What Makes an Anti-Zombie Author Hate the Undead?
A response to this post at The Zombie Feed.
What is it that makes an author write a story attacking the Differently Animated?
Sure, there’s the monetary angle, the fact that Anti-Zombie fiction is hot now and therefore it’s easier to get published, and the nasty anti-social tendencies of writers in general. (I know from experience). But the theory I’ve always found most convincing is that these people fundamentally don’t like humanity, and need an acceptable outlet for their misanthropy: recognition of our common humanity doesn’t aid these individuals. It’s a terrifying thing that your friend, who has followed you home, slept over on your couch, waited for you to get off work to share some beers, might one day stop talking to you, suddenly want to hurt you. With Anti-Zombie fiction though, it isn’t just about your friend; it’s your neighbor, your dog, your sister, your husband. They no longer know you, care about you or want to protect you. You’re a victim, nothing more. You’ve been reduced to prey, even by those who you believe should most want to protect you. And none of it’s your fault or personal failing. It’s all the ‘Zombie Apocalypse’.
Anti-Zombie authors are terrifying to me at least because they’ve suddenly lost their sense of empathy, and therefore their ability to care about their characters. The omnipresent Anti-Zombie types will always say that, ‘Zombies aren’t people, you can’t care about a Zombie’, that if you show compassion to the Undead you’ll just get eaten for your trouble: the Anti-Zombie author, however, takes this trope to a whole new level. How much harder must it be to create a world where someone shoots their 12 year old son for being a Zombie than it is simply to read about such a world? How much harder to make a fictional man of your own creation leave his wife behind, even as she begs him not to leave her alone as she dies, because she’ll attack him in minutes? While these fictional Zombies discard their personal relationships at death, the Anti-Zombie author is the one who leaves their created Survivors the heartbroken ruins of those relationships and inflicts upon them the terror of running from the very people they once loved.
This psychologically damaged behavior is one of the things I want to address with The Zombie Rights Campaign and our ZRC blog. As a society we’ve lost a lot in the recent Anti-Zombie craze, but the deepest scars are those on a shared literature that no longer exists, full of empathy and compassion for its creations. Civilization has always relied on a certain ability to understand the Other. Loners and iconoclasts just don’t supply the building blocks for a better world. But when there is only Anti-Zombie fiction left, and very little of it even readable, who can you turn to for reinforcing and training that ability? How do you come to terms with both the flood of Anti-Zombie hate literature washing over our shelves and then the self-inflicted wounds our culture obtains by reading it in order to keep current in break-room conversation?
The ZRC is at its core an organization about relationships, and we look not only at the an author’s relationship to their readers, but also to the fellow authors around them, and an author’s relationship with their conscience after creating yet another world that nearly came to a blood-splattered end, as well as their relationships with children who should grow up in a better world than the one they’re helping to create. What struck me most when I first started addressing this wave of fiction was the permeating loneliness not just Zombies might feel in a world that so often rejects them, but the sickening desire a creator must have to inflict this pain on helpless others, and the desire they would have to have to try and create meaning out of the bloody chunks of narrative they vomit in our collective laps. What is the destiny of an author left with nothing to write about but Zombies they hate, and no one to write for but Anti-Zombie fans? What about the Zombies themselves? After all, Zombies are people too. Do they remember everyone who insinuates that they consumed their families, friends and neighbors? Must the sin of the fictional walking corpse after death make a mark against the real life souls who inhabit our society without pulses? And what about the Living people, seduced into to evolving a new, harder set of rules to live by that rule out co-existence with the Differently Animated, in exchange for mere survival? These are the kinds of things that haunt The Zombie Rights Campaign, an organization desperate to find a path toward mutual understanding in a world of Anti-Zombie hate.
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