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My So-Called Death: 7 Books with Thinking Zombies
Vampires tend to go on at length about their post-life agonies—the romantic intrigues, the moral conflict of blood drinking, the tragic isolation of immortality… Bloodsuckers are chatty folk, once you get past the brooding. Zombie, not so much—we rarely get their perspective on life and undeath; they are simple, mindless creatures. The thinking zombie is an interesting anomaly, often unique even among other zombies in the narratives.
Liv Moore, the lead of iZombie, premiering tonight on The CW, joins a number of other of her kind able to expound on their trials and tribulations. iZombie is based on the same-named comic, but it appears to have key differences from its source material. (Even the name of the titular zombie is different.) In the show, after her zombification, Liv Moore takes a job at the coroner’s office, which gives her access to the brains she needs to eat to survive. She also acquires the memories of the deceased when she consumes a brain, which can aid the police in murder mysteries. I’m jazzed to hear what she has to say.
Typically, the thinking zombie is that most unfortunate of supernatural beings, afflicted with a decaying perishability, but with immortality that will eventually make that state unbearable. In these 7 novels, the zombies do not repair or revitalize, instead living a half-life, lingering, driven by their unnatural appetites, and eager to talk about it.
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Breathers: a Zombie’s Lament, by S.G. Browne
A rom-zom-com in the vein of Chuck Palahniuk, Breathers follows lovers Andy and Rita after they meet at an Undead Anonymous meeting. Breathers shun zombies, and have more or less stripped them of their civil rights, a reoccurring theme in novels of the thinking undead. When Andy and Rita are slipped human flesh by a zombie activist and begin to understand their own disenfranchisement, they are galvanized to take legal action on the part of their zombie brethren. I don’t mean to make this sound drearily political, because it’s much more quipping than monologuing. But then, both horror and comedy often belie more serious messages.
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Dearly, Departed by Lia Habel
Nora Dearly is a teen in New Victoria, a steampunky post-apocalyptic society, who, through a series of accidents, ends up a captive in a camp of zombie soldiers. The sentient zombies are working clandestinely for the government to put down the more rabid of their kind. Nora and zombie soldier Gram Griswold enact a Pyramus and Thisbe style courtship through a door, which I found genuinely affecting. Alas, undead flesh grosses me out, and I ultimately allied with the anti-zombie bigots. When zombies stand in for persecuted minorities, there is a certain unavoidable decay informing the metaphor.
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The Girl with All the Gifts, by M.R. Carey
Melanie is taken five days a week, washed in chemicals, and then chained to a desk in a classroom with other children. Sometimes one of the other children disappears, and they never return. Their teacher is the rueful Miss Justineau, who offers the children some of the only kindness they have ever received. Melanie’s perspective widens through the novel, and ours widens with it. Though Carey eventually tackles larger questions of society and humanity, the intense relationship between Miss Justineau and Melanie is the beating heart of the book. Sometimes it’s not about the thinking zombies, but the feeling ones.
My Life as a White Trash Zombie, by Diana Rowland
Angela Crawford, a high school dropout and addict, wakes up from an overdose and a car accident without a scratch on her… and an inexplicable craving for brains. She’s blackmailed into a job at the morgue, where she slowly comes to understand her undead state. Like Liv from iZombie, she must consume brains to keep from going feral, though unlike Liv, the murder mystery is her own. There’s a lot of comedy in Rowland’s novel, though much of it is the kind that whistles past the graveyard.
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Raising Stony Mayhall, by Daryl Gregory
In the world of Gregory’s novel, Night of the Living Dead is a documentary of the first rising, though after the zombies’ initial murderous impulses pass, they resolve back into thinking creatures. Stony Mayhall is found on the side of the road as a zombie infant, and taken in and raised by a family in Iowa. Stony is unique: he isn’t turned, but grows impossibly from a zombie child into a zombie man. The undead are hunted and feared, and Stony spends much of the novel in one kind of confinement or another. Hands down, this is the most thoughtful, philosophical exploration of the tropes of zombie fiction on this list, a thinking zombie novel on several levels.
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Revival, by Tim Seeley and Mike Norton
This ongoing comic follows the denizens of Wausau, Wisconsin, after a discrete and local reanimation: on one day, in this one town, all the people who died got back up. The series is subtitled a “rural noir,” and as such, its undead aren’t shambling biters so much as uneasy revenants and reminders: a child complains of cold, an old woman (horribly) can’t get her dentures to fit. It is more creeping dread than bloodbath, but even then, there’s a fair amount of blood in the snow. One of the revived (one who isn’t officially counted) is the sister of a sheriff’s deputy, and the complicated family dynamics dovetail into the larger issues of quarantine and small town life.
Warm Bodies, by Isaac Marion
In this update of Romeo and Juliet, the zombie R eats Perry’s brains, and acquires both his memories and affection for the lovely Julie. Much of the novel is narrated from R’s locked-in zombie point of view, and his inability to express himself is both frustrating and horrifying. Like its young lovers, Warm Bodies maybe isn’t as deep as it wants to be, but R’s tongue-tied urgency resonates with us fools who remember love’s first bite.
Who’s your favorite zombie with a brain?