Anti-Zombie Rant

[deborahjross]

Does anyone else find zombies utterly uninteresting, tedious and faintly nauseating? I don't want to read about them and I certainly don't want to watch them. I can hardly wait until they are completely passé.

One writer who did something interesting with the shambling-rotting-flesh routine was Andre Norton (I think in Perilous Dreams) where the virus itself had a sort of intelligence that drove the decomposing victim to see out a new host. She did not, of course, use the word zombie, and she described the disease more from the psychological horror of a half-dead person wanting to infect you with what was killing it than with any description of gore or gunfire. It seriously creeped me out, whereas modern zombies leave me thinking that filling out my tax returns might be an interesting and pleasant way to pass the time.

Comments

[deborahjross.livejournal.com]

Moral and ethical questions always make a subject more interesting, if only because there are no easy answers.

IIRC, Tanya Huff did interesting things with zombies in one of the "Blood Price" books, but then she always does interesting things, no matter what the subject.

[otana.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Even something I'm not normally interested in could grasp my attention if it was done in a new way and brought in interesting moral and ethical debate. I have immense amount of respect for a writer who can take an old subject and put a new, interesting spin on it to hook a whole new range of reader.

[deborahjross.livejournal.com]

This is as true for zombie tales as for any other. Beginning writers often agonize over whether "it's been done before." I don't think that matters, or matters nearly so much as the "new, interesting spin" you described. Good story lines are amazingly complex, with infinite possibilities. Case in point: TAM LIN by Pamela Dean, set it a small liberal arts college.