The Written Dead: Essays on the Literary Zombie

226 Pages·2017·2.212 MB·English

by  Kyle William Bishop (editor), Angela Tenga (editor)

The Written Dead
CONTRIBUTIONSTOZOMBIESTUDIES
WhiteZombie:AnatomyofaHorrorFilm.GaryD.Rhodes.2001
The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia. Peter Dendle. 2001
American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise)
of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture. Kyle William Bishop. 2010
Back from the Dead: Remakes of the Romero
Zombie Films as Markers of Their Times. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. 2011
Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead
in Modern Culture. Edited by Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz. 2011
Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations
of the Caribbean Tradition. Edited by Christopher M. Moreman
and Cory James Rushton. 2011
Zombies Are Us: Essays on the Humanity of the Walking Dead.
Edited by Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton. 2011
The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, Volume 2: 2000–2010. Peter Dendle. 2012
Great Zombies in History. Edited by Joe Sergi. 2013 (graphic novel)
Unraveling Resident Evil: Essays on the Complex Universe
of the Games and Films. Edited by Nadine Farghaly. 2014
“We’re All Infected”: Essays on AMC’s The Walking Dead
and the Fate of the Human. Edited by Dawn Keetley. 2014
Zombies and Sexuality: Essays on Desire and the Living Dead.
Edited by Shaka McGlotten and Steve Jones. 2014
…But If a Zombie Apocalypse Did Occur: Essays on Medical,
Military, Governmental, Ethical, Economic and Other Implications.
Edited by Amy L. Thompson and Antonio S. Thompson. 2015
How Zombies Conquered Popular Culture: The Multifarious Walking
Dead in the 21st Century. Kyle William Bishop. 2015
Zombifying a Nation: Race, Gender and the Haitian Loas on Screen.
Toni Pressley-Sanon. 2016
Living with Zombies: Society in Apocalypse in Film, Literature
and Other Media. Chase Pielak and Alexander H. Cohen. 2017
The Written Dead: Essays on the Literary Zombie.
Edited by Kyle William Bishop and Angela Tenga. 2017
The Written Dead
Essays on the Literary Zombie
Edited by
K W B and
yLE iLLiAM iSHoP
A T
NGELA ENGA
Afterword by Robert G. Weiner
CONTRIBUTIONS TO ZOMBIE STUDIES
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina
ISBN (print) 978-1-4766-6564-1
ISBN (ebook) 978-1-4766-2968-1
LiBRARyoFCoNGRESSCATALoGuiNGDATAAREAvAiLABLE
BRiTiSHLiBRARyCATALoGuiNGDATAAREAvAiLABLE
© 2017 Kyle William Bishop and Angela Tenga. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Front cover image: Shannon Eberhard, Whistler’s Mother
as a Zombie with Book(ink/digital, 5" × 7") © 2017
Printed in the united States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
Table of Contents
Preface: A Note from the Editors 1
Introduction: The Rise of the Written Dead
ANGELA TENGA and KyLE WiLLiAM BiSHoP 2
Section One: Zombie Literature—
First Words, Baby Steps
Trailing the Zombie Through Modern and Contemporary
Anglophone Literature
KEviN ALExANDER BooN 15
The Attributes and Qualifiers of Literary Zombies
BERNARD PERRoN 27
Love, Connection and intimacy in Zombie Short Fiction
LAuRA HuBNER 40
Section Two: Max Brooks—
Rite of Passage
Analyzing Late Modernity with a Corpse: Max Brooks’
Zombie understanding of Modernity
MARCuS LEANiNG 55
Dispatches of the Dead: World War Z and the Post- vietnam
Combat Memoir
W. SCoTT PooLE 67
Section Three: The Zombie Novel—
Coming of Age
Carrie Ryan’s Romance of the Forest: Mudos, young Adult
Novels and the Gothic
CoRy JAMES RuSHToN 85
v
vi Table of Contents
Toward a Genealogy of the American Zombie Novel:
From Jack London to Colson Whitehead
WyLiE LENZ 98
“Systems Die Hard”: Resistance and Reanimation
in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One
KELLi SHERMEyER 120
Section Four: Revisionist Novels—
Entering Maturity
“Condemned to history by the Hate”: David J. Moody’s
Hater and Postmillennial Rage
DAWN KEETLEy 133
The Psychosomatic Zombie Man: The Postmodern Subject
in Warm Bodies
STEvEN HoLMES 145
Feeding the Frenzy: Mira Grant’s Feed
ARNoLD T. BLuMBERG 156
Teaching Zombies, Developing Students: Pedagogical
Success in The Girl with All the Gifts
KyLE WiLLiAM BiSHoP 167
Desiring Machines: Zombies, Automata and Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road
JESSE SToMMEL 183
Afterword: The Zombie Is Dead: Long Live the Zombie
ROBERT G. WEINER 194
Filmography 197
Bibliography 199
About the Contributors 210
Index 213
Preface
A Note from the Editors
Zombies have garnered considerable scholarly attention in recent years.
Kyle William Bishop’s American Zombie Gothic, Stephanie Boluk and Wylie
Lenz’s Generation Zombie, Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro’s Better
Off Dead, Dawn Keetley’s “We’re All Infected,” Chase Pielak and Alexander
H. Cohen’s Living with Zombies, and Wayne yuen’s The Walking Dead and
Philosophyare familiar titles to students of zombie culture. This volume not
only features contributions from a number of those who have written or
edited these volumes or otherwise contributed to this body of existing schol-
arship, but also represents the first scholarly effort to address the zombie as
a specifically literary phenomenon.
in doing so, the essays featured in this collection necessarily participate
in a process of selection and exclusion that might be considered a step toward
establishing a canon of sorts. As editors and scholars, we consider the primary
works addressed in this volume important in the realm of the written dead.
However, we are also conscious of the limitations of our efforts. Because of
practical and logistical considerations, some works have received less atten-
tion than we would have liked. We therefore wish to recognize, formally, that
while we are aware of our role in defining a nascent canon of zombie litera-
ture, we do not wish to draw attention only to the works that are covered
here. Rather, we hope that others will be inspired to study the literary zombie
both more closely and more widely and to engage in an ongoing dialogue
about the growing body of zombie literature.
We are grateful to the talented scholars who enthusiastically committed
themselves to this project. We hope that their insights promote greater
scrutiny of literary zombies and provide a resource for those who wish to
deepen their appreciation of the written dead.
1
introduction
The Rise of the Written Dead
ANGELA TENGA and KyLE WiLLiAM BiSHoP
For every filmgoer who has ever lamented, “it just wasn’t as good as the
book,” the zombie narrative has traditionally offered a refreshing anomaly.
Zombie films have rarely been the source of this sort of disappointment
because, for most of the history of the zombie, there has been no print pred-
ecessor to which a film could be compared. unlike many of the familiar mon-
sters of our popular culture—especially the ubiquitous vampire—the zombie
did not leap from folklore to page and then to stage and screen.1 instead, it
passed from folklore to stage and screen with minimal print coverage and,
for most of its existence as a popular narrative in Western culture, remained
largely a screen phenomenon.
until recently, that is.
Two of the most popular and highest- grossing zombie films in history,
Marc Forster’s World War Z(2013) andJonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies(2013),
are, in fact, adaptations of literary works, drawing upon source novels by
Max Brooks (2006) and isaac Marion (2010), respectively. Clearly, we now
find ourselves at an exciting point in the development of the zombie in pop-
ular culture. Zombies are increasingly the subject of all sorts of fictional treat-
ments—not merely movies, comic books, or video games—from short stories
to novels, and their gripping stories have been taken on by established writers
of genre fiction, critically acclaimed authors, and emerging talents. it has
taken an unusually long time, however, for the zombie to reach this point in
its evolution, and this kind of “reverse adaptation” of the subgenre makes
studying this literary phenomenon important. What took the zombie so long
to infect literary fiction in the same way that it has come to dominate horror
cinema? Why are we now seeing such a proliferation of zombie- themed short
stories, novels, and even poetry?
2
The Rise of the Written Dead (Tenga & Bishop) 3
The Origins of Zombie Literature
The matter of where and how zombie literary fiction began is open to
debate. Certainly precedents exist around the world—from the oft- cited ref-
erence to the goddess ishtar’s threat to raise the dead from their graves to eat
the living in the Epic of Gilgamesh, to Mary Shelley’s flesh golem Frankenstein,
to even the Christian New Testament’s account of the raised Lazarus—but
our study focuses primarily on the evolution of the literary zombie as a dis-
tinct phenomenon and especially on works that apply this specific label to
the reanimated dead or the contagiously infected. While accounts of the
raised dead, reanimated corpses, the resurrected, or the merely hypnotically
mesmerized can be found throughout the history of oral and written fiction,
the zombie as a bloodthirsty, mindless, and contagious threat—in the spirit
of the cinematic tradition of George A. Romero or Danny Boyle—has only
recently manifested in popular short stories and novels, such as Neil Gaiman’s
“Bitter Grounds” (2003), Sherman Alexie’s “Ghost Dance” (2003), Stephen
King’s Cell(2006), Colson Whitehead’s critically acclaimed Zone One(2011),
and M.R. Carey’s revisionist The Girl with All the Gifts(2014).
Nonetheless, we would be remiss if we overlooked certain works that
contributed to the popularization of the figure of the reanimated corpse as
monster. Certainly Shelley’s Frankenstein, the tale of a lonely monster pieced
together from dead body parts, brought to life, and abandoned by his maker,
provides an important backdrop for the evolution of zombie fiction. in par-
ticular, it evokes the theme of irresponsible science—what Noël Carroll calls
the “overreacher plot”2—a thread that is woven into the fabric of later zombie
fiction. We can look, for example, to H.P. Lovecraft’s tales of “Herbert West—
Reanimator,” published in serialized form in Home Brewin 1922. in Lovecraft’s
Frankensteinparody, in which a mad scientist develops a serum that can be
injected into human cadavers to reanimate them, readers will easily recognize
the influence of Shelley, yet they may also glimpse the approach of the more
popular figure of the zombie.
Millennial zombie works continue to adapt and reshape this tradition
in response to cultural forces. For example, in Brian Keene’s The Rising (2003),
villainous science plays its traditional role: particle physicists (whose real-
life counterparts at CERN faced a lawsuit when the Large Hadron Collider
was about to begin operations in 2008) are conducting secret experiments
that bring about a zombie plague when an accelerator accident leads to
demonic possession of the dead, who return to hunt and feed on the living.
While Keene’s zombies are reanimated through supernatural agency, the
activities of the scientific community provide the interdimensional gateway
that allows the demons to reanimate and control dead bodies. Keene’s work
is exceptional in that its zombies behave more like victor Frankenstein’s