This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It (John Dies at the End, #2)

by David Wong

That is why we fear the zombie. The zombie looks like a man, walks like a man, eats and otherwise functions fully, yet is devoid of the spark. It represents the nagging doubt that lays deep in the heart of even the most zealous believer: behind all of your pretty songs and stained glass, this is what you really are. Shambling meat.

Our fear is that we are already zombies.

“So if your neighbor or whatever calls them and says they suspect you are infected, you get dumped into that camp or whatever. Which is full of hundreds of people who are infected and have turned into monsters and stuff.” “That’s what we’re hearing, yes.” “Oh, wow, that’s like the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

I’m impressed that you did this, you’re amazing for just making this trip. But you don’t know what you’re doing with that thing. And I think there’s a one percent chance you’re going to actually need the guns and a ninety-nine percent chance that a stray cat is going to jump out of the shadows and you’re all going to shoot each other. And me.”

War is about remaking the world to suit the whims of some powerful group over the whims of some other powerful group. The dead are just the sparks that fly from the metal as they grind it down.”

And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do, and now nothing will be restrained from them. Let us go down, and there confound their language.’ It’s right there in the text, Mr. Wong—God’s motivation in that story is that he was afraid. He limited our ability to communicate because he was afraid that, operating as one, we would challenge His power.”

“We simplify tens of millions of individuals down into simplistic stereotypes, so that they hold the space of only one individual in our limited available memory slots. And here is the key—those who lie outside the circle are not human. We lack the capacity to recognize them as such. This is why you feel worse about your girlfriend cutting her finger than you do about an earthquake in Afghanistan that kills a hundred thousand people. This is what makes genocide possible. This is what makes it possible for a CEO to sign off on a policy that will poison a river in Malaysia and create ten thousand deformed infants. Because of this limitation in the mental hardware, those Malaysians may as well be ants.”

All moral choices seem easy when you don’t actually have to make them.”

I suddenly remembered two dozen horrible kid shows my adoptive parents made me watch on VHS, where in the final scene the main character always turned toward the camera and said some variation of, “I know how we’ll solve this problem! With Christianity.”

One of my most read essays was about Dunbar’s number, a theory that is simultaneously obvious and (to me) mind-blowing. It begins with a simple, inescapable idea: your ability to care about other people is finite.

Likewise, you’ve certainly noticed that loosely organized groups, from fantasy football leagues to niche fandoms to cults, are usually peaceful as long as they’re small. As they grow in membership, there’s a tipping point where petty squabbles break out and factions form.

I think our present state of ceaseless anxiety is largely rooted in the fact that modern society requires us to do something we should by all rights find physically impossible: to peacefully coordinate and cooperate with hundreds of coworkers, thousands of neighbors, and millions of fellow citizens simultaneously. If everyday life feels overwhelming, that’s because it literally is that.

We can sit in gridlocked traffic, seething that all of these idiots in their cars had the nerve to do, well, the exact thing we are doing.

If a passenger in our vehicle scolds us for being indifferent to the dead motorist, they’ll use a phrase like, “Imagine that was your spouse or best friend up there!” which is just another way of saying, “Imagine if that person was in your circle of one hundred and fifty and thus recognizable to your brain as an actual human being worthy of your concern!”

Above all else, a zombie apocalypse promises to relieve the audience’s overloaded brain. Imagine stripping away every interpersonal connection aside from a dozen or so scrappy survivors, everyone else replaced by a nameless, unfeeling, shambling corpse you can murder without a second thought.

(did you notice that authoritarian regimes always promise a return to a simpler, less anxious past?).