanting more scenes like it. The bottom line is you pretty much get what’s advertised with Jailbait Zombie; if the concept of a vampire enforcer squaring off against an army of zombies sounds good to you, you’re not going to be disappointed.

For more info, visit MarioAcevedo.com