If you could rename what we know as "zombies," what would you call them?

Isaac Marion It's so interesting what a loaded word "zombie" is. When I'm describing my books, there's a visible shut-down in people's faces the moment I say it. You'll notice shows like Z-Nation and iZombie (campy) say it freely, but Walking Dead (serious) avoids it. Even back in 2013 when the Warm Bodies movie was coming out, Summit knew this and tried to avoid it as much as possible. When I attended their press junket, they actually told me and all the actors to say "the undead" instead of "zombie" because their test groups had shown that people shut off when they hear the z-word.

And I totally get it. "Zombies" have become so inextricably linked with a certain aesthetic, a certain bargain-bin realm of ultra-formulaic B-movies and B-books, corny jokes and kitschy merchandise. It's almost a one-word punchline. So if you're trying to do something different with the concept of undeath, you'd be wise to avoid it.

I didn't avoid it in Warm Bodies, because Warm Bodies was partially a joke. It was partially a winking inversion of the zombie genre, so I couldn't avoid that connection. But now that the joke is over and I'm moving on into the deeper implications of a world where the dead come back to life (or half-life), it's a problem.

Because zombies are silly, and this isn't silly anymore. It's not about green ghouls stumbling around groaning "braaaains." It's about people in a dark state of consciousness fighting to recover their humanity. So what do I call these people?

I never found a great solution to the problem. I do say "zombie" here and there in THE BURNING WORLD but I usually say "the Dead" instead. Or "Dead man" "Dead person" etc. It's not perfect, because it only works in prose where you can see the capital D. In real life, you'd have the problem they had in the movie where they called them "corpses"—those words already mean something. How do you differentiate? You can't use the same word for an inert carcass that you do for a walking, talking human body. That's confusing.

So...basically, I don't know. I have generally been going with "dead people" and just making sure the context implies that they're "not QUITE dead." It's a bit imprecise, a bit poetic, but I guess that's the type of story I'm writing.

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