Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Why Are Zombie Stories Always Disasters?



Yesterday I finished John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Handling the Undead, and I wanted to call it the most creative zombie story since Max Brooks’s World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. Except Handling the Undead was published the year before Brooks’s novel, and I simply took a while finding it. They’re opposed books, because World War Z is the best at what zombies always are, those rotting hordes of the apocalypse. Handling the Undead makes you question why they’re always that.

At this point, Zombie might as well be a genre. It’s apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic, usually gory, stories of survival and moral ambiguity. Humans turn out to be the ultimate evil more regularly than in The Twilight Zone. Every year people proclaim zombies must be done, but The Walking Dead only gets bigger ratings, and more videogames and indie authors produce the rotting hordes. I haven’t fatigued of the zombie, which is the unusual promise that the world we live in will be transformed into a fantasy playground. But I do wonder about it becoming so conventional.

Early on, Handling the Undead de-fangs the zombie apocalypse by showing the police and military immediately rolling in against dangerous ones, while are others are so weak (they’ve been decomposing, for God’s sake) that their families can overtake and even keep them. It’s so matter-of-fact, both from the accounts of survivors and the newspaper-like chapters that fill us in on the world’s reactions, that it wholly disarms the fantasy of the undead toppling everything.

What they topple is the catharsis of death. A mother grieving over a dead son now has something even more inexplicable in her house. She doesn’t know if he’ll recover, if he remembers her, if she can feed or help him. She yearns to, and we read with hands over our mouths, hoping he won’t bite her the next time she leans in.

It’s not a story of headshots and desperate amputations. It made me wonder about Warm Bodies, which I couldn’t stand, but also didn’t give a chance to. YA Romance is so far from my wheelhouse that I didn’t consider it as a property changing the zombie and the story of zombieism. Handling the Undead got more leeway, both because its author wrote Let the Right One In, and because it was about the pathos of the sting of death being removed, which was more novel. Even Shaun of the Dead is really the same old zombie story, but with very funny handling. Part of its appeal is it talked about zombies the way our generation had been doing for years. It wasn’t this disruptive.

Eventually the zombie apocalypse gets so familiar that this happens.
Handling the Undead breaks some explicit and some unspoken rules about zombies. That’s what we all do now, right? You want them to run, you want the bite to be an instant change, etc. For Lindqvist, the undead don’t immediately go after flesh, and he plays on your expectation of this brilliantly, as you’re fearing for mourners who get too close. They seemingly respond to the emotional states of those around them (this is going to start the flesh-eating, isn’t it?).

More pregnant are the unspoken rules it breaks, for instance: zombies no longer spawn like hordes of videogame enemies whenever convenient. I love The Walking Dead comic, but both the comic and show get silly with the number of zombies that show up miles from any source of food or civilization, like they’re smelling the plot. You need that unspoken rule if you’re going to tell an action story. Handling the Undead, though, is about the emotional effects on loved ones of the recently returned.

It’s when you tamper with those “rules” that are actually contrived conventions that audiences can wonder why all those other stories act alike. There’s drama in a mass of zombies banging on the hero’s door when he’s only got two bullets left, but there’s a rarer drama in a devastated grandfather researching what medical equipment might keep his returned grandson alive, and the knowledge that if he can sustain the boy, he’ll have to flee the city to keep him safe from the government.

The disruption underlies what excites me most in all Speculative Fiction. We’ve seen so many cynical zombie stories that we know where most of it will go, that the old world will die and any non-protagonists will probably form negative groups, like cults and corrupt military pockets. But when you take a creature that is typically the engine of global disaster, and instead apply it to the internal life of specific people who don’t even get the reprieve of oppressive social orders disappearing, it can become something else. The humanity of it is unyielding, ironically, because it can’t die anymore.

16 comments:

  1. I found this interesting being a walking dead freak.......to be precise I love the tv series and not the comic novels which I find irritating.
    I have never read a zombie novel ( a seriously written one) and now aim to do so

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    1. I couldn't recommend you two stronger starting points than World War Z and Handling the Undead. It really depends what flavor of narrative you're in the mood for.

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  2. I didn't make it past the 10 minute mark on "Warm Bodies" so if you watched the whole thing, you have more patience than I do. However, you bring up interesting point.Personally,I think the zombies are on the rise because, for many, the standard of living is going down, it's harder to pay bills, get medical, etc. When you watch a zompocalypse movie, you can think "well, at least things aren't THAT bad!"

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    1. I was in your camp, Gany. I did not watch much of the film despite romantic duress from someone nearby.

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    2. Too bad -- I thought the references to Romeo and Juliet were subversive and hilarious. It's kind of revenge for that Baz Luhrman nonsense, and the way it twists the double suicide ending really worked for me.

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  3. Considering the author, I might have to check that one out.
    I don't read young adult, but my wife insisted on watching the movie version of Warm Bodies. It was actually good.
    Plants versus Zombies. Awesome game!

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  4. Oh my. Not a genre I usually read - but you have tempted my weak-willed self. Both sound like books with integrity.

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    1. I certainly recommend it, with your more literary sensibilities. It's got the ache of traditional drama and a very different sense of Horror.

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  5. I get why you couldn't stomach Warm Bodies, but what I liked about it was: 1) That there are things worse than the zombies (that they are even scared of); 2) The answer to why they eat brains; 3) That they can come back. I know love and teenagers are the death of your soul, but there was some good stuff in that movie as far as zombie-twists go. It humanized them. Which is what this book does in a very different way. I always say I'm not a zombie fan, but I liked Warm Bodies and WWZ and Shaun of the Dead, so maybe I am. If I had to break down and read a book about it, this sounds like a great place to start.

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    1. It could be that you only enjoy novel takes on zombies, Danni. Did you enjoy the WWZ movie or novel? I forget if we discussed them ever. This year has not been kind to my memory.

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  6. If you don't want the romance in Warm Bodies, then read the book instead. The movie definitely focuses more on the love story while the book fleshes the world out and you get more than a love story.

    Handling the Undead sounds interesting. Although I swear that is the hundredth zombie book I've seen that uses that cover. Can we retire that particular image?

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    1. The American cover (which I used) is generic. I don't know if it attracts anyone to the Horror section, or catches attention in the Horror section. I guess the splayed eyelid grabs more attention when you glimpse it on the bus?

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  7. I'm not a Walking Dead or zombie fan, but you definitely made your case for Handling the Undead. I thought Warm Bodies was a clever idea, poorly executed in some respects but still entertaining. But then, I went to see it knowing that it was "fluff".

    As an interesting side note, I watched the local 5th grade at recess as they substituted "zombie tag" for "freeze tag". They were having a ball. :)

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    1. I like the idea of zombie tag! Much nicer than the zombie 10Ks I've seen people run, with cosplayers pursuing them the whole time for the sake of motivation.

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  8. A very thoughtful book review. I loved World War Z, the book, but the movie twisted the best parts of the book into a Brad-Pitt-vaccine-fest. I have not heard of Handling the Undead, but I like the idea of it delving into the human side of it all. Walking Dead (which I love) dealt a bit with folks trying to keep zombie family members around, but yeah, those plot smelling zombies chasing them keep the action going. Zombie really has become a genre of it's own. I am hoping to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies soon :)

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  9. I have never read a zombie novel but I am intrigued!!!

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