Review of the Dead - Part 1

Currently I am reading a lot of zombie novels. I have a general fascination for quality suspense, and at present there is little that holds my interest when it comes to fantasy books.
These are the books that I have been reading:

Word War Z by Max Brooks
The Rising and City of the Dead by Brian Keene
Monster Island and Monster Nation by David Wellington
Dying to Live by Kim Pfaffenroth and D.L. Snell (editor)
Plague of the Dead by Z A Recht
Down the Road by Bowie Ibarra
--and Heart-shaped Box by Joe Hill, which isn't a zombie book per se, but which I will be talking about nevertheless.

Back to our zombie novels. What makes a good book about zombies? Gore? Rotting corpses? To a certain degree. In my opinion, good horror stories aren't necessarily about the supernatural specifically, but about characters. As long as the characters are interesting, their emotions and thoughts compelling, then there is a basis for a good scary story. Without interesting characters (fictional people we might deem "almost real", but care for nonetheless), any story--but specifically the horror story--falls flat on its face. That is the mistake they keep making with the Aliens franchise: the first two movies got it right in that regard, the others didn't.

Then there's a certain degree of genre conventions. Slasher films usually have one killer and a group of teenagers. It's the ten little indians cliche, with the sequence of deaths happening in the order of which sex, drugs and booze are being had by the youngsters.

Zombie stories are a bit like that. They also have certain conventions. First of all, they usually contain some sort of contemporary social commentary or a very critical look at ourselves as a society. It's also about creativity and adaptation: survival. This is key to the zombie story. Aliens and Ghosts for instance, in the classical sense, can't be outwitted by creative adaptations of our surroundings or the elements in it, because aliens and ghosts break certain rules that propel them into a different category. A ghost can shift through walls, Aliens can usually teleport or fly (unless they are in a M. Night Shyamalan movie, where Aliens can't even open a door), so they are scary in other ways and require different solutions.

Zombies are basically us, and to a certain degree, suffer from the same obstacles as we do. Where they differ from us is not what is scary. Personally, I find corpses to be either disgusting or a little bit sad (not as in pathetic, but I can get sad when I see one). Sure, a walking corpse is scary, but you can't write an entire story about it.

What you can write a story about however, is how specific people react to the situation of being trapped in a building, on a boat, or in a world that's being overrun by zombies. Sure, the zombies themselves do matter, as do the rules that the writer comes up with (Is their bite infectious or not? Are they fast or are they slow?), but in the end, they aren't the main characters. The survivors are. And whether this part of the story is interesting will make or break the entire story.

In the next part I will take a look at the individual books.