Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups.
After the seminal Book of the Dead came another zombie-themed anthology from editors John Skipp and Craig Spector, Still Dead: Book of the Dead 2, published in 1992. The book’s connection to Night of the Living Dead and its follow-ups was proudly displayed on the cover, which promises, “19 terrifying new stories based on the universe of George A. Romero”. Meanwhile, gore-effect maestro Tom Savini provided a foreword.
Skipp and Spector followed Savini’s foreword with an introduction entitled, “Nineteen New Ways to Kick Ass, or, Resisting the Urge to Decay”. This touches upon a range of topics, from the distinction between Romero’s masterpieces and lesser zombie films (“It was painfully clear that what the world didn’t need was the literary equivalent of a hairball like Spookies”) to moral debates over horror literature, and eventually to the contemporary appeal of zombie fiction:
Right now, as the planet steers a course into Millennium [sic], it’s only natural that we should have a taste for apocalypse myths. They help us address our fears for the imminent future, by staging earnest survivalist games in our heads. They help us prepare, on the inner plane, for the impending Historical Crisis … in whatever form it might ultimately choose to take.
The anthology begins with “The Old Man and the Dead,” by Mort Castle, which is presented as a prologue. The main character is implied strongly to be Ernest Hemingway, and the story locates the beginning of the zombie apocalypse in 1961 – the year in which Hemingway committed suicide. The old man, who has seen his share of twentieth-century atrocities, looks upon the walking corpses and is reminded of words he heard during the Spanish Civil War: “When the world is hell, the dead walk.” This is, of course, a paraphrasing from Dawn of the Dead, Romero’s universe intruding upon Hemingway’s life.
With the old swept away, the anthology moves on to the new. This time around, Skipp and Spector add a contribution of their own: a poem entitled, “The Ones You Love.” This pulls off the neat trick of flipping back and forth between dark romance (of the sort found in many a vampire fanzine) and chunks of blank verse with phrases like “gristleflesh.” The other member of the splatterpunk power trio, David J. Schow, again writes under the pseudonym Chan McConnell and delivers “DONt/WALK”: a vision of urban decay where the dead – living or otherwise – blur together with the merely derelict. Cinemas are filled with derivative sequels (“an endless repetition of Roman numerals that is somehow comforting in its consistency”) and early reports of the zombie outbreak are lost in a morass of trash TV. Then, when the protagonist witnesses the zombie deaths, things get down to business:
A woman in a shit-stained housecoat tried to hold her smashed head stable as she stood up. She was dead. Big bites were missing from her breasts and legs, through ragged holes in the housecoat. She wobbled. Too much meat had been taken, especially from her neck. Her head tore loose and hit the pavement with an overripe splut, rolling once. Her nose stopped it like a little stabilizer. The headless body sat down hard, limbs sprawling, and remained propped against a litter basket.
The flies moved in. WALK.
A recurring motif in Still Dead, and with much splatterpunk, is a focus on characters from the margins of society: the oddballs and the misfits. K. W. Jeter’s short-and-punchy “Rise Up and Walk,” for example, views the zombie uprising from the perspective of a man who believes himself to be Jesus. And this time around, the voices telling the stories were a little more diverse.
Where Book of the Dead was a boy’s club, Still Dead incorporated a number of female writers: Elizabeth Massie, Kathe Koja, Roberta Lannes, Nancy Holder and Nancy A. Collins. (Also involved was Billy Martin, alias Poppy Z. Brite, who would not come out as a trans man for some years and was, at the time, still presenting as female). Nancy Collins’ contribution to the book is “Necrophile,” about a woman named Samantha who lives in an underworld of grindhouse cinemas and strychnine hits. Here, she becomes infatuated with a death-obsessed man named Mouli.
Samantha’s new flame has the hobby of photographing open graves, a pursuit that takes on a new dimension when he gets a job at the morgue, and Samantha realises that she must compete with death itself for his affection. Collins’ writing is associated more with vampires than with zombies, and her trip into Romero’s world allows her to blend the romanticisation of death – a key part of vampire fiction – with the raw viscera of the zombie genre:
The disinterment photos were replaced, one by one, by photographs of the occupants of the city morgue. These were far more disturbing than the others because the subjects still looked human, despite the occasional shotgun blast to the head. The floaters were the worst. I stopped looking at the walls. There was no poetry to the Death in those pictures; the romanticism of my morbid fantasies curdled in the face of reality.
Any readers still holding onto an assumption that the anthology must consist of non-stop splatter would find their misconception cleared away by Glen Vasey’s “One Step at a Time.” This is a sensitive story about a man facing the ailing health of his father, who has awoken from a coma only to relapse. The narrative hops back and forth in time as the protagonist deals with complex memories of his sometimes violent and abusive father, themes that are handled with care and thoughtfulness. Even when the zombies turn up towards the end of the story, Vasey uses them to articulate the wider motifs of death and lingering life, rather than an excuse for gruesome mayhem – all of which lends the brutality of the climax that much more impact.
Thus concludes the first section of the anthology, which is themed around the coming of the zombies. The second and longest part of Still Dead focuses on humanity’s response once the zombie outbreak is well underway. The stories put the spotlight on a broad range of social groups, including those that would not usually spring to mind when we think of the word “punk.”
“Prayer,” by Douglas Morningstar and Maxwell Hart, a story of bikers and brutality that is barely two pages long, is bracketed with Simon McCaffery’s “Night of the Living Dead Bingo Women” – a story where the title spells out the premise. Gregory Nicoll’s “Beer Run” takes a wry look at subcultural survival: the main characters are young funsters who liberate beer from a zombie-filled Oktoberfest while listening to their preferred music. They choose numbers by Black Flag and Roky Erickson. but find that the Zombies and the Dead Kennedys have rather too many unfortunate connotations.
Contrasting with the urban settings typically associated with splatterpunk, Elizabeth Massie’s “Abed” is a backwoods horror. It opens in the outwardly idyllic setting of a rural family household, in a far-off area where the zombie apocalypse has had little impact. The folksy tone is promptly subverted by the revelation that the family is blighted by forced incest – something made all the more harrowing when one of the family members involved is a zombie.
Perhaps the most overtly anti-punk story is “This Year’s Class Picture,” by Dan Simmons. The main character, an elementary school teacher, tries to instruct her zombified class with the rudiments of reading, writing and ‘rithmatic. She helps them along with rewards in the form of meat nuggets – made not from chicken, but from the remains of school faculty who committed suicide.
The story takes its absurd premise to a genuinely poignant level: the teacher actually cares about her zombie pupils and wants to protect them from the ghoul-eat-ghoul world outside. Simmons would later become known for his political conservatism, and we see a glimmer of this when the story informs us that the teacher benefits from having previously “protected her fourth graders from the tyrannies of too-early adulthood and the vulgarity of a society all too content with the vulgar.” An interesting detail is that, while other authors involved in the Skipp and Spector anthologies show a fondness for referencing metal bands or splatter films, Simmons namechecks Peter Rabbit, Green Eggs and Ham, Bunnicula, and Richard Scarry’s ABC Book.
As well as different types of survivors, we meet different types of zombies. Gahan Wilson’s “Come One, Come All” is set at a circus in which zombies are shown tantalising spectacles of fleshy living performers; the ghouls here – particularly, the zombie baby – are pitiful rather than scary. Meanwhile, Kathe Koja’s “The Prince of Nox” is about a zombie who has retained sapience. The story starts as a modern update of the Gothic wandering-immortal motif and then settles into a recurring theme from the first Book of the Dead: post-apocalyptic religion. The protagonist tries to teach ethics to mindless shamblers by encouraging them to eat only those who would be likely to die of natural causes anyway.
Concluding the book’s section on coping with the dead is “Calcutta, Lord of Nerves,” by Poppy Z. Brite. This story, in which the zombie apocalypse spreads to India, is a short masterpiece of ghoulishly gorgeous prose. It also suffers, however, by using its setting of Kolkata as a shorthand for exoticised squalor and weird religious violence, even including a blatantly anachronistic reference to thuggee gangs (this sort of thing was typical of the era: see also Dan Simmons’ 1985 novel Song of Kali). The following excerpt sums up both the virtues and the vices of the story.
Devi works the big hotels now, selling American tourists or British expatriates or German businessmen a taste of exotic Bengal spice. She is gaunt and beautiful and hard as nails. Devi says the world is a whore, too, and Calcutta is the pussy of the world. The world squats and spreads its legs, and Calcutta is the dank sex you see revealed there, wet and fragrant with a thousand odors both delicious and foul. A source of lushest pleasure, a breeding ground for every conceivable disease. The pussy of the world. It is all right with me. I like pussy, and I love my squalid city.
The third and final section of Still Dead is themed around life after the zombie apocalypse has occurred. As per the book’s satirical leanings, the general impression is that human society has changed only little.
The apocalypse is not always spread equally. J. S. Russell’s “Undiscovered Country” depicts a scenario where zombies are amok in the developing world, while residents of wealthier nations sit in comfort and watch as military ghoul-hunts from abroad are served up as reality TV. “I Walk Alone” by Roberta Lannes is set in a world that has been taken over by two types of zombie. The familiar mindless, shambling ghouls are termed “usuals” by the second type of zombie: those who retain consciousness. The story’s narrator belongs to the latter variety, and shows us how she and her kind live an aimless existence of social cliques, kinky sex and predatory relationships.
Brooks Caruthers’ surreal “Moon Towers” likewise focuses on sex in the zombie apocalypse. It takes the reader on a trip through a mutilated world in which life is still worth living because of sex, even if this has taken on strange new forms:
I hear a sound like a soft ripping and Viva grunts and I feel a burning, stinging pain all down the front of my body. I am bleeding. Viva is bleeding. It’s the kind of bleeding you get from bad abrasions. She keeps pushing me away. I look down and see that the skin of her buttocks has grown into the flesh of my thighs.
Nancy Holder’s “Passion Play” concludes with a full-on apocalypse, but opens with a situation where zombies are more of a conundrum than an immediate threat. The setting is Oberammergau, a Bavarian village which, since the time of the bubonic plague, has held a passion play every decade (this part of the story is derived from fact). Now that the zombie plague has hit, those responsible for the play hit on the idea of using a resurrected corpse as a body-double for Jesus during the crucifixion scene, allowing all of the gruesome details to be conveyed with accuracy.
Objecting to the usage of a zombie as a stage prop is protagonist Father Meyer, a priest who sees ghouls as living things that should be treated with humanity. He has even granted absolution to a zombie, arguing that this is no more than an extension of the Church’s traditional mercy towards the condemned. The story was later republished in a 2008 anthology called The Living Dead; surprisingly, nobody seems to have seen fit to reprint the story four years earlier, when Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ lent it newfound topicality.
The final story, “Bright Lights, Big Zombie” by Douglas E. Winters, turns out to be the perfect conclusion to the anthology. Winters’ choice of protagonist is a contributor to a Fangoria-like horror magazine who is confronted not only with the rising dead but with a clampdown on gore films: apparently, to the authorities, removing such material from the public’s imagination will also remove it from reality. As the zombie apocalypse unfolds, the main character (referred to as “you,” the story being written in the second person) traverses a deeply chic underworld where Italian and Japanese horror videos are traded like class-A drugs and skinheaded nymphettes prowl the streets in search of New York Ripper, Eaten Alive and Man From Deep River.
Really, a clearer example of how the splatterpunk movement viewed itself would be hard to find. Although it would have been easy for a story like “Bright Lights, Big Zombie” to become unabashed self-indulgence – the author namechecking his favourite grindhouse films while indulging in a Robin Hood fantasy of rebellion – Winters’ absurd yet sharp and evocative prose makes it worthwhile:
You dream about the Still Dead. You sneak down the corridors of the Center for Disease Control. Nobody can see you. A door with a plaque reading C’est La Mort opens into the Department of Victual Falsification. Miranda is spreadeagled across the top of your desk, her wrists and ankles bound with strips of celluloid, the censored seconds from the first reel of Deodato’s Inferno in diretta. Around her in white hospital beds, like the four points on a compass, are the Still Dead. You approach and discover that she isn’t moving. You touch her. She is cold. Quiet. One of them. Still dead. But then she opens her eyes and looks at you. You make a sound like a scream but it is the telephone ringing. The receiver is hot and wet in your hand.
Like its predecessor, Still Dead performed well on the awards circuit. Dan Simmons’ “This Year’s Class Picture” won a Bram Stoker Award, with the runners-up including both the Douglas E. Winter and Gahan Wilson stories. Simmons’ story also earned a Sturgeon Award, a World Fantasy Award (for which Brite’s contribution was also nominated) and, after being translated into Japanese, a Seiun Award. After this round of success, however, things went rather quiet for zombie literature.
A third volume in the series was mooted during the nineties, and mentioned as part of Stefan Dziemianowicz’s section on splatterpunk in Fantasy & Horror (1999). But this book — Mondo Zombie — would not be published until 2006, nearly a decade and a half after Still Dead. If Book of the Dead was a triumphant mission statement, then its 1992 sequel feels like an epitaph for both splatterpunk and the zombie boom of the eighties.
Change was in the wind. 1991, the year before Still Dead was published, saw two events which did much to reshape the horror landscape, and not in favour of the living dead. One was the film version of Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs, which was both a commercial hit and an Oscar-sweeping critical sensation. The other was the publication of Bret Easton Ellis’ controversial novel American Psycho. David Flint captured something of the mood when he commented in Headpress #2 that, “Ellis has taken a bigger step towards breaking down social taboos on what can and cannot be discussed than Clive Barker and the rest of the Splatter-Punk [sic] hangers-on could ever dream of.” Zombies were becoming passé, serial killers were the new icons, and splatterpunk gave way to the rather more grown-up sounding genre of the psychological thriller.
How ironic that Skipp and Spector opened Book of the Dead with that question from Psycho author Robert Bloch: “What’s going to come out of those people who think that Night of the Living Dead isn’t enough?” After all, it was the descendants of Bloch’s most famous creation, Norman Bates, who would push zombies out of the limelight.
Next: The third Return…
