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Apocalypse Weird
Jun. 24th, 2014 01:29 pmFinally finished the Litreactor course feedback, so that's only year's worth of Shirley Jackson Awards fundraising fun done with. Tonight, meanwhile, I'm taking part in a panel on QUILTBAG issues in SFF/H at the Merrill Collection, which should be fun. I think there'll be a fair amount of nodding and agreeing, because I hurt (storm yesterday, mug with extreme humidity today), and my brain isn't working very well. But I'm looking forward to it, nonetheless.
In other news, my money finally came in, so I was able to pay off various bills, put some away and still buy True Detective on BluRay. Since then, I've watched almost every episode except the one with the big seven-minute take stash-house assault sequence, which I found gruelling enough the first time 'round that I fast-forwarded most of it. And I got an $8 DVD coy of Cary Fukunaga's version of Jane Eyre at the same time, which was interesting, not least because I was totally unaware that Moira Buffini wrote the screenplay. But I'll talk about those later, I think.
As some of you may remember, I've been working my way through the huge bag of zombie fiction I found one night in my building's library. It's fascinating to speculate on exactly where/who these books originated from; the very wide quality spread, twinned with a propensity to buy entire series at a pop, seems to imply that whoever put them literally just ordered everything they could find with the words "zombie" or "[living] dead" in either its title or its synopsis, so my guess would be that one of the building's surprisingly large population of grad student residents might be writing a paper on the subject. And while I couldn't possibly begin to cover everything down there...well, I guess I probably could; frankly, I just didn't want to...here's what I've ended up covering, thus far:
The Hater Series, David Moody (Hater, Dog's Blood, Them or Us)
The Autumn Series, David Moody (Autumn: The City, Autumn: Purification, Autumn: Disintegration)
The Monster Series, David Wellington (Monster Island, Monster Nation, Monster Planet)
Rise Again, Ben Tripp
Alison Hewitt is Trapped, Madeleine Roux
Sadie Walker is Stranded, Madeleine Roux
Handling the Undead, John Ajvide Lindqvist
Undead, John Russo (contains Russo's screenplay novelization for Night of the Living Dead and Return of the Living Dead, but not the Return filmed by Dan O'Bannon)
Tomes of the Dead: Stronghold, Paul Finch
Day by Day Armageddon Series (Day by Day Armageddon, Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile, Day by Day Armageddon: Shattered Hourglass J.L. Bourne
Stuff in the pile I'd already read includes:
Desperate Souls, Greg Lamberson
The Reapers Are the Angels, Alden Bell
Patient Zero, Jonathan Maberry
Outpost, Juggernaut and Terminus, Adam Baker
Dust, Joan Frances Turner
Still to go:
Dying to Live Series (Dying to Live, Dying to Live: Last Rites, Dying to Live: Life Sentence), Kim Paffenroth
Eden Series (Eden, Eden: Crusade, Eden: Resurrection), Tony Monchinski
How the Dead Live, Will Self
Thunder and Ashes, Z.A. Recht
After Life, Jaron Lee Knuth
Down the Road, Bowie Ibarra
As the World Dies Series, Rhiannon Frater (The First Days, Fighting to Survive)
Twilight of the Dead and After Twilight: Walking With the Dead, Travis Adkins
Resurrection, Tim Curran
The Dead, Charlie Higson
Zombies: The Recent Dead, Paula Guran ed.
The New Dead, Christopher Golden ed.
The Living Dead and The Living Dead 2, John Joseph Adams ed.
I also spent some time on Permuted Press's website. As their press releases state, the company was established in 2004 to produce The Undead, “a single high-quality zombie anthology title.” Since then, they've published over 80 POD books and ebooks (many of them parts of various series) targeting the apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and survival horror fiction markets. On their Sumissions Guide page, the first three novel types they say they're looking for are A) “Prepper, TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World as We Know It), SHTF (Shit Hits the Fan), and plague/outbreak novels” dealing with realistic societal collapse; B) “Apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic novels” dealing with alien invasions, last man on earth scenarios, nuclear and/or biological war, etc.; and C) “Survival horror/adventure novels” like Richard Laymon's Island, John Carpenter's The Thing or William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
So yeah, this means I've been thinking about apocalypse fiction in general, zombie fiction in specific. It's a huge segment of the current horror scene, arguably its most "mainstream" segment, and I can't help but notice that even somebody as stringently committed to the Weird as Jeff Vandermeer has started to overlap with it, though his brilliant Southern Reach trilogy is rightly filed in literature/general fiction, rather than straight-up horror. For myself, I'm far more likely to follow Jeff's lead than I am any of the people on the lists above, because--my mean, true love for The Walking Dead aside--I really do find zombies one of the most fatigued tropes around, right now. Yet I can't stop picking at why that might be, in a grit-before-the-pearl sort of way.
As I was saying to Alyx Dellamonica recently, part of the problem with zombie apocalypses is that they often careen back and forth between disaster/misery porn and a strange sort of Ayn Rand Disneyland sensibility unseen since the decade right after the Bomb hit, before we really knew what the term "fallout" actually entailed...the idea that while it's obviously awful when 80% of the world's population and all its infrastructure is suddenly removed, it's also sort of exciting, because it provides a potentially transfigurative experience. You become what you were maybe always meant to be, and there's a sort of stark, awful beauty in that.
Applying this to Philip Blake, for example, as I'm wont to: yesterday you were just that guy at the back of the office, constantly rode overtop by a younger, snappier boss who handed you all the shit-work because he knew you were a big loser--but today, you're the affable, tall dude everyone who's freaking out around you flocks to, because your simmering toxic dislike for the way the world used to be makes you treat apocalypse as an opportunity, not a tragedy. Suddenly, all the vicious, reductive decisions you "have to" make from now on are understandable, forgivable, because they're born out of shared grief and practicality. You're literally saving what's left of the world, one person at a time, and if that ends up turning you into a redneck warlord, well, all the better for them! It's what they NEED you to be, given the circumstances.
(In retrospect, while the text of The Walking Dead seems to imply that the Governor assumes that if everybody in Woodbury found out what he was keeping in his fishtank room's closet then there'd been a mass exodus, I more and more believe that he was probably wrong in that assumption. I can see maybe 20% of them reacting to Penny with horror, but even that 20% might still have weighed their options and considered Woodbury the best of a bad bargain. For the rest, I think they'd find it sad, but not exactly alien. As Alyx notes: "I'm kind of surprised we don't see more people leading their dead kids around on chains, given.")
Anyhow. Though lot of the Big Bag o' Zombie Fic books have interesting aspects, one of the things that wears most on me about the genre is its insistence on playing things out in real-time. Maybe it's a hold-over from the formative influence of Day By Day Armageddon, which began as an online "diary" narrated by a naval officer caught at ground zero. But while it very occasionally can be made to work, if your narrative voice is interesting enough (Alison Hewitt is Trapped, etc.), a lot of the time what a commitment to real-time produces is trilogies where each book has one neat idea, after which you reach the end and think: man, that could have been all one novel, and I really wouldn't have missed most of the accoutrements.
(David Moody's Hater trilogy is particularly bad in this respect, which is a pity, because its central idea--a certain percentage of the human race's inherent genetic differences are suddenly triggered, making them terrified to cohabit with those "not like them!" anymore, forcing them to immediately attack and try to kill even members of their own families if they sense they're not genetically compatible--is truly startling/creepy. But when I found out it'd been optioned as a movie, I could only hope they'd realize it could be easily boiled down to the first two books with maybe a tiny bit of the third as epilogue, and then left there.)
Some books, like Ben Tripp's Rise Again, posit stages to the ecological shift from pre- to post-zombie; his has (again) a certain percentage of the population suddenly driven to flee until their systems give out, after which there's a few days of trying to deal with massive piles of dead and dying people (the runners, plus collateral damage) followed by the runners coming back to life as slow but not predatory creatures, then a few more days before they start tracking, hunting and killing/infecting any live human who crosses their path. But it's very easy to get bogged down in the physicality/physics of zombification, especially when rot is added to the mix, as it usually is (rot being a primary zombie characteristic). Again, David Moody comes up with one fun if disgusting idea along those lines in Autumn, his other series, in which the eventual ecological fallout of a mass zombification event is a disgusting layer of liquescent zombie flesh all over every fucking thing. Like you're wading through it, and it's contaminating everything it touches. Eugh.
One way or the other, most zombie fic keeps to the two main concepts of the monster in question: tool--old-style voudou zombies--or plague--the now-classic Romero model. The latter are not the people they seem to be, they are the thing that killed those people, a virus-puppet driven only by contaminative hunger. Where things get a bit more interesting is when you add evolution towards re-sentience to the mix, as many--even Romero himself--are starting to do. British TV show In The Flesh injects the idea that a drug can restore the personalities of Romero-style zombies, thus making them more like the people from Resurrection (US) or The Returned (France), able to be held to moral account and potentially be reintegrated back into society, because they understand and regret the things they did while “untreated.” But in those latter cases, I'd hesitate to call the people in question "zombies". They're revenants--ghosts with an idea of flesh--or maybe liches, like self-willed mummies, when they're not on tanna leaves and being steered at other people.
Okay, so. That's where I am right now, trying to mulch all this into a viable idea. More later, I guess.
In other news, my money finally came in, so I was able to pay off various bills, put some away and still buy True Detective on BluRay. Since then, I've watched almost every episode except the one with the big seven-minute take stash-house assault sequence, which I found gruelling enough the first time 'round that I fast-forwarded most of it. And I got an $8 DVD coy of Cary Fukunaga's version of Jane Eyre at the same time, which was interesting, not least because I was totally unaware that Moira Buffini wrote the screenplay. But I'll talk about those later, I think.
As some of you may remember, I've been working my way through the huge bag of zombie fiction I found one night in my building's library. It's fascinating to speculate on exactly where/who these books originated from; the very wide quality spread, twinned with a propensity to buy entire series at a pop, seems to imply that whoever put them literally just ordered everything they could find with the words "zombie" or "[living] dead" in either its title or its synopsis, so my guess would be that one of the building's surprisingly large population of grad student residents might be writing a paper on the subject. And while I couldn't possibly begin to cover everything down there...well, I guess I probably could; frankly, I just didn't want to...here's what I've ended up covering, thus far:
The Hater Series, David Moody (Hater, Dog's Blood, Them or Us)
The Autumn Series, David Moody (Autumn: The City, Autumn: Purification, Autumn: Disintegration)
The Monster Series, David Wellington (Monster Island, Monster Nation, Monster Planet)
Rise Again, Ben Tripp
Alison Hewitt is Trapped, Madeleine Roux
Sadie Walker is Stranded, Madeleine Roux
Handling the Undead, John Ajvide Lindqvist
Undead, John Russo (contains Russo's screenplay novelization for Night of the Living Dead and Return of the Living Dead, but not the Return filmed by Dan O'Bannon)
Tomes of the Dead: Stronghold, Paul Finch
Day by Day Armageddon Series (Day by Day Armageddon, Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile, Day by Day Armageddon: Shattered Hourglass J.L. Bourne
Stuff in the pile I'd already read includes:
Desperate Souls, Greg Lamberson
The Reapers Are the Angels, Alden Bell
Patient Zero, Jonathan Maberry
Outpost, Juggernaut and Terminus, Adam Baker
Dust, Joan Frances Turner
Still to go:
Dying to Live Series (Dying to Live, Dying to Live: Last Rites, Dying to Live: Life Sentence), Kim Paffenroth
Eden Series (Eden, Eden: Crusade, Eden: Resurrection), Tony Monchinski
How the Dead Live, Will Self
Thunder and Ashes, Z.A. Recht
After Life, Jaron Lee Knuth
Down the Road, Bowie Ibarra
As the World Dies Series, Rhiannon Frater (The First Days, Fighting to Survive)
Twilight of the Dead and After Twilight: Walking With the Dead, Travis Adkins
Resurrection, Tim Curran
The Dead, Charlie Higson
Zombies: The Recent Dead, Paula Guran ed.
The New Dead, Christopher Golden ed.
The Living Dead and The Living Dead 2, John Joseph Adams ed.
I also spent some time on Permuted Press's website. As their press releases state, the company was established in 2004 to produce The Undead, “a single high-quality zombie anthology title.” Since then, they've published over 80 POD books and ebooks (many of them parts of various series) targeting the apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and survival horror fiction markets. On their Sumissions Guide page, the first three novel types they say they're looking for are A) “Prepper, TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World as We Know It), SHTF (Shit Hits the Fan), and plague/outbreak novels” dealing with realistic societal collapse; B) “Apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic novels” dealing with alien invasions, last man on earth scenarios, nuclear and/or biological war, etc.; and C) “Survival horror/adventure novels” like Richard Laymon's Island, John Carpenter's The Thing or William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
So yeah, this means I've been thinking about apocalypse fiction in general, zombie fiction in specific. It's a huge segment of the current horror scene, arguably its most "mainstream" segment, and I can't help but notice that even somebody as stringently committed to the Weird as Jeff Vandermeer has started to overlap with it, though his brilliant Southern Reach trilogy is rightly filed in literature/general fiction, rather than straight-up horror. For myself, I'm far more likely to follow Jeff's lead than I am any of the people on the lists above, because--my mean, true love for The Walking Dead aside--I really do find zombies one of the most fatigued tropes around, right now. Yet I can't stop picking at why that might be, in a grit-before-the-pearl sort of way.
As I was saying to Alyx Dellamonica recently, part of the problem with zombie apocalypses is that they often careen back and forth between disaster/misery porn and a strange sort of Ayn Rand Disneyland sensibility unseen since the decade right after the Bomb hit, before we really knew what the term "fallout" actually entailed...the idea that while it's obviously awful when 80% of the world's population and all its infrastructure is suddenly removed, it's also sort of exciting, because it provides a potentially transfigurative experience. You become what you were maybe always meant to be, and there's a sort of stark, awful beauty in that.
Applying this to Philip Blake, for example, as I'm wont to: yesterday you were just that guy at the back of the office, constantly rode overtop by a younger, snappier boss who handed you all the shit-work because he knew you were a big loser--but today, you're the affable, tall dude everyone who's freaking out around you flocks to, because your simmering toxic dislike for the way the world used to be makes you treat apocalypse as an opportunity, not a tragedy. Suddenly, all the vicious, reductive decisions you "have to" make from now on are understandable, forgivable, because they're born out of shared grief and practicality. You're literally saving what's left of the world, one person at a time, and if that ends up turning you into a redneck warlord, well, all the better for them! It's what they NEED you to be, given the circumstances.
(In retrospect, while the text of The Walking Dead seems to imply that the Governor assumes that if everybody in Woodbury found out what he was keeping in his fishtank room's closet then there'd been a mass exodus, I more and more believe that he was probably wrong in that assumption. I can see maybe 20% of them reacting to Penny with horror, but even that 20% might still have weighed their options and considered Woodbury the best of a bad bargain. For the rest, I think they'd find it sad, but not exactly alien. As Alyx notes: "I'm kind of surprised we don't see more people leading their dead kids around on chains, given.")
Anyhow. Though lot of the Big Bag o' Zombie Fic books have interesting aspects, one of the things that wears most on me about the genre is its insistence on playing things out in real-time. Maybe it's a hold-over from the formative influence of Day By Day Armageddon, which began as an online "diary" narrated by a naval officer caught at ground zero. But while it very occasionally can be made to work, if your narrative voice is interesting enough (Alison Hewitt is Trapped, etc.), a lot of the time what a commitment to real-time produces is trilogies where each book has one neat idea, after which you reach the end and think: man, that could have been all one novel, and I really wouldn't have missed most of the accoutrements.
(David Moody's Hater trilogy is particularly bad in this respect, which is a pity, because its central idea--a certain percentage of the human race's inherent genetic differences are suddenly triggered, making them terrified to cohabit with those "not like them!" anymore, forcing them to immediately attack and try to kill even members of their own families if they sense they're not genetically compatible--is truly startling/creepy. But when I found out it'd been optioned as a movie, I could only hope they'd realize it could be easily boiled down to the first two books with maybe a tiny bit of the third as epilogue, and then left there.)
Some books, like Ben Tripp's Rise Again, posit stages to the ecological shift from pre- to post-zombie; his has (again) a certain percentage of the population suddenly driven to flee until their systems give out, after which there's a few days of trying to deal with massive piles of dead and dying people (the runners, plus collateral damage) followed by the runners coming back to life as slow but not predatory creatures, then a few more days before they start tracking, hunting and killing/infecting any live human who crosses their path. But it's very easy to get bogged down in the physicality/physics of zombification, especially when rot is added to the mix, as it usually is (rot being a primary zombie characteristic). Again, David Moody comes up with one fun if disgusting idea along those lines in Autumn, his other series, in which the eventual ecological fallout of a mass zombification event is a disgusting layer of liquescent zombie flesh all over every fucking thing. Like you're wading through it, and it's contaminating everything it touches. Eugh.
One way or the other, most zombie fic keeps to the two main concepts of the monster in question: tool--old-style voudou zombies--or plague--the now-classic Romero model. The latter are not the people they seem to be, they are the thing that killed those people, a virus-puppet driven only by contaminative hunger. Where things get a bit more interesting is when you add evolution towards re-sentience to the mix, as many--even Romero himself--are starting to do. British TV show In The Flesh injects the idea that a drug can restore the personalities of Romero-style zombies, thus making them more like the people from Resurrection (US) or The Returned (France), able to be held to moral account and potentially be reintegrated back into society, because they understand and regret the things they did while “untreated.” But in those latter cases, I'd hesitate to call the people in question "zombies". They're revenants--ghosts with an idea of flesh--or maybe liches, like self-willed mummies, when they're not on tanna leaves and being steered at other people.
Okay, so. That's where I am right now, trying to mulch all this into a viable idea. More later, I guess.
