The Walking Dead in an Age of Anxiety

After the release of my zombie novel, Resurrection, City Journal asked if I could explain why so many people worldwide are obsessed with zombies. Here’s the first part of my essay:

“Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us,” the German poet and journalist Heinrich Heine wrote in 1842, “and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of Saint John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in compari...