Arise, ye more than dead
I'm a working stiff.
--Terry Pratchett on the zombie labor movement, Worldcon 2004
I like zombie stories. When I say that, though, people tend to assume I mean Night of the Living Dead and all the zombie apocalypse genre. I do like Shaun of the Dead, don't get me wrong, and I'm as fond of survival horror as the next fan. There's been a lot of it lately--I was into The Walking Dead (comics-verse) for a while, before I realized nothing was going to improve for the characters, basically, ever. Now there's the TV show, and what with that and World War Z (which I also loved) and various similar films and books, the zombie apocalypse has gone mainstream. But that's not what I like most about zombies.
I love stories with zombie protagonists. They're rare, in fiction, film, or other media, but when I find them and they're well-presented, they make me very happy. There are oodles of vampire protagonists out there. Make all the Twilight jokes you want, but Anne Rice really opened the door on vamp antiheroes. Frankly, I've read too many friggin' vampires over the years. I've no grudge against other people liking them, but vampires are usually The Beautiful People, and it's hard for me to identify with that. As Famous Monsters of Filmland go, I identify much more strongly with werewolf characters. These are fortunately fairly common these days, but I've still to read a satisfying novel with a werewolf protagonist.
Zombies are the neglected stepchild of the Sympathetic Monster family. They're usually used as expendable mooks with no personality or free will, as in most zombie apocalypses. (Apocalypoi?) I can see why they don't have vampire-appeal, mind you. Even if you get past the zombie-hordes type of story and find undead people with some individuality, the things that make them monstrous are deathly pallor and some degree of rot or disfigurement. When they're up against vampire archetypes (monstrous because they have fangs and bite your neck in a tidy, Apollonian manner) and even werewolf archetypes (predatory/physical/healing factor/howling at the moon), zombies are hopelessly outclassed.
That's part of why I love them. The rest is... clear to me, but harder to explain to anyone else. I've been fascinated by some aspects of death since I was a child: Egyptian mummies, bog bodies, skeletons (when clean), old local gravestones with skulls at the top where you might expect a cherub. That's just a side effect, though, not the root cause. What else? Between the ages of about sixteen and eighteen I wrote a book called Miss Bailey where the protagonist is an immortal zombie, gone AWOL from an experiment in vile magical arts in 1904 and presently living quietly in upstate Maine until hijinks ensue. It was immensely long and wordy, but it did have some good concepts which I may reuse. Miss Renata Bailey herself was a cold, cynical narrator, I recall, self-centered and depressive, and acid with her friends (who were also immortal demi-humans, and loved her nonetheless). If you want to get pop-psych about it, she was everything that people thought I wasn't. For sure, she was an escapist character.
It wasn't just that one writing project, though. Before I wrote it, and well after I finished it, I had an ongoing series of waking dreams and those odd near-visions you get on the edge of sleep. In some of them, I was undead; I had been killed and then reanimated, though I didn't look human enough anymore to fool people. It was terrifying and yet empowering. The worst thing in the world had happened to me, I had passed through death, and yet here I was, still conscious, and now all bets were off and I could do whatever I thought best. For example, I could take gruesome revenges on those who had killed me, or ignore them, or watch everyone who had ever hurt me age and die while I remained unchanged. I'd never have to worry about looking attractive again, in any sense: no need to bother with love, no need to be afraid of being victimized because I was female. I would never have to take any crap from anyone ever again. If people got on my nerves, I would give them a creepy dead stare. If they really bothered me, I'd pull them to pieces and leave town (because in my fantasy world zombies have super-strength and are also unaccountably allowed by the government to roam at large). That's the power of revenant corpses.
In other daydreams, I had a zombie following me around through daily life. This wasn't menacing. Quite the reverse. It was like having a pet (or a minion, I suppose, though I never demanded anything of it). The zombie was a sad, dry creature, but it seemed to like me and I was the only human it trusted. I took care never to violate this trust by giving it orders or trying to pry into the sick magic that kept it revenant. I'd just let it lurch around after me, talk idly to it as you do to a favorite pet, and try to make it comfortable. You know: sew it back together when it lost body parts, give it new clothes (it was very much like having a doll) and seat it on the sofa with a book in its lap. Occasionally I'd try to elicit some personality from it by asking it questions, but I stopped when I got no reply. Either it couldn't talk, or it could talk but had lost its memory. (A third option which I just considered: maybe its memory was fine, but it had done or seen horrible things that it didn't want a teenaged girl to know about.) This zombie usually took the form of a small, lean older man, but in some iterations of this daydream it was a woman or a youngish man. It didn't have the direct application to the problems of daily life that the first daydream did, but it was nice having Imaginary Zombie around and I found it reassuring to think of myself as a kind caretaker of the undead.
All this may go some way towards explaining how zombie protagonists have become important to me, though I'm still having trouble expressing why. I'm going to assemble a comprehensive list of zombie protagonists soon. It's well past time.
--Terry Pratchett on the zombie labor movement, Worldcon 2004
I like zombie stories. When I say that, though, people tend to assume I mean Night of the Living Dead and all the zombie apocalypse genre. I do like Shaun of the Dead, don't get me wrong, and I'm as fond of survival horror as the next fan. There's been a lot of it lately--I was into The Walking Dead (comics-verse) for a while, before I realized nothing was going to improve for the characters, basically, ever. Now there's the TV show, and what with that and World War Z (which I also loved) and various similar films and books, the zombie apocalypse has gone mainstream. But that's not what I like most about zombies.
I love stories with zombie protagonists. They're rare, in fiction, film, or other media, but when I find them and they're well-presented, they make me very happy. There are oodles of vampire protagonists out there. Make all the Twilight jokes you want, but Anne Rice really opened the door on vamp antiheroes. Frankly, I've read too many friggin' vampires over the years. I've no grudge against other people liking them, but vampires are usually The Beautiful People, and it's hard for me to identify with that. As Famous Monsters of Filmland go, I identify much more strongly with werewolf characters. These are fortunately fairly common these days, but I've still to read a satisfying novel with a werewolf protagonist.
Zombies are the neglected stepchild of the Sympathetic Monster family. They're usually used as expendable mooks with no personality or free will, as in most zombie apocalypses. (Apocalypoi?) I can see why they don't have vampire-appeal, mind you. Even if you get past the zombie-hordes type of story and find undead people with some individuality, the things that make them monstrous are deathly pallor and some degree of rot or disfigurement. When they're up against vampire archetypes (monstrous because they have fangs and bite your neck in a tidy, Apollonian manner) and even werewolf archetypes (predatory/physical/healing factor/howling at the moon), zombies are hopelessly outclassed.
That's part of why I love them. The rest is... clear to me, but harder to explain to anyone else. I've been fascinated by some aspects of death since I was a child: Egyptian mummies, bog bodies, skeletons (when clean), old local gravestones with skulls at the top where you might expect a cherub. That's just a side effect, though, not the root cause. What else? Between the ages of about sixteen and eighteen I wrote a book called Miss Bailey where the protagonist is an immortal zombie, gone AWOL from an experiment in vile magical arts in 1904 and presently living quietly in upstate Maine until hijinks ensue. It was immensely long and wordy, but it did have some good concepts which I may reuse. Miss Renata Bailey herself was a cold, cynical narrator, I recall, self-centered and depressive, and acid with her friends (who were also immortal demi-humans, and loved her nonetheless). If you want to get pop-psych about it, she was everything that people thought I wasn't. For sure, she was an escapist character.
It wasn't just that one writing project, though. Before I wrote it, and well after I finished it, I had an ongoing series of waking dreams and those odd near-visions you get on the edge of sleep. In some of them, I was undead; I had been killed and then reanimated, though I didn't look human enough anymore to fool people. It was terrifying and yet empowering. The worst thing in the world had happened to me, I had passed through death, and yet here I was, still conscious, and now all bets were off and I could do whatever I thought best. For example, I could take gruesome revenges on those who had killed me, or ignore them, or watch everyone who had ever hurt me age and die while I remained unchanged. I'd never have to worry about looking attractive again, in any sense: no need to bother with love, no need to be afraid of being victimized because I was female. I would never have to take any crap from anyone ever again. If people got on my nerves, I would give them a creepy dead stare. If they really bothered me, I'd pull them to pieces and leave town (because in my fantasy world zombies have super-strength and are also unaccountably allowed by the government to roam at large). That's the power of revenant corpses.
In other daydreams, I had a zombie following me around through daily life. This wasn't menacing. Quite the reverse. It was like having a pet (or a minion, I suppose, though I never demanded anything of it). The zombie was a sad, dry creature, but it seemed to like me and I was the only human it trusted. I took care never to violate this trust by giving it orders or trying to pry into the sick magic that kept it revenant. I'd just let it lurch around after me, talk idly to it as you do to a favorite pet, and try to make it comfortable. You know: sew it back together when it lost body parts, give it new clothes (it was very much like having a doll) and seat it on the sofa with a book in its lap. Occasionally I'd try to elicit some personality from it by asking it questions, but I stopped when I got no reply. Either it couldn't talk, or it could talk but had lost its memory. (A third option which I just considered: maybe its memory was fine, but it had done or seen horrible things that it didn't want a teenaged girl to know about.) This zombie usually took the form of a small, lean older man, but in some iterations of this daydream it was a woman or a youngish man. It didn't have the direct application to the problems of daily life that the first daydream did, but it was nice having Imaginary Zombie around and I found it reassuring to think of myself as a kind caretaker of the undead.
All this may go some way towards explaining how zombie protagonists have become important to me, though I'm still having trouble expressing why. I'm going to assemble a comprehensive list of zombie protagonists soon. It's well past time.