by MV Clark
I love zombies. Fast, slow, thin, fat, legless, eyeless, vomiting, hemorraghing … I just love them.
In real life, I don’t know anybody who feels the same way, which is why I am so happy to find myself on the Summer of Zombie blog tour with like-minded people.
What is it about zombies that I love, and you love, and the other writers that are part of this event love?
Truthfully, I can only answer for myself, but what I can say is it’s changed a lot since I first latched on to the genre, back in the 90s with some TV rerun of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.
Back then, I was viscerally thrilled by walking corpses in large numbers. It was both overwhelmingly terrifying and unlikely to happen in real life, which was a great combination for me at that tender age. I was less struck by the famous idea that the zombies came back to the mall because they hadn’t changed that much from when they were alive.
For a long time, I consumed zombie culture in a similar way – for the sheer mind-boggling thrill of hordes of undead. My ‘horde peak’ was probably Max Brooks’ World War Z, in which zombies cover the land for miles.
But then I wrote my own zombie novel, The Splits, and everything changed.
I’ve now researched and thought about zombies, rather than just gulping them down as entertainment. I’m no expert, but one thing is clear – they’re much more than just ravening hordes. So what else are they?
1. They’re us. They’re what might happen to us if if we can’t keep our minds alive. They’re what may have already happened to us. Because what if all the stuff we think is so great – family, money, shopping malls – is at best meaningless, and at worst actually deadening us?
2. They’re a radical political statement. An early incarnation of zombies in William Seabrook’s 1929 book The Magic Island had them as slaves-plus, the ultimate exploited labour. They were black people working for white masters eternally – because they were dead.
3. They’re the people we love. Take the Spanish found footage zombie horror Rec. Each zombie in this film is ripped from a common repertoire of comforting characters – the gentle old lady, the strong and competent police officer, the protective mother, the heroic firefighter. All one by one flipped on their heads into hungry corpses as they get infected with the toxin of the Medeiros Girl.
This final version of the zombie is my personal favourite. Because these reassuring archetypes are never totally stable, even without a zombie plague. Sometimes you fear your grandma, you hate your mother, and we all know perfectly well the police shoot innocent people. The zombie inside the loved one is always with us.
That’s why I love zombies. That’s why the living dead, to me, are more truthful than a hundred bog-standard literary novels about ennui and memory. Bring on your zombies, authors – I’m ready and waiting!
Check out The Splits by MV Clark.
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