I recently read a zombie novel. That’s not entirely true. I recently finished a zombie novel that I had been reading since last autumn. Maybe late summer.
Monster books have always been among my guilty pleasures. The monstrous captures the imagination like no other topic, filling me with boyish thrills, frissons of possibilities unimagined. I read vampire novels (drawing the line at Twilight) and werewolf books, when they can be found, are even better.
Zombies, however, just don’t seem to work for me.
It’s not that I have anything against zombies. My first piece of published fiction was a zombie story. The problem isn’t the topic, but the suspension of reality. Zombies are believable enough. In my story the zombie identity isn’t revealed until the end. There’s a reason for that.
In a novel, where the story stretches on over many, many pages, your rational mind creeps in and thinks, this is impossible. How can a creature with its insides chewed out, still “live” to try to eat the living? It’s hard enough for me to get around sometimes and I’ve got organs, ligaments and muscles all intact.
This difficult especially plagues those who write descriptive scenes of zombies. As soon as lungs, or stomach and intestines are listed as missing, the creature drops dead in my mind. No way it’s getting up and chasing after anybody.
The vampire may be undead, but he or she is intact. They’ve got all their parts. Even transforming into other animals is acceptable on a mythological level. Zombies are too parsimonious for that. They’re just dead.
Funny zombie novels are fine. We can laugh at anything. It’s when a writer tries to take zombies seriously, describing their decomposition, that my brain simply shuts down. I love zombie movies. There, the sight before your eyes can be accepted. Reality’s not a problem.
Maybe that’s one reason it is so hard to be a good writer. It’s not just a matter of skill, but also of topic. Given my record, however, I may very well be one of the zombies I excoriate.
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