Zombies Suck and If You Like Zombies It's Because You're Dumb. And You Smell.

    I don’t usually vent in my blog posts, but I’m really getting tired of the anti-zombie discrimination that seems to be getting more and more rampant these days. I’ve come to expect it in certain places and have learned to live with it, but one place I hate to see it is in a zombie book. Yes, that’s right, in a zombie book. I opened a book on my Kindle yesterday and in the author’s notes he described the way he was browbeat into helping write it with his partner despite the fact that he found zombie books to be, “…played out, trite, boring, and in most cases, downright bad.”
    Wow, excuse the rest of us who enjoy them and took a momentary interest in your book before deleting it from our e-readers when we realized what an uppity douche you are. Why would you publish a book and insult fans of that book’s genre before you even begin to tell the story? Why not keep it to yourself altogether? Oh, I see. It’s because YOU’RE the guy who’s going to write the brilliant masterpiece that changes the entire genre and saves us brain-dead, zombie-loving schleps from ourselves. YOU’RE the one that the prophecies told us would come and enlighten us. Well, thanks but no thanks, Mr. Self-important. I choose to wallow in the same cesspool of ignorance I’ve spent most of my life in and will continue to read the books I love while somehow managing to not drown in my own drool.
    Believe it or not, I also see this discrimination amongst other fans of horror. I belong to a few horror discussion groups on the internets. For the most part, I love the groups, but whenever someone posts anything about zombies, the horror intellectuals come out to sneer at it. Fortunately, there isn’t a ‘disdain’ font. If there was, that’s what they would all use to type their replies, which usually go something like this:
    “Zombies are dumb. Everyone at the coffeehouse I hang out at says so. Tonight’s slam poetry night. I can’t wait.”
    “I’m better than you, because I’ve read all of Joe Hill’s books and you haven’t.”
    “If you’ve never read Kin or When We Join Jesus In Hell it’s because your parents were probably siblings.”
    Maybe when they’re done typing those things they take their noses out of the air long enough to smell the stink of arrogance on themselves. I doubt it, but one can always hope.
    I’ll never understand some people’s need to crap on the things that other people enjoy. I’m sure I’ll ever get around to reading any of the Twilight books. Nothing about them appeals to me at all. However, millions of people love the series. Who am I to judge what others enjoy? Poetry is another good example. It’s the creative outlet for a lot of people. Being deemed a Poet Laureate is an esteemed honor. Last I checked, there were no Horror Laureates, although I think there should be. Despite all that poetry means to the world of literature, the art form is lost on me. I have no use for it whatsoever. Maybe that makes me unsophisticated, well, a lot of things make me unsophisticated, but it’s just not my thing. I do not, however, run around trashing poetry because it doesn’t appeal to me. I’ve always been a ‘whatever floats your boat’ kind of guy. Especially on subjects that involve reading and writing. To me, anything that gets your nose in a book is a good thing, especially if it’s a zombie book.