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

[auriaephiala.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. I have enough rotten people in my life w/o encountering literally rotten ones in fiction.

Of all these recent classics-with-new-features, the only one I've even wanted to read more than two pages into is _Android Karenina_ (Anna Karenina with robots) which is fun and at least so far not creepy.

[deborahjross.livejournal.com]

I suspect I am more likely to perceive zombie-ness while reading US political news.

I hadn't heard of ANDROID KARENINA. Let me know what you think once you've finished. So many of these mash-up have a cute idea, but turn into a one-trick pony and don't follow the ramifications of that one idea.