Husk Chronicles, #6 — tweaking zombies

How do you tweak a zombie?

Pinch his behind and run like hell.

Thank all that’s holy that joke didn’t make it into the book.

Once again, with feel­ing; how do you tweak a zombie?

In a pre­vi­ous post, I wrote of my fond­ness for the zom­bie as the ulti­mate mon­ster (he is us, he is metaphor, etc). I also com­mit­ted the car­di­nal sin of admit­ting that, as per­son­al­i­ties, zom­bies are really bor­ing. In regards to the think­ing zom­bie, your cin­e­matic pick­ings are slim: there was Bub in Day of the Dead, he has glim­mer­ings of an inter­nal mono­logue; Big Daddy in Land of the Dead almost led an undead rev­o­lu­tion; and Fido in Fido becomes a beloved fam­ily pet. But even in those instances, it’s still all groans and moans and shuf­fling and appetite. There is some actual thought into the moral­ity of the undead in Return of the Liv­ing Dead, where two men become infected, die, and still walk about con­vers­ing and won­der­ing what the hell is hap­pen­ing to them, but even there (SPOILERS), the full zom­bie effect soon hits one (result­ing in drool­ing attacks of the can­ni­bal­is­tic nature), and the other cre­mates him­self before he can lose all control.

No, if you want to have your zom­bie become a main char­ac­ter, with moti­va­tions and per­sonal issues and qualms and ques­tions of moral­ity ver­sus the need for brunch, you’re going to have to:

1. write a book, because you need the expan­sive­ness of paper to fully delve into psy­cho­log­i­cal ram­blings, and
2. do some seri­ous rejig­ger­ing on the mythology.

Or at least I did, and I’m hardly the first; check out the spec­tac­u­lar anthol­ogy The Liv­ing Dead for a cor­nu­copia of tal­ented authors push­ing at the lim­its of zom­bie lit­er­a­ture. David Welling­ton threw some curve­balls in his Mon­ster tril­ogy, Robin Becker kept an innate intel­li­gence func­tion­ing behind the decay­ing brain of her hero in Brains: A Zom­bie Mem­oir, and although I haven’t got­ten to read it yet, I’ve heard very inter­est­ing things about S.G. Browne’s Breathers.

For my own take on it, I wanted to make sure that Shel­don Funk (my zom­bitag­o­nist) retained the basic ele­ments of the clas­sic undead; he had to eat peo­ple. He could feel con­flicted, he could debate the moral­ity, but in the end he needed to feast on the sweet sweet tang of human flesh, or rot away to noth­ing. A lit­tle wish-wash namby-pambiness was fine, but I needed Shel­don to be a mon­ster, albeit a mon­ster you can relate to. Darn it, I wanted the guy to be nice. With­out that, there would be no rea­son to fol­low his adventures.

So I kept far more aspects of human­ity intact after Sheldon’s res­ur­rec­tion, and made him out to be my ‘patient zero,’ my Typhoid Mary. He would wield those cer­tain char­ac­ter traits that any objec­tive observer might clas­sify as ‘ghoul­ish’ (the bit­ing, the rot­ting, the pos­si­bil­ity of infec­tion, the lack of a heart­beat), but he would still retain the capac­ity for ratio­nal thought and intel­li­gent speech (although the sec­ond is far harder than you’d think). Peo­ple can then react to him either as a man or a demon, as he con­tains aspects of both.

This is what I call ‘tweak­ing,’ and what oth­ers may call ‘dis­tor­tion’ or ‘out­right wrong.’ But I feel that if a cer­tain best­selling author can cre­ate a cult around vam­pires who twin­kle in the day­time, I should be allowed a great deal of lat­i­tude with how a rean­i­mated corpse might behave. Per­son­ally, rather than admit any ances­try to Twi­light’s hor­ri­bly bland sham­pires, I feel Shel­don is far more a cousin to Steven Sherril’s sad and lonely Greek mon­ster in the won­der­ful The Mino­taur Takes a Cig­a­rette Break, slav­ing away through eter­nity as a short-order cook.

If you do have a prob­lem with my tak­ing of zom­bie lib­er­ties, I can only sug­gest that, rather than com­plain, you write your own book on the subject.

That’ll show me.