All Aboard the Zombie Train

Do you remember your first encounter with a zombie?

Mine was Return of the Living Dead — and wow, I haven’t been the same since.

It happened on a dismal, rainy night in New Jersey, the summer after seventh grade; the movie theater was small and squalid, a two-screener wedged into a strip mall between a Chinese restaurant and a dollar store. My friend and I slinked self-consciously inside. Did the usher who collected our tickets care that two 12-year-old boys were entering an R-Rated movie? If so, he said nothing, staring with glassy eyes into the remaining abyss of his eight-hour shift.

The movie began. Hunkered down in my seat, I was both transfixed and terrified. In possibly the single most transformational 90 minutes of my life, I had absorbed my first-ever viewing of tar-faced zombies munching human brains… and on top of that, full-frontal female nudity!!! (Although many years later I learned that Linnea Quigley, the actress playing Trash, had been wearing a latex pubic cover-up. Childhood memories are never what they seem.)

Shaken, I emerged from the theater to find the rain hammering down on the parking lot, the pavement glistening yellow from reflected streetlights. It was as if the movie had followed me outside — the steamy summer night air loaded with Trioxin 245, seeping into the ground, summoning rotten corpses to eat my brain. My friend and I scooted back to his house, scared out of our minds, legs ready to bolt if we saw zombies charging down the street.

We made it home alive. But 25 years later, I still have nightmares about that damn movie. About zombies. And sometimes about full-frontal female nudity, but I’m working on that in therapy.

Now, probably like you, I’ve seen a hundred zombie films since that night — some great, some awful. The zombie subgenre has long been established, following in George Romero’s (and Richard Matheson’s) honourable footsteps. So as a writer, why keep going? Because zombie fiction will always need an influx of new material, recruiting new fans from the dark corners of New Jersey and everywhere else in the world. I’m here to support the cause.

In today’s extreme wealth of movies, books, graphic novels and video games, zombies might seem like a runaway train — but it’s a train that we all join at different points along the track, and there’s no telling where first-time riders might climb aboard. If you’re lucky like me, it’s Return of the Living Dead. If you’re not so lucky, it’s Redneck Zombies. You never know whether the movie you make or the book you write will be somebody’s first zombie experience, good or bad. Maybe somebody reads THE RETURN MAN and thinks it’s cool, and as a result they want more; so they dig in and discover my favourites, the true canon of the subgenre — the Romero trilogy and World War Z and Shaun of the Dead. Now that would be awesome.

So whether THE RETURN MAN is your first zombie novel, or whether you’ve read more than you can count, welcome aboard the zombie train. I’ve saved you a seat.