In Sure and Certain Hope

Zombies.Why zombies?There are so, so many stories to be told. So many things to explore, to consider, to talk about.So why, by the very hair of the yeti, why write another story about zombies?Okay, so we had the traditional shamblers a la Romero; then we had the rage virus; then we had walkers. More literary approaches have been taken as well — Brooks’s World War Z (the book, not the movie) isn’t too shabby, and Whitehead’s Zone One is pretty damn close to highbrow. But all of them have two things in common: The zombies are dangerous; and there’s very little in-depth examination of what happens to a society that finds itself facing them.I don’t mean the military response, the panic, the running-and-hiding-and-not-being-eaten. I mean something a little more personal, a little more authentic to the society we inhabit now, a little more visceral (in the sense of the emotional, not in the sense of the snacked upon).Romero didn’t even discuss it. 28 Days Later skipped right past it (which was clever in several ways). World War Z told it largely from one person’s perspective, though it did go into some details about how the outbreaks were handled at first. Zone One concerns itself chiefly with aftermath, but there are vignettes of the time before to be seen. Walking Dead … yeah. Okay, sure, if you like.Still, these stories have zombies as being mortal foes to the living. And I got to thinking. I got to thinking, what if they’re not like that at all? What if they’re fundamentally harmless? Dead, yes — no life processes at all — but apart from that, a lot like people in a permanently vegetative state? What would we, the living, do with them, the animated-deceased?And that’s why I wrote another story about zombies.Because this isn’t another story about zombies. Not at all.

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