Why Zombies?

[_ocelott_]

So... why zombies? Those critters are all over the place, and there are many different variations on them, but they're common enough even a small child can recognize one. Even before they became "solidified" into the standard zombie we think of, nearly every culture had something zombie-like in their mythologies, something that crawled back from

Comments

[juushika]

I'm obligated now to point you towards rozk's Zombie 1.

If more zombie stories were that—the personal experience, the dehumanization, of a life without life, Armstrong's response and rozk's fantastic poem—I might still be drawn to them. But that's the minority these days; instead zombies are mostly about the mindless and threatening Other, and the exceptions to the rule tend to be pretty shitty. I don't have a lot of interest in non-experience—for example, I couldn't care less about character death; what interests me more is the impact of loss and grief on survivors, because I feel that the actual story exists with those there to experience and tell it. So most zombies themselves don't interest me—they're a non-entity, a lack of story. A zombie setting can have an interesting impact on survivors, but that's been played to death—fast zombies, slow zombies, rage zombies, zombie apocalypse, there's a lot of material but it's pretty well overdone by now, and I'm bored of it. Zombie POV stories like Warm Bodies have potential for creating an

[marycatelli]

the irony is the actual Caribbean zombie wasn't dangerous -- the nightmare of it was that you couldn't escape slavery even by dying