Relatively recently (ok, it’s been up in my tabs for a while), Fangoria looked at a few of the upcoming wave of Anti-Zombie books coming out:

As they continue to shamble (or run) off the presses, it’s clear that zombie books still…won’t…die. Since our roundup of the subgenre’s last ration of offerings (see here), upcoming fiction titles treading both fresh and familiar territory are again lining up to stack the shelves. Undead spins on H.G. Wells, Jane Austen and survivalist fare have all announced their release dates or are already in stores for your (in)digestion.

Yes, the ‘Insert Zombies Here’ movement strikes again and again as someone realized that H.G. Wells is in the public domain and was off to the races, and the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies juggernaut trudges wearily down the road in another installment.

Far more interesting, while still disturbing, were some of the other titles Fangoria looked at:

“Imagine every woman you’ve ever met, you girlfriend, your wife, your mom, your granny, the babe down the hall, the little girl in first grade—every female on the planet suddenly struck with The Disease, a viral mutilation of the chromosomes that will render every human female a ranting, raving, cannibalistic zombie bitch from hell.” So goes, natch, ZOMBIE BITCHES FROM HELL! by Zoot Campbell (out now from Grand Mal Press), a first-person journal-entry-styled confessional told through the eyes of news anchor Kent Zimmer. The reporter bears witness to zombie pregnancy, drag queens with machine guns and evil nuns, amidst other gender-specific insanities. Whether the sentiments of Campbell’s latest can be read as feminist or misogynist, we’ll leave to the reader.

Hmm… is Campbell aware that all men carry an X chromosome too? There are female-specific genetic diseases, as I recall but the idea that a virus that attacks the X chromosome (most viruses don’t care much about where they attach to your DNA anyway) would skip over the male population is odd, to say the least.

This story reads a little at first glance like an inversion of The Taint, a movie about a ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ like scenario where contagious misogyny causes men to go insane and become hyper-violent (along with… other physical symptoms too bizarre to describe here). The Taint in turn can also be seen as a wacky version of The Screwfly Solution. Man, horror is an intellectually incestuous genre.

Then there’s another Choose Your Own Adventure style Anti-Zombie book:

Set for a February debut is Max Brallier’s CAN YOU SURVIVE THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE? (Gallery Books). Rather than subject us to zombie (or lifted plot) terror with no agency or control, Brallier’s novel reads much like an interactive role-playing game, filled with moral dilemmas, strategies and alternatives from which to choose and navigate as the reader is left to deal with the impending flesheater invasion of New York. What could have been the same old song and dance here aims to be a refreshing revisiting of the tropes—a meticulously laid-out scheme with multiple possibilities to explore. Now if a character in your story decides once again to go into that dark room alone, you have no one but yourself to blame.

The only even small glimmer is in an anthology series that seems to take a slightly more sympathetic view toward some of the Undead, though it’s not clear how Zombies fare:

Sam Stone seeks also to rock Manhattan with his anthology ZOMBIES IN NEW YORK AND OTHER BLOODY JOTTINGS (Telos Publishing) next month. Jack the Ripper under investigation by a vampire, the unexplained sapping of energy of the typically hearty Moulin Rouge and other episodic installments comprise Stone’s decidedly poetic angle on the material, which has turned some heads interested in making this one a full-length feature.

Well, the ZRC will keep an eye out for these and other books dealing with Zombies in the months ahead. Though honestly? Don’t expect to see a lot of reviews of the Zombies+Public Domain genre. I think that idea is played out, even for the rigidly trend-worshipping world of Anti-Zombie fiction.

Tags: Books

This entry was posted by John Sears on Wednesday, February 9th, 2011 at 11:11 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.