Isaac Marion
This may surprise and confuse you, but I don't have a favorite zombie novel. I've never read one that I liked.
Zombies are fascinating creatures but they're so rarely used for anything that interests me. Human beings who have lost their identities and exist as hollow shells of themselves, following destructive instincts they can't understand or control--that's an amazing concept that's ripe with potential, but it got hijacked by incurious minds and reduced to its most boring elements: violence and disgust. Just one more voiceless, implacable threat for protagonists to run from. In most zombie fiction, you could swap the zombies with aliens, robots, disease, or bad weather and the story would barely change at all. That's boring to me. People running from things is boring to me. People shooting things is boring to me. I need curiosity and emotion and exploration of ideas. If there's going to be something as unique as a walking human corpse in your story, I need you to do something unique with it. I need a compelling reason for it to be zombies instead of sharks or tornadoes or some combination thereof.
There are a lot of zombie MOVIES that I love, especially the comedies like Shaun of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead, and Fido, but I need a little more substance out of novels since they're such a huge commitment of time and mental energy, and I haven't come across many zombie novels that even claim to offer substance. So unless you consider The Road a zombie novel, the only one that's intrigued me enough to read it is Zone One, by Colson Whitehead, because I was curious what an ultra literary author like Whitehead would do with the genre. I'm still not really sure what it was he did with it--it's a very opaque story--so the search continues.
And yes, I'm very aware of the irony of a guy who built his career on a zombie novel saying he doesn't like any zombie novels. But the genre has gotten so mired in its lowest-common-denominator, gross-out horror roots that it's rare to see anyone trying something ambitious with it. If I ever heard about a zombie novel that promised to be fresh and different and to push boundaries in some way, I'd be excited to read it. But most seem content to wallow in genre conventions, and nothing is more boring to me than contentment.
Zombies are fascinating creatures but they're so rarely used for anything that interests me. Human beings who have lost their identities and exist as hollow shells of themselves, following destructive instincts they can't understand or control--that's an amazing concept that's ripe with potential, but it got hijacked by incurious minds and reduced to its most boring elements: violence and disgust. Just one more voiceless, implacable threat for protagonists to run from. In most zombie fiction, you could swap the zombies with aliens, robots, disease, or bad weather and the story would barely change at all. That's boring to me. People running from things is boring to me. People shooting things is boring to me. I need curiosity and emotion and exploration of ideas. If there's going to be something as unique as a walking human corpse in your story, I need you to do something unique with it. I need a compelling reason for it to be zombies instead of sharks or tornadoes or some combination thereof.
There are a lot of zombie MOVIES that I love, especially the comedies like Shaun of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead, and Fido, but I need a little more substance out of novels since they're such a huge commitment of time and mental energy, and I haven't come across many zombie novels that even claim to offer substance. So unless you consider The Road a zombie novel, the only one that's intrigued me enough to read it is Zone One, by Colson Whitehead, because I was curious what an ultra literary author like Whitehead would do with the genre. I'm still not really sure what it was he did with it--it's a very opaque story--so the search continues.
And yes, I'm very aware of the irony of a guy who built his career on a zombie novel saying he doesn't like any zombie novels. But the genre has gotten so mired in its lowest-common-denominator, gross-out horror roots that it's rare to see anyone trying something ambitious with it. If I ever heard about a zombie novel that promised to be fresh and different and to push boundaries in some way, I'd be excited to read it. But most seem content to wallow in genre conventions, and nothing is more boring to me than contentment.
More Answered Questions
weirdkim
asked
Isaac Marion:
Greetings Sir! I would just like to say that I am a huge fan of yours ever since I read Warm Bodies three years ago. It's one of my favorites and I really like how unusual it is. (in a good way) :) I just found out now that you're writing a sequel to Warm Bodies, the second book and the prequel. My question is, is it already published as a book? Cause I would love to buy it if it is. Thank you.
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Oct 16, 2015 12:45PM · flag
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