An anthology of revisionist zombie stories. Feh.

I wish people would stop trying to re-invent the wheel. Anyone who’s in the market for a good wheel wants to stick to the basics, and anyone who would buy a square wheel didn’t have transportation in mind to begin with. Basically, I distain ‘originality’ when it is merely a fashionable affectation.

Trying to re-work a classic horror story, let alone an entire genre, seldom bears out fruit. On its surface, the attempt usually ends up producing something so entirely non-frightening as to be laughable. Underneath the veneer, the gesture usually belies on the part of the revisionist, a total ignorance of what makes said genre work, if not an actual contempt for its conventions. I could write volumes of theory on what makes zombies so damn scary. Are there merely a tangible representation of death itself? As slow as shambolic as the creatures may at first seem, their progress is inevitable, and their arrival most likely sooner than you think. Do they represent mindless conformity? The death of the spirit? Is because they often tend to be cannibals? (Our primal fears dictate that being killed and then devoured is much more terrifying than simply dying.)

An anthology centered around one of these themes, or a thousand others may have been worth reading. As it is, the approach to theme in this collection is cripplingly haphazard. Stories range from the insufferably self important, to the mirthlessly ludicrous. The only overlapping theme being that there is not a single occurrence of the classic flesh-eating Romero-esque zombie (you know, the good, interesting kind) to be found. Specimens range from voodoo-style zombies, to things which have no right posing as the undead to begin with. Of course, this might be forgivable if the actual entries in ‘Zombie’ weren’t so uniformly mediocre.

Some of the most overrated hack author of the century have works appearing in ‘Zombie’. Anne Rice, the woman who single-handedly ruined vampires for the past few decades, here shows her talents with the deliriously off-topic ‘Carmilla’. (Carmilla is a vegetative patient, possibly-I forget as Rice’s prose is so mind-numbingly banal-under the control of some mystical influence. If she’s a zombie, so was Terri Schiavo.) I’ve never sampled Rice’s writing before, for obvious reasons (I’m a heterosexual male, with a library full of actual horror books to muse over) but if this is representative of her style, I’m even more puzzled by her success. She displays a HUGE interest in describing the most minute and irrelevant details of the setting, almost like an obsessive/compulsive Raymond Chandler. Forget being scary, or even interesting, this story barely has characters or happenings! That might get in the way of us achieving full knowledge of the texture of the trim overlapping the wainscoting of Carmilla’s bedroom!
Harland Ellison’s entry ‘Z is for Zombie’, is, I think, supposed to be humorous. It really just winds up being embarrassing, which if you know much about him comes as no shock. Ellison excels at making an ass of himself, but to be funny requires one to have actual wit. Simply being a sore-headed petulant crank doesn’t cut it.
(Shucks, and I try so hard!)

But I’m off on another tangent. Most of the other entries consist of failed social commentary, limp satire, and tedious melodrama. To be fair, I say most and not all, as I could not bring myself to finish such a messy and discursive collection. Frankly, it’s not that ‘Zombie’ is abominable, it’s just that it has no purpose in existing, what with the glut of horror anthologies and much better zombie compilations already on the market. Feel free to pass it up.