I Love Zombies.

 I just started reading Feed by Mira Grant and, let me tell you, it is one hell of a good piece of zombie fiction. There are some really interesting things going on in this novel. The zombies have unique attributes one of which is the ability to use group hunting techniques when there are many of them together. The writing is straight-forward and witty and the characters are likable. I haven't even finished the book yet and I can say that I would recommend it to anyone interested in zombies or horror fiction. I am a huge zombie fan, whether they are in books, movies, or comics, I love those shambling, cannibalistic corpses.
 Zombies have come a long way since their voodoo beginnings. In the time before George Romero and his Living Dead series, zombies in fiction were usually undead slaves of witchdoctors. The witchdoctor was in complete control of his zombie and used it to kill his enemies, guard his home, or, one could assume, fetch yummy snacks. Thank the dark gods that H.P. Lovecraft came along and breathed new life (pun intended) into the zombie story with the introduction of science as the cause of zombification.
 In his horrifying Herbert West -- Re animator, Lovecraft's protagonist is a doctor who conducts experiments in, you guessed it, reanimating corpses. Unlike the voodoo zombie, Lovecraft's zombies cannot be controlled and some of them even retain the knowledge they have from before their reanimation. One of the "smart" zombies learns how to reanimate corpses and builds a small army to exact revenge on West for his various crimes against humanity. After Herbert West -- Re animator, zombies in fiction began to originate in science but they were still not quite the brainless, shambling masses that we know and love today. The zombies are either under the control of the scientist (or magician, voodoo still shows up from time to time, as in the film White Zombie) who reanimates them or they retain enough brain power to retain their human personalities while gaining a taste for human flesh (sometimes these creatures are called ghouls).
 The contemporary zombie had its debut in 1968 with George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. The zombies in this film are under no one's control, they are just a mindless mass of reanimated corpses that have a craving for human flesh. There is no definitive explanation for the event, although there are hints via news broadcasts that blame the radiation from a crashed space probe for the reanimation of the recently deceased. Romero created a franchise from this film and the series set the stage for the current generation of zombie fiction. More recently, radiation has been replaced as the source of zombification, changed to the modern fear of viral infection/biological experimentation. Movies such as 28 Days Later and Resident Evil and books like Feed and The Loving Dead are good examples of viral zombification.
 Finally, I cannot write a post about zombie fiction without pointing out two of my all-time favorite series within the sub-genre. The Evil Dead series of movies starring Bruce Campbell and directed by Sam Raimi and the Amanda Feral series of novels written by Mark Henry. Both of these series are humorous and full of action, with brilliant characters and fun story arcs. Neither series relies on science to explain their zombies. The Evil Dead returns to magic as its source for the living dead, using a spell from an ancient tome as the catalyst (the book is the Necronomicon, which was first mentioned in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft). Mark Henry's zombies feature the ability to "breathe" undeath into a human who will turn into a zombie after they die. In most zombie fiction, a bite from any zombie will infect a human and cause them to die and become a zombie as well, but in Mark Henry's world only a few zombies have the ability to "breathe" and create new zombies. Also, Amanda Feral and her zombie friends retain all of their past knowledge and personality so they are very much unlike anything else in zombie fiction.
 Overall, zombie fiction does a good job of playing on humankind's fear of death by forcing us to confront what we are all destined to become, corpses. Death is something that is difficult to comprehend and we have a tendency to "pretty it up" in an attempt to make the concept less intimidating. Zombie fiction takes the cold, decaying corpse and shoves it directly into our faces, forcing us to sit up and take notice. Once that reanimated corpse has its cold, dead hands in a choke hold on our attention it usually takes that opportunity to make us face other realities that we would rather ignore. The Living Dead movies confront everything from racism to consumerism. Resident Evil and its sequels expose the potential horrors of a society influenced by enormous, global corporations. The Amanda Feral novels are an expertly crafted commentary on modern societal ills. Zombies aren't only about entertainment, there is real substance beneath the rotting, maggot-riddled skin. The combination of entertainment and substance is the source of appeal that zombie fiction holds for me. That and gore. Buckets and buckets of gore.