The Zombie Messiah? ‘Raising Stony Mayhall’ and a Different Take on the Global Reanimation Block Party
Light spoilers below in the io9 interview excerpts, proceed with caution:
You know, when I click an io9 link about Zombies I honestly grimace a bit. Going to their site to read anything about the Differently Animated is usually the mental equivalent of smacking myself in the hand with a hammer.
Yet of course, I must, for it is my sacred duty here as your humble ZRC President. So imagine my surprise when they carry a lengthy interview with the author of a new Zombie novel that seems right up our alley!
Behold ‘Raising Stony Mayhall’:
Ever wondered what the Nativity would look like if Jesus were a zombie growing up in late-80s Ohio? With Raising Stony Mayhall, Daryl Gregory has answered that question. We asked him where the idea came from.
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Your central concept of a sentient zombie is a break from (to use a really bad pun) the body of zombie literature. What made you go that direction?
I really wanted to write an anti-zombie novel. There was just so much zombie stuff coming out that I thought, “Maybe there needs to be somebody going the other way.” When I pitched it to my editor, I was saying, “It’s kind of like the Unforgiven of zombie novels.” I saw that movie and I thought, “Well, that’s pretty much it for westerns for me. It said everything, took every cliche and inverted it and moved on. No one can ever film another western again.” But of course, you can’t stop westerns and you’re certainly not going to stop zombie novels, nor should you.
Really it started out, I wanted to write about a family in which a kid was being raised with them, sort of adopted, feeling like an outsider and feeling like something was missing. In the first idea, it wasn’t really a zombie novel. There was just something terribly wrong with him. When I realized that he could be dead and I could use all those tropes from zombie fiction, then it just spiralled out from there and I got really excited about it.
Of course, my agent really liked it because she thought, “Well, I can sell a zombie novel!” I didn’t quite tell her that I was writing the anti-zombie novel at the time, that I was maybe just going to annoy all the people who really like zombie fiction in which zombies are monsters.
Wow. What a great concept, and what an intriguing idea! Being completely honest, we’ve considered the issue of a Zombie Messiah here before at the ZRC, but more in a theological sense dealing with Christian thought rather than a forward looking speculative fiction take. (Unfortunately we have also seen the exact opposite take on the concept, with actual Jesus persecuting Zombies in fiction, uggh)
The story in ‘Raising Stony Mayhall’ apparently touches on all sorts of wonderfully hot button issues, like class status for Zombies, the religious and scientific implications of Undeath and more besides:
One of the big tensions in the novel is that zombies are this underclass, and they’re wondering whether they should just die off, recruit a couple of new people annually by biting, or just launch the apocalypse. At the end, that tension is still there. Do you think it’s possible for these two groups to coexist?
I would like to hold out hope that they can. Because they’re sentient, maybe there’s hope. But the realist in me says its not going to work out. You’d think by now we’d be done with war and racism and zenophobia, but its so persistent that I don’t think this world is any sort of exception.
Oh, the many questions that can be asked about organizing for Zombie Rights! It’s so nice to see them articulated in a novel. So very nice.
There’s a lot more fascinating info in the admittedly somewhat spoiler heavy interview at io9, which is a great read, given the spoiler caveat.
As for the ZRC, I’m slapping this one in my Amazon to-buy-and-read list as soon as I save this post; I suggest you do the same.
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