Fresh thoughts about zombies

Hi, folks! Sorry for so many months of silence. Ben and I both really went through the wringer this year, in various ways. For me it was mostly a reminder that no matter how glamorous an obscure auto-immune disorder might seem :), it's a nasty rotten drag when you're stuck having to deal with sustained exposure to things that trigger bad reactions. I think or at least hope I'm past that bout and getting back to work.

A note about links: whenever I link to an RPG title, it's very likely a link to that game's presence at DriveThruRPG or whatever online store front they may use. I hope you go check some of these things out, even if it's just to look at their free previews. There are a whole lot of people doing really neat things in the RPG world, and my feeling is that everyone benefits from good work getting rewarded.

Today I want to talk about zombies.

Talk to hard-core horror fans, and quite a few horror creators, and you're very likely to hear the thought that zombies are played out, creatively—that is, that there's only so much you can do with them before they turn into something else, and any new attempt is going to end up revisiting concepts, characters, and plots done so often they've already turned into cliches. In fact, you could have talked to me last year and heard just that thought. One of the first things we agreed on about topics for Something Wicked was that we didn't need to do a lot with zombies.

Now, part of that last bit is because in gaming, there's the really excellent All Flesh Must Be Eaten line, and a host of other games covering the walking dead from all sorts of angles, from the marvelously mood steampunk-ish dystopia of Unhallowed Metropolis to the tight modern character drama (and fascinating art design) of Outbreak: Undead. This is a thing that happens in gaming, fairly regularly: a topic catches on as a thing for people to publish games about, and a whole lot do. It's a field full of super-crowded little niches with a lot of empty space in between. So the sense of over-crowding has struck me as worse in gaming in particular than in the surrounding media environment, and it struck me as bad enough in comics, computer gaming, and such.

However, I've changed my mind. I don't know how much I'll end up wanting to say bout zombies in Something Wicked, but I see that there's a lot I could say, for several reasons.

#1. People do in fact keep finding interesting new things to do with zombies. It turns out that steampunk + walking dead opens up interesting angles. Cherie Priest's Clockwork Century series, starting with Boneshaker, is very much unlike Unhallowed Metropolis, even though the place to start with each probably is "it's a steampunk setting with the walking dead prominent". Priest lays out an alternate 19th century, while Soles, Vega, Berman, and Gauger (and their artists) built up a horrific future, with very different aesthetics and focus. Then there's Mira Grant's excellent Newsflesh series, set two decades after the zombie outbreak, dealing with politics and media culture in a society stuck in permanent stress. There's Pontypool, movie and freely available radio play, with a semiotic catastrophe that reminded me of something by William Burroughs, Umberto Eco, or J.G. Ballard. And the list goes on and on.

It felt to me like there was a bottleneck building up around, primarily, 28 Days Later-style not-living-dead zombies and World War Z-style semi-scientifically-rationalized zombies. Both are good riffs, but not exclusive, and after a while, a whole lot of stories with the same kind of setup end up feeling very much like each other. But I looked around some at work like in the above paragraph, and saw that some people are busily pushing through the bottleneck and others simply taking other roots altogether.

#2. This last week I re-read The Book of the Dead, the 1989 anthology edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector. One of the standard things to happen to a genre is that it begins with a lot of casting around in many directions, then narrows as particular channels or branches capture attention and energy. The spread of tone in The Book of the Dead is really pretty broad, and half or so of the authors are doing something suggested by George Romero's movies rather than in any sense trying to work with that particular zombie mythos. It's not a shared world or anything like that. There are works here that didn't get picked up and imitated much, that I find myself liking as much as I did whenever it was I last re-read this book.

I am not nearly crazy enough to think seriously any thought like, "Yeah! HeroQuest could totally be a good framework for advice about how to run and play games that work like 'A Sad Last Love at the Diner of the Damned' and 'On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks'! Time to fire up the ol' word processor and get to work!" No. Not hardly. But there's a vibrant intensity in stories like those (and "Like Pavlov's Dogs" and some of the others) that makes me want to vibrate with some intensity of my own—pass the infection along, so to speak. And there's a related concern....

#3. I keep recommending Stephen King's Danse Macabre, even though it's well out of date in terms of coverage, because his insights into how different kinds of horror work remain immensely valuable, and put in really friendly ways. I keep quoting the comment he works into an analysis of Peter Straub's amazing Ghost Story: "Straub succeeds winningly at this, and the novel's machinery runs well (although it is extremely loud machinery; as already pointed out, that is also one of the great attractions of the gothic— it's PRETTY GODDAM LOUD!)." Today, though, I want to touch on two other bits from that fine book.

In discussing The Amityville Horror, King suggests a category of economic horror, where there's a big emphasis on the loss and stress associated with trying to own and manage things that are getting out of your control. He describes seeing the movie in a theater and hearing someone else moan sympathetically about the terrible costs of all the repairs. That doesn't begin to make the story good, or at all honest in its presentation, but as he often emphasizes, moments of unintended insight can turn up just about anywhere, and sometimes what the creators take for granted and put in without any thought at all can be very illuminating.

He takes up a related thought in analyzing Jack Finney's novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the movie adaptations of it. As the aliens replace more and more of the people of Santa Mira, there are fewer and fewer to care about the places they live. Whatever it is the aliens are interested in, it's not anything that the narrator can recognize in terms of simple quality of life. Trash accumulates. Broken windows go unfixed. Gardens and yards die of neglect. Everything gets run down. One of Finney's recurring themes is how precious and worthwhile the routine of life is, when we put the effort into it. It's easy to lose, and much harder to get back, if it ever can be had again at all.

I've had occasion to quote Clive Barker's comment, cited in the introduction to The Book of the Dead (see? "Nothing is tangential", as a professor of mine liked to say when returning from a digression to her main points): "Zombies are the liberal nightmare. Here you have the masses, whom you would love to love, appearing at your front door with their faces falling off; and you’re trying to be as humane as you possibly can, but they are, after all, eating the cat. And the fear of mass activity, of mindlessness on a national scale, underlies my fear of zombies."

This next part is going to get a touch political. I'm not looking for an argument about it—this is not "I try to convince you of the rightness of my claims", it's "I share with you thoughts I've been thinking".

I don't write with much deliberate symbolism, and less so in gaming. There are people who can make it work, but I'm not one of them. I think of what I focus on as something probably better called evocation, and in particular on solid tangible things in the setting as evocations of a particular mood or state of mind. It's the flip side of extrapolation. Take vampires. I've never been undead, fortunately. I can sit down and work out thoughts about what necessarily follows from a particular set of premises for vampires, and what can plausibly follow without that sense of inevitability. But I can also work from the other end, and have. I do know what it's like to feel cut off from the world, to have an altogether unwanted dependency, to feel stagnant in the midst of change, and more, and all of those feelings can be purified and amplified in the experience of vampires.

So what about zombies?

This has been a generation of losing ground, for most of the people in the industrialized world. Wages have stagnated or fallen, while costs of essentials have not. Conditions of work and life outside work have gotten worse in lots of ways, far from completely offset by neat new stuff. And of course in recent years, the gradual decline became a precipice. (And no, this isn't just a matter of anecdote; Calculated Risk has some of those really stark and startling visualizations of a bunch of data on the subject. The third graph in particular is a pointer toward awful realities.)

In recent years we've had news and images that seem almost unbelievable to someone who grew up in the tail end of the post-World War II consensus, like prosperous cities turning off street lights rather than discuss any tax increases. Prominent social and political leaders talk about the virtues of suffering and straitened conditions—for people other than themselves, of course—and aren't laughed or shouted out of polite society, while the need for ever-escalating prosperity at the top is taken as a given, a fact of nature that must not be contested or interfered with. It's the kind of decline that alarmed and saddened Jack Finney, but covering whole continents rather than an isolated small town.

Zombies are, among other things, the concrete manifestation of life in the midst of social and personal depression, I'm thinking. They embody the extreme end point of being cut off from everything you need for a good life, and the awareness of being able to get any of what you need only at someone else's expense, because the means of self-sufficiency have been taken from you. They are dangerous and monstrous, but they were made that way—not even seduced or deceived into it, but forced into it by something acting on them as they died and after. If there's sin in their existence, it's someone else's, whatever the specific cause may be.

Zombies are also, in their current form(s), altogether a wholesale peril rather than a retail one. (Side note: part of what makes the trilogy of vampire novels written by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan distinctive in their feel is that they've brought a lot of stuff from zombie riffs and applied them to vampires. The wildfire epidemiology is something far more often brought up as a potential peril than used as an actual reality within the story.) Older stories of voodoo and such feature single people turned into zombies by the focused effort of single schemers or small covens of evil-doers, but at least since Night of the Living Dead, zombies have been big groups, on up to entire populations with only handfuls of surviving exceptions.

That fits together nicely with that evocation. A whole society goes bad, and a whole society suffers further for it.

I don't know, right this moment, how much of any of the above, or anything else, I may wish to write up for inclusion in Something Wicked. But it's clear to me that there's much more I could say, enjoy saying, and feel altogether worthy of offering to the public about zombies than I thought last year.