Reflecting on a collective sense of aimlessness and dread in a troubled society, zombie films and literature have become a pop culture expression of government oppression, mutating diseases and fear over questionable biological experiments. The dark eroticism of the vampire mythos that tapped into the zeitgeist – particularly the fear of AIDS – during the 1980s and 90s has been supplanted by gruesome, nihilistic stories of a post-apocalyptic society where the dead roam the Earth, feeding on the living.
To wit: Sexy and ancient creatures of the night offering eternal life in exchange for a bite on the neck have been overridden by armies of very unsexy somnambulistic killers who eat human flesh, and the Sisyphean task of the dwindling number of living humans who try and stay alive.
Zombie: An Anthology of the Undead
Edited by Christopher Golden, this is an offbeat collection of survivors' – and, in some cases, zombies' – tales of living in a bizarre new world created by science, military or religion gone awry. Unlike many horror stories that focus on the origins of anomaly, the stories in Zombie provide minimal preamble as to why the dead walk the earth, focusing more on situational aftermath.
Setting the tone of the book is the first story, Lazarus, by John Connolly, a tale that's easily recognizable after a few paragraphs but is told from a completely unique perspective. David Liss' What Maisie Knew, Kelley Armstrong's Life Sentence and Closure by Max Brooks (author of The Zombie Survival Guide) stand out as particularly interesting studies on the (potential) moral dilemmas facing the survivors among the living dead: Are zombies still people, or are they now creatures to be used at the discretion of the living? Where is the line drawn regarding using zombies for torture, revenge – or pleasure? Rounding out this rather hefty volume of portentous scenarios is a yarn told entirely in "tweets"; using the framework of updates via Twitter gives a chilling real-time account of mayhem as it's happening.
Can You Murder a Zombie If It's Already Dead?
Within the understandably and expected graphic depictions of chaos and insanity are, ironically, deeper questions about what it is to be alive: The lethargic-but-lethal zombies are the polar opposite to the so-called "human condition" of emotion and reason, but when the world turns upside down the same "reasonable" humans can become as dangerous as their zombie counterparts. More than just gory entertainment, the stories contain elements that ask the reader to ponder: Who is the predator and who is the prey?
Edmund O'Reilly - Originally from New York, Edmund moved to Australia in 2006 and works as the Creative Director at a multimedia agency in North Sydney, ...
