Tag Archives: zombies

Hooray for Horror!

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What is it about the horror genre that gives us both shivers and thrills? I’m not talking about the excessively gory kind of horror, though that has a place and a fandom. Instead, I mean the more pop-culture renditions (sorry not sorry) of horror beasties and things that go bump in the night. Zombies are a big thing on TV, in the movies, and in books right now. So are vampires and werewolves. Anything creepy that humans can turn into, really.

Let’s take a look at these creatures and their evolution.

Here Come the Zombies

Zombies are a staple of modern horror. The Walking Dead, Fear the Walking Dead, and more have brought zombies out of George Romero movies and into the mainstream. My favorite version of the zombie pandemic is Feed and its sequels by Mira Grant (aka Seanan McGuire). It rises above the body (sorry not sorry) of the typical shambling, brains-eating stereotype by being caused by a literal pandemic, despite the fact that it came out in 2010, back when few of us feared a pandemic, zombie or otherwise. It also adds meaning and interest because it addresses other pertinent topics such as media, conspiracies, and politics.

(Seanan-Mira has also plumbed the depths (sorry not sorry) of horror by writing a novel, Into the Drowning Deep, about killer mermaids, which is a lot more horrifying than that description makes it sound. But I digress.) 

Bite This!

Vampires seem passe now. They’ve been done to death (sorry not sorry). The craze, I think, really took off in 1976 with Anne Rice’s novel Interview with the Vampire, which later became a movie (now remade, I understand) and a TV series. I personally thought the novel was overwritten and too long, but that didn’t stop it from becoming a runaway bestseller. More recent but still old (from 1997) was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, still my favorite of the vampire-themed media sensations. It was based on an older movie, about which the less said the better.

The Twilight books and movies proved extremely popular as well, though I haven’t succumbed to any desire (I have none) to read or view them. What’s interesting about them is that they pitted vampires against werewolves, not as killing machines but as romantic rivals. It’s kind of disturbing that heartless killers are presented as love objects and sexual partners.

None of these modern iterations have anything to do with Bram Stoker’s original Dracula, which has been committed to film many times. Nor is this an all-inclusive list, which would take more space than I allow myself in this blog. I will, however, recommend Those Who Hunt the Night by Barbara Hambly as my favorite vampire novel. (Although the first time I read it I thought one character was the main character (or MC, as we writers say). A rereading revealed to me that she was a supporting player. But I digress again.)

Loup-Garou

(Okay, I’m showing off. “Loup-Garou” is French for “werewolf.” But I digress some more.)

Werewolves became as fashionable as vampires during the heyday of the Twilight series. Fans divided into Team Vampire and Team Werewolf based on who they thought should get the girl and I don’t mean as a snack.

It should be noted that not just werewolves, but all kinds of shapeshifters have become popular. There have been were-bears as far back as Beorn in Tolkien’s The Hobbit and other shapes to be shifted into, including crows, hawks, and leopards, among other beings. I guess you’d have to think about Zeus, too, who appeared to various women as a swan, a bull, a shower of gold coins, and a goddess, to hide his extramarital exploits from his wife. While Zeus’s transformations were hardly what you’d call romantic, shapeshifters in modern fiction are often presented in those terms. It’s called the “dark fantasy” or “fantasy romance” novel.

Welcome to Hogwarts

And of course, we couldn’t catalogue otherworldly beings without including witches and wizards. Although most of the witches and wizards in Harry Potter are positive characters, that’s not the case in many other books in the genre. Evil wizards and malevolent witches abound. In more subtle books, there are those with mixed motivations – for example, a low-powered witch who eventually turns into a dragon and back (making her both a witch and a shapeshifter, I guess) in Barbara Hambly’s excellent Dragonsbane. (It’s a book that I recommend to others just so we can discuss it later. That’s how I was introduced to it. But I digress even more.)

Why do we love horror so much? I think it’s because we know that, however disturbing the beings are, they can’t really get to us. The COVID pandemic, though, made pandemics all too real, except for the fact that people turned into vectors, not zombies. Perhaps the glut (sorry not sorry) of zombies will soon recede and we’ll go back to ghost stories, the classical alternative that hardly ever gets written or filmed these days. Even the movie Ghost‘s most memorable scene featured pottery, not haunting. It’s a form of horror bait-and-switch.

If only they would find a new creature to menace the humans – like the bunyip, an Australian water monster. But I guess “Attack of the Bunyip” just sounds like something warm and fuzzy. What we need are fresh kinds of horror, something that will scare a whole new generation.

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Zombie Novels That Aren’t About Zombies

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Just in time for Halloween, Mira Grant (aka Seanan McGuire) has published Feedback, the latest in her series of zombie novels. The original books were Feed, Deadline, and Blackout, collectively known as the Newsflesh trilogy.

Sign of infected areaThe thing is, they’re zombie novels, but they’re not really about zombies. Oh, there are plenty of undead, infected creatures roaming through the novels, trying to bite the living, converting them to more zombies, or simply feeding on human flesh. There are brave zombie hunters who defend civilization against the shambling menace with intelligence, courage, and a vast amount of firepower. There are excitement, chase scenes, well-drawn characters, stunning surprises, and all the things that make a good horror-scifi-action-thriller.

So what are these books really about? Not Jane Austen, that’s for sure.

Fear. Okay, you probably expected this one. A zombie novel about fear. But in the Newsflesh books, fear of zombies is the least of it. There are alarming secrets that turn out to be symptoms of big, appalling conspiracies. One of the novels’ underlying messages is that fear can be – is – used to manipulate people and control them. If the threat is big enough, and scary enough, and relentless enough, people will do anything, give up anything, completely change their way of life to avoid the danger.

And people who know that can pull their strings.

Safety. Again, a fairly standard topic for a zombie book. But in this world (and ours), there is no guarantee of safety. All you can rely on are yourself and the few people around whom you can trust – and sometimes not even them. Mechanical defenses have holes; strategies have deficiencies; friends have their own agendas. In the end, you have only yourself and your principles, and maybe a few other people if you are very, very lucky.

Journalism. The main characters are bloggers, who form teams that gather the news, poke zombies with sticks, or write fiction. This gives the author plenty of room to explore how modern technologies have affected news-gathering, as well as the consumer’s desire for real-life action-adventure, poetry, and stories too. Large questions are explored: How far does the public’s right to know extend? Are there secrets that journalists shouldn’t reveal? What happens when the journalists become part of the news themselves? Have no fear (except of the zombies and conspiracies); these subjects operate in the background while the plot continues to rocket ahead.

Politics. The blogger-journalists are embedded with the campaign of a possible candidate for President, which makes the books all the more timely. Politics and zombies may not sound like a fascinating combination, but when the dead are rising everywhere in the world, people look to governments to address the problem. Whether those governments and the people in them make sound decisions, put responsible policies in place, and fund research can affect the outcome for individuals. Anyone who can’t make connections with the current political climate just isn’t paying attention.

I hope I haven’t scared you away from the novels. There are plenty of gore, ambushes, narrow escapes, heartbreaking deaths, and all the other accoutrements of your standard zombie novel, if that’s what you want. There’s even a zombie bear. You don’t have to pay attention to the various subtexts, though your reading experience will be richer if you do.

Not content to stop after writing the trilogy, Grant has revisited the near future, post-zombie-apocalypse world with short stories, novellas, and now the new stand-alone novel. (I say stand-alone, though its plot runs roughly parallel to Feed.) She explores interesting questions: What is this character’s backstory? What would happen in zombies got loose in a science fiction convention or a school? Who was responsible for starting the zombie plague? Is the zombie situation the same in Australia? Clearly, this is a fictional world with lots of room for expansion, despite the definitive ending of Blackout. It’s an impressive piece of world-building.

Grant is a gutsy writer (pun intended). Writing under the name Seanan McGuire, she has even written a novel in which one of the major plot points is Evil Pie. And for some reason, it works. (It’s in Chimes at Midnight, one of the October Daye series of urban fantasies.)

For more about Feedback, the other Newsflesh novels, short fiction, and Mira Grant, see miragrant.com.