by Jay Wilburn

Great zombie stories build the human characters in the midst of the zombie monsters. Still, there is a need to build the monsters whether they are zombies, vampires, werewolves, a surrogate for these tropes, or something completely new. Zombies can be mindless and empty, but there has to be something built into them. Usually it involves fear or threat, but it can be other things too. There needs to be texture and some level of physical and/or symbolic depth to them being there. Their presence needs to mean something more than a convenient plot device or a cheap motivation. They need to be something more than the opposite of the “machine of the gods” where instead of miraculously rescuing the story and its heroes, the monsters simply divinely get the characters into trouble right when we need an easy conflict. Stories can be high action and monster slaying adventures, and sometimes they should be, but there has to be some level of connective tissue to the story too and often the monsters are no small part of that construction.

The “highest minded” approach is probably when the zombies reflect the emotions and struggles of the characters themselves. If done well, this elevates the storytelling and adds layers to the living characters in the story. This is not necessarily to best approach for every story or every writer. It is an interesting way to build the monster into something more.

Building a different sort of zombie can be a useful approach. This is not an automatic win. I have read a lot of zombie stories as a reader and in preparing for these blog tours every year. Some of the worst stories I’ve read have been the ones that did nothing different and the ones which did something different with the style of the zombie, but then absolutely nothing else of note with plot, character, or action. These stories were nothing more than “What if zombies were like this?” and that’s as far as the writers went with their creativity.

That being said, there are authors who built different sorts of zombies and made something worth reading out of the story around them. Armand Rosamilia began his Dying Days series with a take on extreme zombies. There was a sexual threat in the undead as well as the threat of being eaten. He did not exploit the concept with needlessly graphic scenes, but he used the implication and threat to good effect. He was also one of many authors who evolved his zombies well through the course of his now complete series. Having the zombies change in a meaningful way builds an interesting monster too. Joe McKinney did the same sort of thing, evolving the zombies in his books.

Brian Keene made his zombies vocal, intelligent, and possessed by a greater evil in his cornerstone work The Rising. Chris Philbrook made his zombies silent and created a real range of threat, dread, and terror with that construct. Grivante uses all manner of zombie in his Zee Brothers series. Brent Abell has Voo Doo zombies in historic settings with a mission they must complete before they rest in his Southern Devils series. Ken Stark has stages to his undead which include a period of living “rage” style zombies and then a slower undead stage as well. There are other unique characteristics in his monsters too during the various stages. Joe McKinney likewise had living “zombie-like” monsters to make some sense of the biology of the zombie trope. Jessica Gomez followed her own take on that idea with the building of her monsters in her Flash series.

We always jump back to the concept that the humans are the real threat and the real monsters in a good zombie story. That concept can also get tired too, if authors rely on it to build their human monsters for them. As much depth, creativity, and storytelling has to be applied to any human monster which a story turns upon. Perhaps it is even more important to build a different, layered, and meaningfully interesting human monster than even the undead threats.

Differences between good and bad monster building can be as subtle as the difference between good stories or great stories. There is an art to painting the pictures of the fear, threat, and terror created by the zombies the various authors use. Many authors are doing a good job with monster building. A few are doing a great job.

Jay Wilburn

Jay Wilburn has a Masters Degree in Education that goes mostly unused since he quit teaching to write about zombies. Jay writes horror because he tends to find the light by facing down the darkness. His is doing well following a life saving kidney transplant. Jay is the author of Maidens of Zombie Kingdom a young adult fantasy trilogy, Lake Scatter Wood Tales adventure books for elementary and middle school readers, Vampire Christ a trilogy of political and religious satire, and The Dead Song Legend. He cowrote The Enemy Held Near, Yard Full of Bones, and The Hidden Truth with Armand Rosamilia. You can also find Jay's work in Best Horror of the Year volume 5. He is a staff writer with Dark Moon Digest, LitReactor, and the Still Water Bay series with Crystal Lake Publishing.

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