We’ve had our issues with, well, most of the mainstream press here at the ZRC. That’s why I’ve got searchable tags for Journamalism *and* Mainstream Media, after all.

Still, the New York Times seems to want to make a name for itself with narrow-minded Anti-Zombie vision, and this latest take on recent Zombie literature is a slightly-more-informed-than-average variation on the Zombie bashing theme:

The Romero-type zombie, very much the dominant form these days, multiplies by contagion, like a virus: it feeds on flesh, and its bite is lethal, so even those semi-fortunate humans who aren’t wholly devoured, but merely gnawed upon, die and come back as shuffling, hollow-eyed flesh-eaters themselves.

It was not always thus. Time was, the mere idea that a corpse could come back to life and walk the earth (however slowly) seemed sufficiently creepy. The monster in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” did have some anger-management issues, but until “Night of the Living Dead” most resurrected cadavers had been pretty placid. The title creature of Jacques Tourneur’s weirdly lyrical 1943 movie, “I Walked With a Zombie,” doesn’t eat flesh and is entirely unthreatening to the living beings around her; all that’s horrifying is the unnatural, unassimilable fact of her existence. That’s not enough anymore: nature isn’t what it used to be, after all. And to be repelled by a woman just because she has returned from the dead could be considered a tad judgmental.

Actually, we think that being repelled by someone just because they’re a Zombie is more than a TAD judgmental, here at The Zombie Rights Campaign. We call that behavior out for what it is: prejudice. Bigotry.

Moving on the author raises some valid points about the ‘Survivor’ mentality that permeates modern Anti-Zombie fiction, but fails to note the relatively rare, but still vital, cracks in the edifice of the Living Supremacist literature canon:

In fiction, however, these alarming entities have fewer obvious attractions because, unlike vampires, werewolves, demons, witches, goblins and shape-shifters, zombies can’t plausibly be endowed with rich, complex inner lives. They don’t even have personalities.

…

All these literary products are, in varying degrees, worth reading, or at least dipping into on one of those days when you’re not feeling unambiguously alive yourself. But taken as a whole the recent onslaught of zombie fiction is wearying. There’s a certain monotony built into the genre: in too many of these tales, the flesh-chompers advance, are repelled, advance again and are repelled again, more or less ad infinitum.

Modern-day zombie stories often read like plague narratives, in which a panicky populace struggles to deal with a threat that’s overwhelming, unceasing and apparently uncontrollable.

Naturally this is an oversimplification; there are lots of other takes on Zombiism that take the form of the written word (or comic-books, which the review covers by mentioning The Walking Dead in passing)

Ironically, there are a number of great alternative takes on Zombie short fiction in one of the anthologies he mentions, ‘The Living Dead’, which I really need to formally review here on the blog. Some of them are wistful, some are sad, but many are very sympathetic to the Zombie and most strive not to be simple Romero rehashes.
The ZRC very much appreciated ‘The Dishonored Dead’ by Robert Swartwood, a story about a very different idea of Zombiedom indeed. ‘Breathers’ by S. G. Browne, while not a Zombie Friendly book, was one fairly high-profile recent novel to feature thinking, feeling Zombies; and we’ve heard very good things about ‘Brains: A Zombie Memoir’ by Robin Becker. ‘Monster Island’ and its sequels feature many Zombies as complicated characters, along with of course some regrettable retrograde ideas about the Differently Animated. They were bestsellers so it’s not like you can call them obscure, either.

And of course, it should go without saying that any review of Zombie literature that fails to even *mention* the Discworld novels and Sir Terry Pratchett’s sympathetic views on the Differently Animated is inherently flawed.

As for comics the Romero Zombie stereotype is the rarity there, rather than the norm. ‘Marvel Zombies’, ‘I, Zombie’, ‘Deadpool Merc with a Mouth’, ‘The Littlest Zombie’, the list goes on and on. Many of these stories are not Zombie Friendly, but very few are Romero-esque. Indeed, ‘The Walking Dead’ is in part noteworthy for how closely it hews to Romero, including the concept of universal infection that informs Romero movies but is absent in almost all the derivations others make of his work.

It’s also noteworthy for selling a bajillion copies. Blast you, Robert Kirkman!!

The NYT piece concludes by praising a Zombie Apocalypse novel that differs from the perceived norm because it features a sort of upbeat spiritualism as the anchor to its slaughter of Zombies.. and somehow this too is a radical change. Really? Well-adjusted slaughtering Survivors, that’s what you were looking for, Terrence Rafferty? Good to know.. I guess.

It’s just sad that the New York Times is willing to publish such a hateful sentiment.

Tags: Books, Social Justice

This entry was posted by John Sears on Sunday, August 7th, 2011 at 12:44 am 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.