Zombies: The Recent Dead Read online

  ZOMBIES:

  THE RECENT DEAD

  Edited by

  Paula Guran

  For Linda and Laura—

  who have kept me from becoming

  one of the living dead myself lately,

  and who I trust will know when

  to hit me in the head with a baseball bat.

  Copyright © 2010 by Paula Guran.

  Cover art by Szabo Balaz.

  Cover design by Stephen H. Segal.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-262-7 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-234-4 (trade paperback)

  All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors,and used here with their permission.

  PRIME BOOKS

  www.prime-books.com

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For more information, contact Prime Books.

  Table of Contents

  Preshamble, Paula Guran

  Introduction: The Meat of the Matter, David J. Schow

  Deaditorial Note, Paula Guran

  Twisted, Kevin Veale

  The Things He Said, Michael Marshall Smith

  Naming of Parts, Tim Lebbon

  Dating Secrets of the Dead, David Prill

  Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed, Steve Duffy

  The Great Wall: A Story from the Zombie War, Max Brooks

  First Kisses from Beyond the Grave, Nik Houser

  Zora and the Zombie, Andy Duncan

  Obsequy, David J. Schow

  Deadman’s Road, Joe R. Lansdale

  Bitter Grounds, Neil Gaiman

  Beautiful White Bodies, Alice Sola Kim

  Glorietta, Gary A. Braunbeck

  Farewell, My Zombie, Francesca Lia Block

  Trinkets, Tobias S. Buckell

  Dead Man’s Land, David Wellington

  Disarmed and Dangerous, Tim Waggoner

  The Zombie Prince, Kit Reed

  Selected Scenes from the End of the World, Brian Keene

  The Hortlak, Kelly Link

  Dead to the World, Gary McMahon

  The Last Supper, Scott Edelman

  Publication History

  About the Editor

  Preshamble

  I’ve never thought of them as zombies; I never called them zombies. When I made Night of the Living Dead, I called them flesh-eaters. To me, zombies were those boys in the Caribbean doing Bela Lugosi’s wet work for him [in White Zombie (1932)]. I never thought of them as zombies. It was only when people started to write about them and said these are zombies that I thought maybe they are. All I did was make them the neighbors; take the voodoo and mysterioso out of it and make them the neighbors, and I don’t know what happened after that. The neighbors are scary enough when they’re not dead. Maybe that’s what made it click.

  —George Romero

  As David J. Schow correctly points out in the following introduction, the modern zombie archetype is derived from cinematic rather than literary roots.1 But we’d be remiss if we did not note the other zombie mythos—and the roots of an earlier round of zombie popularity.

  Haitian Voudou is not an easily explained belief system. For our purposes we will only mention that the idea of the “voodoo zombie” arises from a mixture of African folklore—the dodo of Ghana, for example, shambles, hides in trees, and eats unwary travelers—and the Afro-Caribbean religion of Voudou. Essentially the “traditional” zombie is a dead or living person stripped of their own will and/or soul who is under the control of a sorcerer.

  American and European understanding of Haitian Voudou is steeped in racism, racial and cultural stereotyping, and a complex socio-political history. For our purposes, let us state only a few overly simplistic facts:

  A slave rebellion beginning in 1791 ended with the establishment of an independent Haiti in 1804, a black republic composed of former slaves.

  This successful rebellion by black slaves inspired American slaves, but it terrified white slave-owning Americans. As black, white, and multi-racial Haitian refugees arrived in American port cities, slave owners fears of a black revolution spreading to the to the United States were further exacerbated.

  After the American Civil War Haiti was still generally held in disdain by the U.S. In the nineteenth century, fiction (and “nonfiction” that was just as imaginative) concerning “voodoo” gained popularity. (Zombies—albeit not by that name—appeared in some of it. An 1882 novel, for example, by “Captain” Mayne Reid, The Maroon: A Tale of Voodoo and Obeah, features a voodoo practitioner who resurrects himself from the dead.)

  Fear that Germany might establish a military base in Haiti—dangerous close to the Panama Canal—and imperialist motivations led to the United States’ occupation and rule of Haiti by means of a military government between 1915 and 1934.

  Although the occupation had some positive aspects (such as infrastructure improvement), Haiti was still ruled by white foreigners with profound racial prejudices and contempt for its inhabitants.

  Both fiction and nonfiction fed on and imbued the predominant racism and ethnocentricity concerning “voodoo” and its supposed sorcery and black magic.

  The American public, which had already developed an appetite for entertainment based on such fallacies and prejudices, was further misinformed by a hugely popular book: The Magic Island, a 1929 “travelogue” on Haiti by William Seabrook.

  Seabrook—in dramatic style—reinforced current and earlier American and European thought about “voodoo” while introducing new innuendo and “facts” about zombiism. “ . . . Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields,” a twelve-page chapter in The Magic Island featured the first widely read English language account of Haiti’s “walking dead” that referred to them specifically as “zombies”:

  It seemed . . . that while the zombie came from the grave, it was neither a ghost, nor yet a person who had been raised like Lazarus from the dead. The zombie, they say, is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life—it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive. [Seabrook, W.B. The Magic Island. New York: Harcourt, 1929.]

  Kenneth Webb, inspired by Seabrook, wrote a dud of a Broadway play, Zombie. Opening on February 10, 1932 at the Biltmore Theatre in New York City, it lasted only twenty-one performances.

  Now-forgotten fiction written for Weird Tales and other pulp magazines by writers like Hugh Cave, Seabury Quinn, Robert E. Howard, Jane Rice, Henry S. Whitehead, and others was at least partly inspired by Seabrook’s book. But such stories were relatively rare, of no great literary merit, and made little impact on popular culture as a whole.

  The first feature-length zombie movie, White Zombie (1932), and later films provided a far more lasting cultural influence.

  Ultimately much of what Western culture thinks it understands about Voudou is still based on Seabrooks’ depiction, films like White Zombie and I Walked With a Zombie (1943), and consequent pop-culture fantasies.

  Voudou/voodoo also played a role in more recent Haitian politics during the oppressive regimes of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier (1957-1971) and his son Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier (1971-1986). Papa Doc exploited Haitian belief in Voudou, reputedly practiced sorcery, and even claimed to be a loa (spirit) himself.

  Canadian anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis theorized in his 1985 book The Serpent and the Rainbow that tetrodotoxin (TTX) is used in Haiti to place people in a pharmacologically induced trance by use of “zombie powder” containing TTX. (A horror movie directed by Wes Craven, The Serpent and the Rainbow, very loosely based on the Wade’
s book, was released in 1988.) Wade’s ideas have been both challenged and defended. Most recently, Terrence Hines [“Zombies and Tetrodotoxin,” Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 32, Issue 3: May/June 2008] refuted Wade’s claims on a physiological basis writing that TTX does not produce the trance-like “zombie” state.

  We still have fiction and based on the “traditional zombie”—some fine examples are contained in this volume. But the currently prevalent “Romero” archetype assumed the name “zombie,” become disassociated from Voudou, and has taken on an undeath of its own.

  The “new zombies” have little in common with the controlled, non- cannibalistic “old zombies.” Traditional zombies were enslaved victims; contemporary zombies are uncontrollable flesh-eating monsters.

  Not that the stories about either variety are really about zombies . . .

  Paula Guran

  June 2010

  Introduction:

  The Meat of the Matter

  When the film opened, it was met by outraged attacks against its motives, its competence of execution, and the unabashed saturation of gore. It was dismissed by critics, flagellated by concerned commentators who viewed it as a prime example of the pornography of violence, and cited as a contributing factor to everything from crime in the streets to the corruption of the morals of American youth.

  —George A. Romero, from the Introduction to

  Night of the Living Dead by John Russo (1974)

  Once upon a time, an independent Pittsburgh filmmaker and commercial cinematographer named George A. Romero conceived of a low-budget movie about corpses that reanimate and attempt to eat everyone still alive. Supposedly activated by a space virus (possibly the product of governmental experimentation gone horribly wrong), these walking dead laid siege to the living, killing and infecting them with the virus so they, in turn, became new walking, flesh-hungry zombies.

  Romero originally wrote out his concept as a prose piece titled “Anubis” (after the Egyptian god of the dead) and presented it to his partners in his company, Image Ten. The topic of an independently financed movie had been tabled and hashed around by others in the company, becoming a sort of community casserole of gags, ideas, and set-pieces which one of the partners, John Russo, eventually completed as a feature screenplay.

  Miles of copy have been written about the Romero “zombie trilogy” in the years since 1968, when Night of the Living Dead—originally titled Night of the Flesh Eaters—first became notorious for depicting naked corpses on the hoof, greedily devouring, on camera, “stunt guts” (animal entrails standing in for human tripe). This poverty-budgeted black-and-white quickie offended nearly everybody and established what was then an important new foothold for graphic special effects in film: no movie since Psycho and Peeping Tom had demonstrated such an ability to grab its audience by the genitals and honk. It also kicked off Romero’s career as a “real” moviemaker and, in due course, between other projects, he presented the world with the second and third acts of his zombie saga, Dawn of the Dead (1979) and Day of the Dead (1985).2

  Where Night laid down the rules of game play, Dawn eagerly exploited them to become the exploding head movie of the seventies. By deftly setting its action in an iconographic (and characteristically characterless) suburban shopping mall, its theme of identity loss through the consumer ethic resonated heavily with another basic American fear: victimization by the masses, the Wad. Thus, Dawn became not only an ass-kicking zombie movie splashed out in lurid anatomical primary colors, but also an incisive observation on the burial of the individual by the herd.

  “When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth,” intones Ken Foree in Dawn. The grand joke of the film is that most of the zombies he must battle were “dead” even before they died—they were dead inside, finding solace only as a consumer mob. He points out why the zombies are magnetized tropistically back to the mall: “This place was important in their lives.” It is a conclusion not only simple but elemental: Now they only exist to consume, the shifted priority being now they only exist to consume you. Instead of being swallowed up by a mercantile culture, they now do the swallowing. Being dead gives them a more unified purpose; they exist to do what viruses do—perpetuate themselves (even as that pointedly nonspecific virus from Out There that started it all did).

  Dawn also depicted its zombies as a nascent new class, below peons, below derelicts (who were at least nominally human), below even the brain-dead (who at least didn’t try to gobble you up). Yet it is clear that by the timeframe of the second movie, the walking dead are slowly learning basic tool use and retaining some functional memory.

  Then came “Anubis,” Phase Three.

  Romero conceived a spectacular conclusion for his zombie trilogy, set in a terminal environment in which the living dead have actually become part of a New World Order. In Night, the phenomenon was freshly rooted; by Dawn, this dark new “race” was clearly giving humankind stiff competition, so to speak. By the final third of this triathlon, the seesaw has definitely tipped in favor of the virus and its constituents. As Paul R. Gagne summed it up in The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh:

  In the third and final stage of “Anubis,” Romero’s original story on which the trilogy was based, an army of the living dead chases a solitary human figure over a hill . . . [this] treatment took the zombie “revolution” to the point where the living dead have basically replaced humanity and have gained enough of a rudimentary intelligence to be able to perform a few basic tasks. At the same time, an elite, dictatorial politburo of humans has found that the zombies can be trained, and are exploiting them as slaves. (Prior to the film being made, it was often facetiously referred to as Zombies in the White House.)3 The hitch, of course, is that they have to be fed in order to be controlled (something alluded to in Dawn), and we all know what zombies like to eat.

  Prior to filming, Day of the Dead hit a speed bump of surpassing mundanity—United Film Distributors, Romero’s backers, refused to pony up the $6.5 million required for this biggest of the filmed trio unless an “R” rating could be guaranteed. Since Dawn had been a success arguably because of its lack of a rating rather than in spite of one, Day had to hew to a similar graphic, gory mark just for starters.

  “For me, the Grand Guignol is part of these films, part of their character,” Romero remarked to Fangoria Magazine in 1985. Accordingly, Day of the Dead was scaled down to accommodate a $3.5 million budget, and as a result was not quite the vast final curtain Romero had hoped for. On its own terms, however, it is quite stark, bleak, and depressing in its chronicle of a tiny band of surviving humans fighting legions of zombies (as well as each other) within the confines of an underground missile facility. The film successfully conveys the impression that these characters are perhaps the only “real” humans left in the whole world . . . and for that reason alone it remains essential viewing for the zombie enthusiast.

  Originally, Romero’s zombies were the product of white pancake and dark eye shadow, deriving from such cinematic precedents as the ghosts in the black-and-white cult classic Carnival of Souls (1962) and the titular walking corpses in Hammer Films’ Plague of the Zombies (1966), in which the dead are resurrected as slave workers for a tin mine via more time-honored Voudou methods, hence “zombis.” Once the zombie archetype had been revitalized by Night of the Living Dead, it crashed face-first into the prosthetic innovations of Dawn of the Dead . . . and a new zombie mythology had grabbed hold of popular consciousness. Horror writers new and old were taken with this retrofit of the traditional—the first “new” monster since that nice Norman Bates proved that even the boy-next-door could kill you without preamble. Romero’s zombies are both a logical extension of Norman and a trump on him, upping his ante.

  They are also one of the first monster archetypes to spring from cinematic rather than literary roots, along with the giant Japanese city-stompers and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Living dinosaurs had been a staple of literary horror since Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost Wo
rld (and later became just as fundamental to the science fiction juveniles of the 1950s); King Kong was just another dinosaur in spirit, and anyway, Bela Lugosi in White Zombie had beat Kong into the movie houses by one year.

  As Hugh Lamb pointed out:

  The zombie . . . embodies aspects of most of the stock horror types—the use of magic and witchcraft, the dead revived (Dracula), the lurching monster (Frankenstein), and mastery over the soul that goes even beyond death. Yet for all this, the zombie has no literary roots whatsoever . . . it lacks any basic work of fiction to draw from. Voodoo zombie tales are rare. One fairly successful story is “Ballet Negre” (1965) by Charles Birkin, in which a troupe of Haitian dancers turn out to be zombies.

  Romero’s science-fictional rationale for the revivification of corpses—never meant to bear intensive scrutiny, but merely provided as a neat one-liner to kick off the entire phenomenon—has its antecedent in a zombie tale written by Richard Matheson in 1955, “Dance of the Dead,” in which a biowar germ takes the blame for making stiffs jump up and jitterbug. One of the most unusual zombies in all of literature is found in Gordon Honeycombe’s 1969 novel Neither the Sea Nor the Sand, in which love is the motivational power that keeps the dead moving (the film version followed in 1972). To travel even further back along the timeline, there’s Tiffany Thayer’s Dr. Arnoldi, a 1934 novel in which death just plain stops; nobody dies anymore for any reason, and the world begins to choke on the living. It includes one scene where a condemned man is electrocuted numerous times before his executioners give up and shove him into a giant meat grinder . . . and when the burger plops out, it’s still squirming around!4

  But it was the “Romero zombies”—scoffed at by purists as more properly ghouls or ghosts or cannibals or some weird potpourri of all three—that captivated idle young minds aplenty, and the influence on writers of Romero’s zombie triptych was seen in its most concentrated form in the late 1980s to early 90s. In the U.S., Bantam Books issued Book of the Dead, an anthology of original zombie stories edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector in 1989. Its sequel, Still Dead, was published in 1991. The Mammoth Book of Zombies, edited by Stephen Jones, followed in 1993. Byron Preiss and John Betancourt’s The Ultimate Zombie (Byron Priess Visual Publications) was also published that year. Clearly, everyone from Stephen King to Clive Barker to Anne Rice had something to say about the walking dead, and when they said it, they influenced other writers. This zombie “virus,” it was clear, could infect in more ways than one.