I’ve been reading some zombie novels lately; among others, I’ve read ‘Dead City’, ‘The Rising’, and ‘Day By Day Armageddon’…and I have to say, at the risk of offending authors who have some online presence (and plenty of online fans), most of them are really not that good. The current crop of zombie books tend to regurgitate Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead”, with a dash of “28 Days Later” for that bioweapon flavor and a generous helping of Mary-Sue-ism to boot. (One exception is David Wellington’s “Monster Island” and its sequels, which do some eye-poppingly clever things with the zombie apocalypse concept.)
And yet, the whole reason I picked them up is that I love zombie movies…and I gotta say, I love the cheesy ones just as much as the brilliant ones. “Nightmare City”, “Hell of the Living Dead”, “The Dead Next Door”, “Feeding the Masses” (which actually had a brilliant script, let down by sub-pornographic actors)…bad or good, I cheerfully watch them from beginning to end. Sometimes, the worse they are the better they are. “Diary of the Dead” is never going to match up to Romero’s earlier masterpieces, but I guarantee you, you will never find a movie with a more bad-ass Amish farmer or drama teacher.
So what’s the difference? Why do I love a bad zombie movie, but grow furious at the lack of ambition and drive behind the majority of most zombie novels? The answer, and I think a lot of readers will find it obvious, is the level of investment needed to finish a movie versus a book. A ninety minute movie lasts ninety minutes, and then it’s over. Whether that ninety minutes is filled with “Shaun of the Dead”, or “Shadow: Dead Riot”, they’re both done when the credits roll.
But a good 300-page book and a bad 300-page book…the former flies by almost on its own, as your mind pictures the story so vividly that you don’t even notice turning the pages. Whereas the latter crawls past at a snail’s pace, as your brain rebels at the thought of reading even one more sentence. You find yourself easily distracted, making excuses to put the book down…and yet, when you work up the nerve to get back to it, the book is right there waiting for you exactly where you left off. It’s like a movie that pauses itself whenever it thinks you’ve stopped paying attention.
And a horror movie can descend to the level of “so bad it’s good.” Inept comedy is merely excruciatingly dull, while inept horror can sometimes become brilliant comedy (which is why the movie “The Mad”, with Billy Zane, failed so badly. But I digress.) But the failings of prose are different than the failings of film, and what can inspire you to watch a bad movie again and again merely inspires you to throw a book at the wall so hard it makes a dent.
It’s a curious difference, the way that engaging with a work of bad art can produce such different effects in different media. The bad zombie movie only attains its true potential as entertainment when the audience engages with it, refusing to passively accept it and instead dealing with it on their own terms. But with bad zombie books, the more you engage with it, the worse it becomes. The only way to succeed is not to get involved at all. (Especially ‘City of the Dead’. Sorry, Brian Keene, but it was a mistake to try to get a sequel out of ‘The Rising’.)
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I agree with you about “City of the Dead”–the story was a paragon of miserablist sensibilities, with pointless nihilism attached to a story that didn’t need to be told–but what did you think about “The Rising”? I haven’t read it since high school, but I remember enjoying it a lot. The demonic possession element made it feel like a drastically different–and more traditionally apocalyptic–take on the zombie genre, and while it got at times cartoonishly dark, I thought it was very compelling and, in its relentlessly dark way, rather fun.
I dunno; a bad ninety-minute movie can turn into a very, very long stretch of time. Painfully so.
I hated Wellington’s vampire-hunter series so much when I tried it I’m totally unwilling to risk his zombie books…
Zombie novels certainly run the gamut from terrible (Patient Zero by Maberry http://abookadaytillicanstay.wordpress.com/2010/10/30/132-patient-zero-by-jonathan-maberry/) to curious (Walter Greatshell’s Xombies series http://abookadaytillicanstay.wordpress.com/2010/12/24/187-xombies-apocalypticon-by-walter-greatshell/) – and I think part of the reason why there is this constant risk of derivativeness is because of the popularity of the movies.
Which is a real shame, as I think the creeping terror represented by the shuffling undead suits the medium of the novel far more than the thrill-a-minute gore of horror cinema.
My problem with ‘The Rising’ was just that it had a premise that it absolutely had to ignore in order to be longer than one page; if you really had an intelligent army of the dead, whose ranks included every vertebrate lifeform that died (birds, snakes, rats, fish…)
Humanity wouldn’t stand a chance. It wouldn’t be a case of holing up in bunkers or hiding out in boarded-up churches or banding together with the remnants of the National Guard; the zombies can use all our weapons, they can use our communications technology (Keene has the radio slowly die into silence over the course of a couple of months, but it would have been more accurate to have the human voices replaced with zombie voices)…heck, the hero shouldn’t even be alive on page one! The zombies know where he is; they can just call a zombie who knows where a bulldozer is and how to drive it, and they can break into his “Y2K bunker”! They know how to use dynamite, C4…I think you get the idea. ‘The Rising’ only works if you ignore its central premise and pretend it’s “Night of the Living Dead, only with wisecracking zombies”. And at that point, why are you wasting my time?
I had the same issue with “The rising.” and it’s sequel. As soon as I realized that there were zombie rats I put it down and gave up. No point, everyone is dead, game over.
“Day by day Armageddon” could have been a good book, but the writer didn’t have chops to pull it off.
Bad movies can pass by quickly…at home. With friends. It’s that key element that you need, more than just the movie being so bad you can laugh at it-you need to have the privacy of friends to be able to do that. If you go to a movie theater and start doing your MST3K routine, you’re being rude to those who wanted to see the movie.
Can I suggest Max Brooks brilliant World War Z. It deals with the Zombie invasion from a world wide, removed perspective.
Well thought out and a great read.
Another factor might be the fact that it’s easier to forgive a mediocre-to-poor movie for the obvious reason that low- / micro-budget horror movies have very small resources, and that includes in some cases being unable even to hire decent actors. But a book should, in theory, have no restrictions placed on its ability to execute its premise – and a lack of imagination, or lack of ability, is all the more unforgivable.
Just a note of dissent–I think that Romero’s Diary of the Dead is the best zombie movie since Day of the Dead (possibly the best horror movie ever made). I will admit to a fondness for works of art about the making of works of art, which other people often find tedious–but I think that in Diary Romero engages solidly and substantially with the question of the duty and burden of the artist *and* with the horrors of the world-plot he created.
The sole possible other contender for “best since” is Shaun of the Dead, which is just terrific start to finish.
wait, its possible to be a somewhat regular reader of zombie fiction and not have read World War Z? That seems backwards to me.
Where do bad zombie video games fit in? My gut answer is they don’t, as bad zombie games are generally pretty similar to regular bad games, in that you quickly realize they’re not worth the time investment, and move on. But if anyone has a more interesting argument…
@August Dylan, Remora: Don’t worry, I have in fact read WWZ. I just didn’t want to bring it up in this post because I didn’t want people saying, “Wait, you’re saying WWZ was a bad zombie novel? How dare you, etc, etc…” I thought it might confuse the issue.
@womzilla: My problem with “Diary” was that it sort of fell between two stools; it tried to be a shaky-cam amateur film done in real time, a la “Quarantine” and “Cloverfield” (and “The Zombie Diaries”, to name an example that makes “Diary” look good) but Romero can’t let go of traditional cinematic lighting, music, and editing. He tries to use the conceit that we’re seeing the finished product after the student film-makers got done with it, but there are times when even that doesn’t explain what you’re seeing (night scenes that are professionally lit, for example) and the net result throws you out of the movie. (OK, that and the drama teacher who happens to also be an expert with guns, bows, swords, and who I fully believe killed all the zombies closing in on them with a toenail clipper five seconds after the end credits rolled.)
@Person of Consequence: Depends on how they’re bad. Cheesy storyline but good gameplay=awesome. Terrible gameplay=doesn’t matter how good or bad the story is, if you can’t make your character move through it, you’re going to give up.
You might just be looking in the wrong places. The true written equivalent to entertainingly bad “so bad it’s good” movies will probably not be found at mainstream bookstores or publishers.
Instead you need to seek out the small independents, vanity presses and e-publishers– where novelists, like their visionary filmmaker counterparts, are free to indulge their muse without being hindered by editorial dictates.
I don’t know of any such novels offhand that are specifically about zombies, but there must be at least a few out there that exhibit genuine “Eye of Argon” quality.
A lot of 300 page shitty books could probably be 150 page “so bad it’s good” books but anymore everything’s got to be a slave to the page count.
womzilla: My problem with Diary is that except for the farmer and teacher as already mentioned, there aren’t all that many characters in that film that I actually want to see survive the movie. The only other one I grew to respect was the actress character and only because she got feed up with the director’s bullshit and left him to fend for herself. I’d have enjoyed the film a lot more if the other characters had murdered him in the first ten minutes so that I could have been spared his assholish selfishness. I shouted with glee when he finally got attacked by a zombie and killed. For me, the number one rule of a zombie movie is that the characters need to be likable so that I can root for them to survive. This was not one of those movies. It would have been a better picture had only the drama teacher survived, covered in blood, gore and bile, surrounded by the corpses of all the zombies he’d just slain. Instead, we got what we got.
tl;dr A bunch of winey college kids doesn’t make for a fun movie; zombies or no.
Apart from some weird religious overtones, Mark Rogers’ “The Dead” is an EXCELLENT zombie apocalypse novel, with an emphasis on the ‘apocalypse’. The zombies are different from just about any others I’ve seen, too. I first read it in high school, and it scared the shit out of me (growing up Catholic certainly helped out there!)
In defense of ‘Day by Day’ it should be noted that the original format was an actual online diary that was being updated in real time and I never got the impression that Bourne had ever really nailed down the overall story and was just seeing where his writing took him. As an early adopter who read it real time it held up much better. The other great aspect was the guestbook that readers could post to in character, experiencing the apocalypse at the same time. Fun ARG feel to the whole endeavor.