Zombie Fiction. . .what about it? (Part One)

Hey, will everyone slow down sending all these fiction submissions in! I don't know if I can read all of these on my own!

That was sarcasm, if you didn't follow. But I didn't start this here post to whine about the near-vacuum of fiction submission I've received. I mean, this is a blog, despite all the reassurances I make over it being a 'zine'. And we don't pay. the idea was to be a showcase for speculative fiction writers who are--to use a term I usually dislike when applied to art and literature--outsiders. So it looks like this blog is gonna be just mine for a while. Submissions are always open, however.

Pretty soon I am going to serialize the work I did on Revenant Magazine's site. Only two of the four stories I had planned made it on their fiction page, and to be honest I don't like them as they are. My plan is to take the stories--the longest of which is about 11,00 words, and coalesce them into a novel. To be honest, I think my infatuation with the zombie motif is waning. yes, it's true. Zombies are challenging and fun to write about, but you can only do so much before it becomes slapstick. I think that's why there are so many comedic zombie films. Still, zombies are resonant. As much as the vampire, at least. but there's something tiresome about the tortured romantic immortal. I like to think that while vampires are enjoying a craze, the zombie enjoys a renaissance

The zombie yarn usually relies on your human characters; the scrappy band of survivalists that go head-to-head with droves of moaning corpses. It's formulaic, but it works. You can do the whole claustrophobia thing, too; people trapped in a building or--dare I even say it--a shopping mall. However, you skirt dangerously close to social allegory when you go down that road, an overused concept in zombie stories. Also,these are near impossible to pull off without looking like homage or pastiche. The canonical zombie films are as respected as they are for a reason. Now, I'm not going to dissect the whole 'mythos' and use words like 'archetypal' and 'allegory' to describe the Romero films. This has been done, it's popular culture now. Everyone is familiar with zombies and shopping malls. I used allegory once already, didn't I?

The stories I wrote and submitted to Revenant are under the collective title of Deadwar. I had originally called it The War on Death, but I like the one word title better. To circumnavigate the whole mandatory 'society going down the toilet', I set the stories almost fifteen years after the dead began to walk. by now, society has gone down the toilet and is on it's way to a sewage treatment plant by now. The idea was that everyone who is alive at the time of the story has been fighting for their life for over ten years. You see, the zombie apocalypse acted as a culling, an 'unnatural selection'. Hence, everyone alive toady is virtually a superman; intelligent; athletic; cool-headed. It hearkens back to the sort of protagonists you saw in science fiction of the forties and fifties. Robert A. Heinlein's competent man; a brilliant, physically fit man. He is pragmatic, but not amoral. he always knows what to say and when to say it, and he is seemingly well-versed in almost everything that comes up.

This type of idealized hero I find hard to swallow. Some of Heinlein's heroes are veterans, or they are still in service. Well, the heroes of the Deadwar were never soldiers to begin with, but found themselves in that exact dodge. A decade of fighting for your life, and leaving those who couldn't pull their own weight to the ghouls. maybe you had to kill some living people, maybe you saw your family go down. The war you fight is against a faceless enemy. You can't put zombies through war tribunals. The enemy, or at least the pain and death he represents, always needs a face

What I'm saying is, you don't get to be a superman without first going through hell. And then there's the sociopaths, probably the only living humans psychologically prepared for the zombie plague. We're talking about people who, in the normal course of things, are able to make rational decisions with no regard to who gets hurt. it seems to be a trend in zombie fiction that society--as a whole--has to abandon emotionality and embrace pragmatic solutions in order to not go the way of the thylacine and the dodo.
I wonder what an earth where the only human forms are the living dead would be like. How long would the dead last? That's a story I would leave to someone else.
What can I say? What can any zombie fan say? I'm captivated by the idea of the living dead apocalypse. Contrariwise, I'll be the first one to admit that I'd be a dead duck in such circumstances. Fighting for my life, day in, day out? I am too fond of leisure and books and music to endure a world like that. When the dead start streaming out of the hospitals and the subway tunnels, that's where this hypothetical situation ends!