Zombies!

I'm doing something I never thought I'd do and writing a short story involving the undead.
Shaun of the Dead had me crying with laughter. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies had me shaking my head at the thought that anything further or more knowingly ridiculous could be wrung out of this hackneyed subject.
It's a challenge. Stephen King did a brilliant job of reviving and modernising the vampire genre in his story, The Night Flier. Having said which, he's Stephen King ...
So why bother trying?
Because the mythology of the undead, born with African magic, evolving though the voodoo rituals of Haiti and New Orleans, is both terrifying and at its dark heart, plausible.
Most of my story is set in Haiti. And though the events are recalled in the present, they take place in 1934; when aeroplanes were powered by propellers and people travelled on tramp steamers and communicated by Morse Code and Marconi sets and telegrams and pre-arranged long-distance telephone calls and there was more ambiguity in the world because you couldn't film everything on your Iphone and download it directly onto Youtube.
A bit of a cheat, perhaps, staging the events nearly eighty years ago. But they're recalled by an eye-witness and they reverberate right into the present. and the story is more atmospheric with a bit of distance and period detail.
Anyway, in my view at least, the past is vastly more sinister than the present contrives to be.