I don’t think it’s much of a secret that I’m no great fan of modern, so-called zombies in fiction (written or filmed). Mainly because most of the time the revenants aren’t really zombies – just the living dead (by means explained or not), and generally with a taste for living flesh (brains!!!!). I don’t think anyone has ever explained how they’re supposed to digest their meals, or moan, for that matter (they’re dead – they don’t breath!).
Yes, I get that Romero’s living dead are meant to be metaphors for capitalism, but most of the time the so-called zombies are clichéd, shambling corpses that can still
somehow overtake a running healthy person (The Walking Dead TV series really
did miss the clue in the title).
However, I have been guilty of committing my own zombie stories a couple
of times – although in my defence I do try and go for the traditional, raised
from the dead and used as slaves motif (no doubt clumsily).
The first was “Zombie Dance” in the second Damian Paladin collection, Walkers In Shadow, and the second has just been published in the Weirdbook Annual: Zombies!.
Entitled “O Mary Don’t You Mourn”, it’s a kind of Weird Western (if New Orleans
can be said to be in the West), set around 1866/67, and featuring a Navajo
character I came up with back in the late 1970s (when I started work on a truly
appalling Western novel – long consigned to the trash-heap of history), and resurrected
not-quite-dead that are a little closer to the zombie of voodoo legend – and inspired
by that nasty fungus which turns insects into suicidal spore spreaders (not to
mention imagery from William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night”, which
gave me the heebie-jeebies the first time I read it as a kid).
So, Weird Western zombie story. Another phrase I never thought I’d be
applying to my fiction.
