Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion

PRAISE FOR
PAUL IS UNDEAD

“A wonderfully inventive blend of comedy, alternative history—and flesh-eating. A post-modern gothic classic.”

—Mick Wall, author of
When Giants Walked
the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

“If you’ve ever wondered (as I have) how the story of the Beatles would have turned out if, instead of a quartet of working-class Liverpool lads, they had been a bunch of zombies, this hilarious book finally answers the question.”

—Michael Ian Black, comedian and author of
Clappy as a Ham

“
Paul Is Undead
brings the Beatles back to life . . . and now they want braaains. Brilliant and hilarious. Two decaying thumbs up.”

—Jonathan Maberry, multiple Bram Stoker
Award–winning author of
Patient Zero
and
Rot & Ruin

“
Paul Is Undead
is the
Abbey Road
of Beatles zombie mashup novels.”

—A. J. Jacobs, author of
The Guinea Pig Diaries
and
The Year of Living Biblically

“Investigative music journalist Alan Goldsher has ripped the moptops off the Fab Four, revealing the wormy undead belly of godless, noggin-gobbling rock ’n’ roll. Read it, or die.”

—Larry Doyle, author of
I Love You, Beth
Cooper
and
Go, Mutants!

Paul Is Undead
is also available as an eBook

Gallery Books
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by Alan Goldsher

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Gallery Books trade paperback edition June 2010

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Designed by Jaime Putorti
Interior Art by Jeffrey Brown

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goldsher, Alan

   Paul is undead : the British zombie invasion / Alan Goldsher.—1st Gallery Books trade paperback ed.

      p. cm.

  1. Beatles—Fiction. 2. Zombies—Fiction. I. Title.

    PS3607.O48P38 2010

    813'.6—dc22                                                      20100002218

ISBN 978-1-4391-7792-1
ISBN 978-1-4391-7795-2 (ebook)

PAUL IS UNDEAD

PREFACE

For some, the most indelible memory of their television-viewing lives was the moment Jack Ruby assassinated Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963. For others, it was Neil Armstrong’s 1969 moon landing. For today’s generation, it might be the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, or the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001.

I realized television was more than sitcoms and sporting events on December 8, 1980, the night Mark David Chapman tried to lop off John Lennon’s head with a silver scythe.

I was fourteen, parked by the tube in the basement of my suburban Chicago home, watching what I watched every Monday night during the winter months:
Monday Night Football
. The New England Patriots were down in Miami taking on the Dolphins, and I can’t recall a damn thing about the game; all I remember is Howard Cosell’s announcement right before halftime—and, like most music fanatics, I know it word for word:

“An unspeakable tragedy confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City: John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous, perhaps, of all of the Beatles, was chopped twice on the top of his spine, then rushed to an undisclosed location, where his skull was reattached and he was reanimated for the 263rd time. The damage was such that his head will now permanently tilt at a ten-degree angle. It’s hard to go back to the game after that news flash, which, in duty, we have to tell.”

I turned off the television. I went to bed. And I wept myself to sleep.

Ironically enough, I fell in love with Paul McCartney’s solo stuff first—hey, I was five years old, and “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” played on the radio all day, every day, so what can I tell you?—then I worked my way through the Beatles’ catalog in reverse chronological order, starting with their swan song,
Abbey Road
, all the way back to their debut,
Please Please Me.
Since I loved almost every note of the catalog, I didn’t factor their state of being into my feelings about them as a music-making unit. I mean, who cared if they were undead? My eighth-grade orchestra teacher was a zombie, and he was cool. Yeah, a couple of the shufflers at school—we called them shufflers, and for that, I still feel guilty—were a bit
off,
but I had no personal issues with the undead. The Beatles were just a rock group whose music I loved, and if they didn’t have blood pumping through their veins, so be it.

When Chapman tried to take down Lennon, it dawned on me that I actually knew very little about the Liverpudlians, so I went to the Wilmette Public Library and borrowed the only four Beatles books on their shelves: Ian McGinty’s
Scream! The Beatles Eat Their Generation
; Maureen Miller’s
A Hard Night’s Death: McCartney, Movies, and Mayhem
; Eliot Barton’s
Hypnosis, Liverpool Style
; and the uneven, clumsily ghostwritten Ringo Starr memoir,
Starr’s Stars: A Ninja’s Life.
Dozens more titles were in print, but the library refused to bring them in, assuming that nobody on the lily-white North Shore of Chicago cared about John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. I suppose I can understand their reasoning: My orchestra teacher notwithstanding, the adult zombie population of Wilmette, Illinois, circa 1980 was all but nonexistent, and none of them worked at the library. I’m not calling my hometown racist. I’m just reporting the facts.

Over the next few years, I scooped up any Beatles-oriented tome I could find, but aside from the purely journalistic bestseller
The Shea Stadium Riot: How the Beatles Almost Destroyed New York City
by
New York Times
crime reporter Jessica Brandice, all of these so-called biographies focused mostly on the music, rather than the men. That’s understandable, as writers were hesitant to sit down with the band after Lennon and McCartney famously dismembered, castrated, and ultimately murdered
New Musical Express
staffer William “Guitar” Tyler back in 1967—and this after previously announcing that, in terms of proactive attacking, the media was off-limits. In the post-Tyler world, publishers and media executives decreed that their staff were required to conduct any and all interviews behind a six-inch-thick partition. (Half a foot of glass wouldn’t stop a hungry Liverpudlian zombie, but it would slow them down long enough for the interviewer to make a getaway.) That sort of impersonal setup didn’t lend itself to an intimate, revealing talk.

Come 1995, the year I became a “real” writer (as opposed to the previous decade, when I was a “fake” scribe who, when he wasn’t trying to get work as a bassist, churned out a bunch of pretentious and clumsy crapola), the Beatles as individuals were all but
forgotten. John and his wife, Yoko Ono, as had been the case since that horrible Monday night fifteen years before, were holed up in their uptown New York fortress. Lennon rarely left the apartment, and when he did, he was accompanied by half a dozen highly trained USZGs (United States Zombie Guards), all six of whom were festooned with tommy guns and force fields. Paul was living on a farm in Scotland, surfacing every few years with a solo album that inevitably didn’t do the kind of numbers he’d hoped for. (Paul was, is, and always will be a bottom-line guy, be it about record sales or body count.) George was the most visible Beatle, giving lectures to religious types and horror aficionados at various conventions throughout the world and having fun with his telekinetic powers—most notably when he created a music video featuring dancing tchotchkes that was a real hit with the first wave of MTV fans. As for Ringo, nobody had a clue; there were sightings from the North Pole to the South Pole and everywhere in between. Pop-culture junkies had stopped caring about Lennon’s, McCartney’s, Harrison’s, and Starr’s whereabouts or activities, and the number of fans who showed up at their local neighborhood Beatlefests dwindled each year. The music was still relevant, but the men, not so much.