Zombie HORROR!!

[mikailborg]

Yesterday, of course, was 'blog like it's the end of the world' day. Several people I know were caught a bit off guard, especially when reading the better-written entries. I'm interested that most of the zombiepocalypse bloggers posted as if they expected to survive all this, and with convincing feeling rather than easy melodrama. Frankly, this was more fun than NaNoWriMo as far as I'm concerned.

But I wrote in mine about 'going mad' with the shock of what's happening. I tried to imagine the other day a horrific event that would 'drive me mad'. There's not a lot I can imagine - I mean, I can imagine being terrified, sickened, appalled, but not driven insane by an event. The very sight of Cthulhu was supposed to do this, or the reading of his forbidden books; but I suspect that had more to do with the awful realization that such things could exist in a universe of which we'd pridefully assumed we were the supreme center.

Last week I read about a story involving a 100-foot-long house with a 110-foot-long hallway inside!!! For a while, i thought that might be my road - how would my scientific, skeptical mind embrace this physical impossibility? It might DRIVE ME MAD!

But maybe not. I have a built-in error-protection routine for these situations, which is to simply say "There's something going on here that I don't understand." If I "know" that you can't fit 110 feet of corridor in 100 feet of domicile, but I am forced by the evidence of my own measuring tape to concede that that's what seems to be happening, I don't need to shriek "That's IMPOSSIBLE!" and run from the building, I need only admit that I can't explain this, and start looking for answers.

A zombie can scare me, might consume me, but can't make me admit there isn't an explanation somewhere :)

Comments

[jdunson.livejournal.com]

Well, *any* zombies are pretty much impossible, which I kind of alluded to; the question, given a seeming impossibility, is how one reacts. When I had free moments I'd be worrying about what was going on, because how best to survive depends on figuring out what the source is.

If we assume that it *was* a world-wide outbreak, that implies strongly that it was either actively spread by a hostile force, or that it was dormant for a long time and then triggered. Both of which tend to imply alien nanotech terror weapons, black government projects gone awry, or the like rather than, say, chemical spills or indian burial grounds.

If we consider that "June 13" isn't a simultaneous worldwide event, that tends to imply either something like high-altitude UFOs spreading stuff worldwide, flying West with the sun targeting morning rush hours as a good way to estimate population concentrations; or perhaps something that's a multi-stage trigger, one of which is sunlight. The fact that the majority of surviving bloggers tended to be people working in office buildings with artificial light and little sunlight exposure might be considered supporting evidence, albeit tenuous.

Oddly enough, the other obvious "people aren't dying everywhere" possibility is the classic "god(ess) of the dead isn't doing their job for some reason" bit. Distracted, captured, disillusioned, dead themselves, fighting in a distant dimension, caught in a time loop, whatever... there's a whole lot of fiction across multiple genres where when the boss of the dead isn't collecting, the should-be-dead don't stop.

[anterus.livejournal.com]

I dunno, James, I just figured it was a Brooksian Class 4 Outbreak, the likes of which he describes in The Zombie Survial Guide and on which World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is based.

Good books, both of those, and definitely what were on my mind for this.