Ten Little Zombies: A Hate Story
At least they’re not trying to hide the Anti-Zombie agenda with this book, entitled ‘Ten Little Zombies: A Love Story’:
Description: When being chased by ten little zombies (no matter how cute they are), your only option is to systematically destroy them one by one, or else become zombie number eleven. In this love story wrapped in a tale of zombie mayhem, a resourceful couple flees from and picks off their undead pursuers with fast-paced ingenuity and an entertaining range of zombie-thwarting tools. As the zombies shuffle and stumble their way toward a variety of gruesome ends, our heroes must come up with new ways to escape sticky situations and stay together. This darkly funny illustrated tale think Bunny Suicides meets Edward Gorey meets Hallmark celebrates the romantic side of a zombie plague, with plenty of BRAINS and a lot of heart.
The book was written by one Andy Rash, who apparently thinks Home Alone was the all-time high point of the comedic arts.
What, may I ask, Mr. Rash, is wrong with being the 11th Zombie, precisely? I wasn’t aware there was a strict quota system in place. Or rather, is a strict quota system, regulating the Unlives and numbers of the Differently Animated your goal? Do you want to set up reservations? Perhaps a nice internment camp in the West? Something scenic and above all, isolated from good and normal Living people?
Somehow this setting, where two unhinged nutbags on the run (from Zombies and hopefully the law) commit numerous acts of premeditated violence, somehow that’s supposed to be romantic. I guess there *is* some precedent; I mean, Bonnie and Clyde are seen as romantic, right?
You know, discounting the mayhem.
That’s the fundamental difference though. When we romanticize past couples steeped in violence, we tend to mentally erase the acts of depravity; here, because that depravity is directed against Zombies, it’s somehow ok.
Well it’s not ok with the ZRC.
About The Author
To the ZRC:
You are correct that I am not trying to hide my anti-zombie agenda with my book: Ten Little Zombies: A Love Story. You are however incorrect on all other points, including your core agenda. Zombies are not individuals in need of rights. You might as well spend your time trying to secure rights for mudslides. In both cases, matter which we have every reason to expect to remain motionless suddenly moves and causes great danger to human beings. We are, as human beings, predisposed to anthropomorphize all sorts of things that are not human: dogs, toys, ships, etc., but when we do so with the undead, we endanger ourselves with sentimentality. This is the core message of my book. Grief and despair must not defeat intelligence and the will to survive, lest the world succumb to zombie apocalypse. By attempting with rhetoric to imbue zombies with hopes and dreams, you undermine the safety of all living human beings. For shame sir!
Yours,
Andy Rash, author and illustrator of Ten Little Zombies: A Love Story, available now in your local bookstores as well as Amazon.com.
P. S. Thanks for the nice review.
To Andy Rash:
The Zombie Rights Campaign thanks you for your reply, but finds your remarks extremely disturbing and, it must be said, patently offensive.
First, the comparison of Zombies to mudslides is both unfortunate and highly charged language, harkening back to similar terms used against other oppressed classes of humanity when attempting to deny them their inherent rights and autonomy. Zombies are people too, not mudslides, nor are they ‘mud people’, words you did not use but which are eerily similar.
Second here do you obtain the right to expect the recently dead to remain inanimate? Who determines that this is in fact the natural order, and on what authority would you seek to have it enforced? Would you also tell those poor souls trapped in persistent vegetative states that they can’t suddenly decide on their own to improve their condition and get up out bed? After all, what part of ‘persistent’ don’t they understand? Clearly, if they have been labeled as such by medical professionals, we have good ‘reason’ to expect them to remain stationary.
Perhaps, rather than being selfish and seeking to regain their lives and mobility, they should settle for a humbler station in life, like being a coffee table.
Third, the core message of your book, as you explain it here, is nothing less than a call to abandon empathy and understanding in favor purely of survival and individual advancement. In the name of this survival you would have we, the Living, not only deny humanity to the Undead, but even to ourselves, in a reckless quest to adhere to some Nietzschean vision. Survival, or Will to Power, sir? What is it you’re truly advocating?
As discussed in the context of the psychology of hypothetical survivors of a ‘Zombie Apocalypse’, itself a harmful fantasy event conjured up by fevered and distrustful minds, Dr. Schlozman of Harvard outlined the dehumanization your empathy removing process would create quite well. (http://zombierightscampaign.org/blog/?p=1228)
While we disagreed with many of his points, we cannot help but agree with that thrust of his presentation: the drive to survive at any cost and dehumanize the Differently Animated pushes Living people toward eventual, perhaps inevitable, psychic dissolution and self-destruction. We believe this occurs because on a core level, even the most rabid Anti-Zombie fanatic knows the truth: Zombies are not mere inanimate matter. The universe has not made some tragic mistake and granted them the semblence of life by accident.
Zombies are, in fact, people. They do not require us to imbue them with hopes and dreams, and their safety is part and parcel of the safety of the human race as a whole.
Shame upon you, sir! Shame for your intolerance, for your lack of compassion, and for publishing that intolerance in convenient dead tree format available from prominent book sellers like Amazon for less than ten dollars. (free shipping available: http://www.amazon.com/Ten-Little-Zombies-Love-Story/dp/081187723X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1295133938&sr=8-1)
We are shocked and appalled.