Being unemployed and moving between four states and driving across country three times in four-five months, I've had some time. Have I been overly productive with said time? Probably not. What I have done (in large part thanks to my birthday kindle) is read a lot of zombie books, and I've noticed a trend. Perhaps it was inevitable, perhaps it's evolution. Regardless, it seems to me that more and more of the zombie creatures plaguing the new apocalyptic fiction tend to be, well, less than dead.
These monsters, while sharing numerous similarities with the zombies of Romero, are in fact not actually doomed corpses walking, talking (okay, moaning), bloody-thirsty, flesh and sinew eating fiends. They are actually living doomed people walking, talking (you get it)... The antagonists of books by Joe Mckinney (great writer if you haven't experience his zombie books) and other more modern zombie fiction writers resemble more the infected horrors of 28 Days Later.
When I first saw 28 Days Later, I, like several critics, deemed the regular peeps turned evil murdering meanies, to be less than zombie as if there was the perfect hierarchy determining what creatures were good enough for the label of walking dead. I was probably a bit snotty talking about the subject. Due to the popularity of the horror film mentioned above and the complete newness and creepiness of its monsters, I was not too surprised (okay, maybe a little) by the sudden influx of these not so dead zombies munching away at the literary world.
However, as time passed, I came to appreciate the ingenuity of these new, evolved zombie figures. Let's face it, they are kind of freaking scary and not just because of their cannibalistic tendencies. This so ups the moral anti. Before, you knew your Aunt Jo or mailman slobbery over the remains of your beloved Fido were dead as door whatever. It kind of helped you cope with annihilating the living dead. However, if now these zombies are merely infected (and not dead, repeat, not dead), how does that not change your perspective on killing them? I mean, doesn't this increase the chance for a cure, for a real return from the undead? Just maybe, if you had enough faith and one mad but brilliant scientist, you could have saved Grandma.
Furthermore, being that they are alive, doesn't that bring in the conversation of propagation? AKA, living zombies breeding! Now, the undead baby in the remake of Dawn of the Dead was pretty horrific. If, however, you have seen Pandorum, this might have given you a better idea of how creepy baby-making undead could be. You thought with enough bullets (and probably grenades, explosives, maybe nukes....) the ordeal could be over; if enough humans outlasted the zombies, we could begin anew. Wrong! If the zombies are having little ones in wild and most predict their populations would outnumber humans anyway, um, that's a lot of creepy, people-eating monsters to contend with.
That brings me to the point of evolution. If alive (though terribly consumed by some phage/virus/parasite/general evilness), the neo zombie has the potential to adapt, to overcome the shackles of its once solely flesh-seeking existence. The monsters might start hunting, planning, WINNING... Not the zombie world I would choose to live in. Are the hairs on the back of your neck tingling, yet? Are you a zombie?
Lastly, the likelihood factor of the world's populace succumbing to the zombie plague increase astronomically by the disease or whatever not actually killing you. Most zombie nay-sayers claim that since zombies are supposed to be walking corpses (let's not even get into the digestion/eating of human flesh part), the chances of a zombie outbreak are ridiculously small (tell that to Alice from Resident Evil). Fair enough. But, if the people infected do not technically die after being bitten, the odds become more stacked in favor of an undead apocalypse. Yeah, go ahead, take a moment. I understand how freaky this is. I'll wait.
Though (if I'm being honest) skeptical at first, the not-so-dead-zombie opens up new fictional veins to explore, breathing more life into the genre. I look forward to seeing what evolutions and twists will spring up in the literature. And I'm starting
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