ZOMBIE NOVEL: BEHIND THE SCENES

After my last major push, I'm up to 65,000 words in my Zombie Novel, DEATHBREED. Holy Smokes! You might be asking yourself, what does 65,000 words look like? It all depends on the font, line breaks and type size. In "manuscript" form (12 pt. Courier, double-spaced) it equals 260 pages (that figure would be significantly cut down in final publication form). But remember, I'm not done yet. I would guess the finished product will be around 250-300 pages, especially if I end up going over my 90,000 word target number.

There are times when the novel writes itself and times where I stare at the page and get little to nothing done. If I can't get anything done on the novel directly, I like to spend the time affecting it indirectly by doing research. Brushing up on Strunk & White's ELEMENTS OF STYLE (available free online), or consulting wikis on subjects such as plague, riots, and martial law. I also like to keep abreast of what the competition is up to (both past and present) so I know what works and what doesn't in a zombie novel. After having read what I consider to be the major fictional works on zombies, I can breathe a sigh of relief and say that what I am doing is not what they are doing. Not that there aren't similarities dictated by the origins and nature of the genre, or shared influences and inspirations. In particular, I don't want to cast aspersions on what anyone else is doing, because I was most definitely entertained by reading their works. But as a first-time novelist, I want to tell a unique story and tell it in my own voice. I don't want to make a carbon copy of anything that has gone before.

How many different ways are there to tell the story of the Zombie Apocalypse? Aside from variations in the nature of the zombies themselves or the cause of the plague that created them, and how society responds to that threat, I would say that the single most important way to make your story unique is through your characters and how they react to the end of the world. If you look back on NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968 or 1990) and DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978), what made them work? Why do they stick with us for the rest of our lives and continue to draw new fans, decades later? It's not the gore, not the zombies... it's the characters.

Zombies are unlike most other monsters. They don't talk, don't plan, don't do anything except try to catch you, eat you, and make you one of them. This isn't Count Dracula or Freddy Krueger we're talking about. There is no complicated strategy, clever one-liners or anything else you'd attribute to a standard villain. It's like being attacked by a school of hungry piranha. If you know zombies are present and take reasonable precautions, you should survive. It's only when you get overconfident or freak out that you run into trouble. Unfortunately, you can only stay "sharp" so long, and everybody flips out sooner or later under the right conditions. The more people in your group, or the less well you get along or know each other, the faster bad things will happen. Are you running a democracy or a dictatorship? You probably don't have a lot of time to sit around and discuss a rapidly deteriorating situation, not if you want to live... Great, so now you have a plan! How much can you really trust anyone not to screw it up or fuck you over? Especially people you just met who are operating under impossible stress and in "do or die" circumstances? Can you count on your group to be reasonable, to follow orders? No.

The problem is that people are not, by nature, reasonable. They are selfish, greedy, stupid and self-destructive. Society imposes a certain level of reasonableness upon us via a system of legal consequences. Strip that threat away and you have chaos, anarchy. Might makes right, only the strong survive, etc. What would you do when confronted by the complete freedom to do whatever you wanted? Money is worthless, so you must steal to get what you need to survive. You probably don't give that a second thought. Your former friends, neighbors and loved ones are trying to eat you, so you start killing them. At first, you find it horrible, but you quickly get used to it if you want to live. Then let's say somebody in your group gets bitten, infected. Do you really want to keep them around? What if they die when nobody's looking and suddenly reanimate in your shelter? Do you kill them or leave them to die? Do you take the risk of keeping them with you?

Now let's say there's a total bastard (example: "Harry Cooper" from NOTLD) in your group. He constantly antagonizes you, hoards stuff you need for himself and selfishly puts the group in danger. He refuses, or only pretends to, listen to reason. What do you do? Do you throw him out, knowing it's a probable death sentence? What if he doesn't get eaten but comes back, maybe with more bastards like him, to kill you or burn down your shelter as revenge? Or maybe he becomes a zombie and by instinct, leads more zombies back to your shelter? Do you kill him outright? Remember, you can do anything now. There is no law except "Do What Thou Wilt." You have to think of your own survival and of those you care about. The old rules don't apply, and if you try to make them, some very bad things can happen to you in short order. Are you even willing or able to live in a world like that? Seeing how different people react to a rapidly devolving, crisis situation is at the heart of any good, apocalyptic story.

We should not rule out the zombie menace altogether; it's what brought our characters together. After all, what do zombies represent? Fear of our own mortality, of conformity, germs, and crowds; loss of identity, control, of everything that makes you "you." To quote Barbara (Patricia Tallman) in the 1990 remake of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, "We're them and they're us." That makes zombies a powerful symbol. I think that's why there are so many social commentaries "hidden" inside zombie movies. Some are deliberately inserted, while the most effective simply creep in all by themselves without the author even realizing it, as was the case with the 1968 NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (contrary to revisionist historians).

With all this in mind, I can get back to work on my novel. I think it's going to be a good one!