Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies (31 page)

This lighthearted tower defense game moved 300,000 copies worth more than $1 million in just nine days, ranking it number one in both units sold and gross revenue on Apple’s charts within twenty-four hours of its launch on February 15, 2010.

Much the way online video has allowed new filmmakers to gain exposure for their work, leading to innovations in that medium, mobile gaming is ushering in a new way of playing in the zombie world.

There’s no shortage of bad zombie movies, and there’s no shortage of disappointing zombie games to go around. Many critics argue that the most disappointing zombie game title ever released is
Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler’s Green
, loosely based on George Romero’s 2005 film. Gamespot’s Alex Navarro suggests that it falls just short of approaching brilliance in its sheer awfulness:

The game shuffles along at a sluggish, depressing pace while pieces of it literally fall apart at the seams. This is either one of the most avant-garde pieces of gaming artistry to ever find its way to the retail market, or the absolute worst game ever.
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For my money, though, the worst zombie game on the planet is
Attack of the Sunday School Zombies
from Sunday Software. In this illogical mess, players take on the role of Super Kenz the Bible Kid, spouting passages from scripture and firing a crossbow loaded with chocolate doughnuts at zombies of all ages as they complain about being bored in church. If Kenz’s aim is true, she subdues the zombies with doughnuts long enough to teach them why their bad attitudes are “lame” and how to be better churchgoers.

Despite several noted innovations in zombie video games over the past fifteen years, they still closely follow a common framework borrowed from zombie movies. None of them have taken advantage of the immersive quality of gaming to construct a world that presents realistic zombie survival scenarios and challenges. That may soon change.

Formed in 2009, Undead Labs is a video game development company in Seattle, Washington, with the singular focus of creating the first-ever true zombie survival console game. Founder Jeff Strain says that the project is a logical next step in the evolution of zombie gaming:

When fans leave the theater after a great zombie movie they’re all talking about what they would have done in that
situation. Zombie survival is a key element to the popularity of the living dead today, but video games haven’t kept up with this reality.

Undead Labs’ plan as of 2011 is to produce a highly polished console zombie game for Xbox, followed by a massively multi-player online world. Hopefully, they’ll succeed.

T
he doorbell rings. You glance outside and spot a group of carolers dressed as if they’d walked off the pages of a Charles Dickens novel. Christmas carolers? It’s the right time of year, the end of December, so when they start humming a traditional song, you open the door. Oops. Too late. The nice singers on the porch aren’t a local church group. They’re actually the walking dead. They’re all dressed like rotting zombies, and though the tune they sing harks back to the carols of a bygone era, the lyrics are rotten and twisted:

Fresh brains roasting on an open fire,
Zombies chewing off your nose.

In 2009, author Michael Spradlin released his book of zombie Christmas carols,
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Zombies.
Now carolers around the country can join the celluloid undead and the electronic undead in your home.

If movies are the old guard in zombie culture and video games are the established player, then zombie literature is the new kid on the block and making quite an impact. As of the end of January 2010, there were no fewer than five zombiethemed books on the
New York Times
bestseller list. At the end of January 2011, there were nine books on the list, with many others rising and falling off over that twelve-month
period. Zombie lit has hit the big time, and it seems that from Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
to Studs Terkel’s oral history of World War II, nothing is safe from loose or direct adaptation for the ravenous zombie market.

Like video games, books are giving back to the medium that created the modern zombie, with dozens of novels being optioned for Hollywood adaptation in recent years. This multi-platform success has helped push zombies from a fringe subculture to the mainstream, and the evidence of their arrival is clear in the names of the players. Brad Pitt’s production company optioned Max Brooks’s zombie novel
World War Z
, slating it for a large-budget studio production. When the undead are mentioned in the same breath as A-list celebrities, you know they’ve hit the big time.

But why did it take more than three decades for the un-dead to make a real impact in publishing? Kim Paffenroth is professor of religious studies at Iona College and an author of several fiction and nonfiction zombie books. He argues that the appeal of zombies has traditionally been a visual phenomenon:

Zombies are cool to look at, either when they’re having pieces of themselves blown off with gunfire, or when they’re tearing a screaming person limb from limb. That makes them seem much better suited to film, video games, and comic books.

The challenge for writers has been to find a way to make an inherently visual creature engaging on the page. Often, this means roping in familiar characters, such as Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy, or focusing on the character development of the survivors. From accounts of the strained relationships of the living to detailing zombie combat, strategy, and tactics,
authors have attacked the subgenre from all angles in the past decade.

In nonfiction, Max Brooks launched the zombie instructional manual craze with his groundbreaking
Zombie Survival Guide
, published in 2003. At the time, the book was cutting-edge and such a hit that it convinced publishers to snap up guides that claimed to teach everything from proper zombie etiquette to the official military policy for dealing with an undead outbreak.

Brooks followed up that effort with his 2006 novel
World War Z
, making him the biggest name in the world of zombie publishing and putting zombie fiction squarely on the mainstream map. The book was originally called
The Zombie Wars
, but his publishers didn’t want the word
zombie
in the title because they thought it wouldn’t appeal to a broad audience. So he shortened
Zombie
to
Z
for the more global-sounding
World War Z.
Now, less than five years later, anything with the word
zombie
in the title is hot in the publishing world, as we’ll see below.

Both of Brooks’s books are regulars on the
New York Times
bestseller lists in their categories, but when he shopped
The Zombie Survival Guide
in the late 1990s, no publishing house would touch it. It took upward of five years from the time Brooks wrote the book for it to reach store shelves, and even then, only a few thousand copies were produced in the first printing. This wasn’t initially a moneymaking scheme, as it has become for some writers since. Brooks did it because he loved zombies, and he’s looking forward to getting his hands on the next great zombie book to come along:

I hope that someone out there right now is writing an amazing zombie book, looking at the monster from a completely new angle. I love reading great zombie stories and can’t wait to be knocked out of my chair.

In March 2009,
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith hit stores with a bang. Billed as a classic romance with ultraviolent zombie mayhem, the novel is 85 percent original text from Austen and 15 percent Grahame-Smith’s undead action. The mix proved to be pure sales gold for publisher Quirk Books. The comedic mashup quickly climbed the
New York Times
best-seller list, spawning two sequels and a Hollywood film deal.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
follows Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters as they defend their quiet English village from roaming undead hordes decades after the country is overrun by zombies. Trying to cash in on the newly discovered zombie mashup market, dozens of other classic stories and characters soon received an undead makeover, including
The Wizard of Oz, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, Santa Claus, and the Beatles. Horror genre critic Juvanka Vuckavic dismisses zombie mashups as one-trick ponies and expects the fad to quickly fizzle out, but there still seems no end in sight.

For my money, one of the better mashups of the past several years is another Quirk Books release, the 2010 zombie romp
Night of the Living Trekkies.
Set at a science-fiction convention, a strange virus soon transforms Klingons, Vulcans, and Ferengi into flesh-eating zombies. Even the nonsensical
inclusion of Princess Leia from
Star Wars
doesn’t slow down the fun.

Before Quirk wrote the rules for classic literature zombie mashups, iconic comic book publisher Marvel was paving the way with their legion of undead superheroes in their five-issue series
Marvel Zombies.
With a first book released in late 2005,
Marvel Zombies
features an alien virus that turns heroes like Iron Man, Spider-Man, the Hulk, and Wolverine into raving beasts with all the bite wounds and rotting flesh of any traditional flesh eater. Some argue that the resulting super-creatures aren’t actually zombies because they are sometimes intelligent, sometimes invincible, and sometimes can even be cured, highlighting the inherent conflict in taking a uniquely scientific infection like zombieism and applying it to the decidedly supernatural world of Marvel.

My favorite comic mashup comes from IDW Publishing. Building on their popular comic series
Zombies vs. Robots
, IDW turned to name-brand Hollywood properties like
Star Trek, Transformers, G.I. Joe
, and
Ghostbusters
in order to produce crossover comics in which these beloved characters battle zombies under the series name
Infestation.
The first one was released in January 2011. I’m waiting for them to go whole-hog with
Zombies vs. Malibu Barbie, Zombies vs. NHL All-Stars
, or even
Zombies vs. The Brady Bunch.

From famine to feast: Where there was virtually no zombie literature in the thirty-five years after George Romero first created his flesh eaters in
Night of the Living Dead
, now readers and publishers are eating it up. Some say that’s not such a good thing.

In countless discussions with other zombie enthusiasts and experts, I’ve always argued that the explosion of zombie literature in recent years can only be a good thing. Just as there are good, bad, and ugly zombie movies, why shouldn’t there also be the same quality variety in books? I like them all and read them all. But an article published in the October 2010 issue of
The Writer
magazine caused me to reverse my view.

The Writer
is a monthly publication with a stated mission to provide advice and inspiration for today’s writer. The article in question, “Dawn of the Undead,” is a detailed outline for capitalizing on the current publishing frenzy around zombies even if you don’t have any personal interest in them. Never seen a zombie movie? No problem. Don’t know who George Romero is? Big deal. What really hit a nerve for me was that the article went so far as to say that you “don’t even have to like zombies to get a career boost from them.” That seems too shallow and predatory even for zombies.

But like it or not, the
Writer
article reflects publishing reality. Even if you don’t want to write about zombies at all, just put the word z
ombie
in the title of your book, and you can sell more copies.
I Talked with a Zombie
is a collection of interviews with horror-movie insiders. None of the interviewees, however, has worked on a modern zombie movie. The word
zombie
doesn’t even appear inside the pages of the book, but the publishers slapped
zombie
in the title and cashed in.
Here’s another example: the
Mammoth Book of Zombie Comics
. More than sixty pages are devoted to a story about a mummy. Another story centers on a haunted painting. I suppose calling it the
Mammoth Book of Monster Comics
wouldn’t have gotten as much attention. So they camouflaged the mummies and haunted paintings in their marketing by plastering traditional modern zombie hordes on the cover in order to drive sales. In truth, I liked the book, and most of its stories focus on zombies. But what if a book of vampire comics had mummies in it? What if a book of aliens had a story about werewolves? Would that fly?