I
don’t know about you, but I’m not a big runner.
I quit the U.S. Army, in fact, due to my passionate hatred of
running. And getting up at 4 am. And eating sawmill gravy. And getting mortared. Look, let’s not complicate the issue. Let’s just pretend like the reason (or even
the main reason) I quit was running.
I don’t recall there
ever being theme runs when I was a kid or as recently as a few years ago when I
was still chuff-chuff-chuffing away daily.
(Well, if there was a theme, it was like, muscular dystrophy or
something, and it wasn’t so much a theme as it was a charity we were running
for.) These days, though, everyone seems
to be going on theme runs, and after several hours of closely researching my
Facebook newsfeed I have classified these theme runs into three main types:
1) “Spartan” runs which are to ancient Sparta
roughly what Lucky Charms are to modern Dublin
2) Mud runs which seem to degenerate into pun
name contests (“The Dirty Birdies? That
rhymes! But I still wish we had come up
with Sticks in the Mud!”)
3) Zombie runs
For our purposes today
I’m going to focus on the third one.
Well, not really, since everything I’ve written up to now has been part
of a throwaway gag that really just kind of ballooned out of control. So let’s move on to the next portion of this
blogpost.
Can you name a movie
released this past year that grossed over a half a billion (with a “b”)
dollars? There are a handful, but I know
of at least one: World War Z.
Here’s another leading
question for you: do you know what the most popular show not just on cable
today, but in cable history is? Well,
even if you didn’t before just now, you probably inferred it already from all
of the hints I’ve been dropping. I’ll
just say it anyway, though: The Walking
Dead.
Now let’s take this
random assortment of half-truths and factoids and attempt to cohere them into
some kind of unassailable unified field theory.
What we know at present is that zombie movies are still making big
money, television has been reinvigorated by the zombie genre, and the shambling
dead have so infiltrated our society that otherwise ordinary people are willing
to get out of bed and exercise on
their behalves. Heck, I even learned the
other day that the Centers for Disease Control here in the U.S. has a zombie
preparedness comic book.
Regular old folks seem
to love their flesh-munching corpses.
That’s my conclusion, anyway, and there’s no arguing with
popularity. Well, there is, but it
mostly ends up with me getting sand kicked in my face and Cheryl stepping out
on me with that stupid Elvis-looking beach hunk even though I paid for those
French fries, Cheryl! But nevertheless,
let’s take this analysis one step further.
Name a popular zombie novel.
Got it? What’d you come up with?
Obviously, we’re not
really having a conversation. I mean, we
sort of can in the comments section. You
can call me a half-educated buffoon and tell me I forgot about <insert name
of important zombie novel here.> But
if I had to guess, if you’re an average Joe, you probably came up with
nothing. Or maybe World War Z. Although, to be
fair, I did mention the movie just a few short paragraphs ago, so I’m going to
claim the credit for that one myself.
Of course, World War Z (the novel) came out in
2006. The other big zombie novel that
jumps to my mind is The Rising, which
came out even longer ago, in 2003.
The Newsflesh trilogy is a little more
recent. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
Warm Bodies. I’m not going to lie: after I kind of wracked
my own brain I checked the internet and there weren’t a whole lot I was
missing. In terms of mass marketed,
significant zombie literature it seems like there’s a bit of a drought lately.
There could be any
number of reasons for that. It could be
that the zombie, conceived in folklore but born of filmmaking is an inherently
cinematic creation. Perhaps the walking
dead just don’t “play” off the screen, either big or small. For my own selfish reasons (which I will get
to in a moment) I hope that isn’t the case.
Another possibility is
that I’m focusing too much on big, popular, traditionally published books. It’s entirely possible (and according to my
GoodReads suggestion list, apparently true) that a whole shambling herd of
self-published and small press zombie novels have filled the corpse-shaped hole
in our collective hearts. The death of a
thousand bites, if you will, rather than a single killer app.
I’m *pretty* sure this
last scenario is the case. I can tell
you from my own trials and travails trying to get my own, admittedly offbeat,
zombie novel published that publishing industry professionals seem to feel the
market is saturated. I was perplexed by
this attitude for all of the reasons I’ve outlined above: the living dead seem
to be at the height of their popularity with the public and yet there aren’t a
whole lot of big-time zombie novels that jump out and bite me on the
fontanelle. I think that people are
satisfying their zombie fix with the indies.
But a third
possibility, and an entirely self-serving one at that, also occurs to me. Maybe it’s
simply that no one has written the Great Undead Novel yet. The reason that’s self serving is because my
own novel, BRAINEATER JONES, came out last week and I humbly offer it to you,
dear reader, as a contender for that title.
BRAINEATER JONES is the story of a man who woke up facedown, naked, and
dead in a swimming pool. With alcohol
the only thing that keeps his brain functioning he sets out into the
Prohibition-era urban jungle to solve his own murder.
Has JONES got what it
takes to become the ULYSSES (or, if you’re a philistine, the MOBY-DICK) of the
living dead? I don’t know. Probably not.
But one thing it does have is moxie.
That’s a ‘30s term for, like, heart, except that, you know, zombies’
hearts don’t beat. I guess I could’ve
said “pluck,” too, but that didn’t really work out for that half-baked pun I
just sort of made.
If you’d like to
contribute to the groundswell, you can purchase BRAINEATER JONES at any of
these fine retailers:
<links pending>
Or, to hear more of my
disjointed ramblings, you can follow my blog at http://manuscriptsburn.blogspot.com
or my twitter account at https://twitter.com/outfortune.
