I’ve created a Livejournal account — profile name of zombiedragon — to mirror this blog for readers who prefer that service. See the button on the left.

OK, I think I’ve got all the major social networking services covered now….

Re the recent Dan Brown affair (his name prominently displayed on a book he didn’t write):

If I legally changed my name to Dan Brown, this would be legitimate, no?

I went out for a walk earlier and stumbled across this on the sidewalk outside my place. Weird. The heart is a chip out of the concrete.

I’m not the only one complaining about the sorry state of zombies. See also A. Lee Martinez’s Zombie Plaqued.

I decided to redesign the website a little and picked a fresher theme that’s got a few more features. I also loaded my online store and books pages onto the main page of the blog, to try to keep everything in the same environment. (I’ll keep the old site up in the background for a while for those who are attached to the rollovers.)

I may still tweak the colours a little, but I think all the links are active and pointing to where they should be pointing. Let me know if you find anything broken or if the site looks odd in your browser.

Peter out.

The other day Peter Simpson, the arts editor of the Ottawa Citizen, asked me and a bunch of other people to explain the enduring popularity of Kiss. Here’s my response:

“I think Kiss endures because, let’s face it, the band’s popularity was always about the characters, not the music. Or maybe the mythology of the characters – not just the Demon and the Starchild and all that, but the sex orgies after concerts, the rumours about what the name stood for, the origins of Gene Simmons’ tongue, the Phantom of the Park, the money. Kiss were never going to be the next Beatles or Rolling Stones. They were too busy being the Harry Potter of their day.”

It’s time for a zombie renaissance.

Let’s face it, zombies just aren’t frightening anymore. They’ve gone from being truly horrifying to being a bad “Who Moved My Brains?” office joke. No one is scared by zombies anymore, not even vegetarians.

But we should be frightened of zombies. And not just because they’ll eat you alive — the most dreadful fate imaginable to, well, pretty much anything that’s alive. Zombies should be truly terrifying because they reveal our final fate. They confront you with what it is to be dead: there’s nothing of you left but mindless, rotting flesh. Everything that makes you what you are — your memories, hopes, experiences, dreams — vanish when you become a zombie. Once you die. Like we all die. Zombies tell you there’s no possibility of a sexy afterlife, like when a vampire takes a shine to you, or even an afterlife at all, in case you were hoping to at least hang around as a ghost. Zombies prove to you that you are simply gone when you die. You’re not undead. You are dead.

You see it first when your co-workers and family members are transformed into zombies. They forget everything about their lives. They even forget who you are and try to eat you, and you have to kill them. And then it’s your turn. Because someday it will be your turn. There’s no escape from that fate. You can run to the mall all you want, but there’s no hope. All it takes is one bite to infect you — hell, maybe even a cough could do it. Sooner or later, it will happen. You can’t escape the dead forever — they outnumber the living, after all. And then everything you’ve done in your life is wiped from the face of the earth. Zombies are a walking, eating existential crisis. Why do you think they moan so much?

But too many movies and video games have transformed zombies from horrors of the soul to little more than generic monsters. They could be orcs or James Cameron’s aliens for all the fear they invoke. And they’re not frightening anymore because they’re no longer us — they’re simply walking targets to be gunned down or killed with ever more inventive, or maybe more mundane, weapons. Hedge trimmers, anyone? Or, even worse, they’re becoming the new vampires, with zombie Twilights rising up in the YA sections of bookstores.

So how do we make zombies terrifying again? The answer is not to make them more monstrous but to make them more human. That is, to make them more alive. More like us. Sure, this goes against the logic of their origins, of their disturbing inhumanity — they are the original uncanny valley, after all — but think about it for a moment. Imagine the following scenarios:

• Zombies that talk nonstop rather than moan. They remember moments of their life and replay them out loud, only it’s all stream of consciousness and disorganized. Imagine hiding in a changing room in a mall clothing store as a zombie moves through the store looking for you, saying in a low voice “a sunny day and we’re all here the knife is in the drawer please put that away please make this stop until the gas kicks in because it hurts so much and you went away and ready or not here I come!”

• Zombies that try to relive their lives. Zombies who go to malls and actually shop rather than wander about aimlessly. Zombies who fill shopping carts full of goods — gas cans and lighter fluid and hatchets and the bottles of water you need to survive. Zombies who go to the movies and talk to the screens about their memories. Imagine running into a cinema to escape a pack of zombies and finding it full of other zombies watching a movie, all of them babbling at the screen, all of them turning to look at you. Imagine trying to hide in that changing room in the store only to find a zombie already in there, ripping clothes apart in an attempt to try them on.

• Zombies that still go to work, still try to do the jobs they remember. Imagine being wheeled into a hospital on a stretcher to treat your wounds after a zombie attack. Imagine zombies dressed as security guards killing the paramedics. Imagine zombies dressed as nurses dragging you down the hall into the operating room. Imagine zombies dressed as surgeons picking up scalpels and staring at them, trying to remember what they used to do with them.

So, if zombies are more like us, then what do they want from us?

Life, of course. They remember fragments of their lives but it’s not enough. They have to seek out more. They remember eating to stay alive. They remember life and want it back. They see we’re still alive. They eat us, because that’s what zombies do, but what they’re really trying to consume is life. Our lives.

Of course, like anything else, they’ll truly die if they can’t feed. So they slow down and fade away over time. They stop talking and remembering. They turn into the classic moaning zombies of yesteryear. But it’s more frightening now because we’ve seen the transition. We’ve seen them turn from us into them. They sit in their apartments and don’t go out. They don’t move. They don’t eat. They could be dead. Really dead. We don’t know.

Imagine a zombie sitting on a couch unmoving. Imagine the zombie holding a photo album in its lap. Imagine the zombie holding a flashlight you need to survive. Imagine creeping toward the zombie, trying to see if it’s really dead or not before you get within arm’s reach. Imagine watching its eyes, trying to figure out if they really shifted toward you or that was just a trick of the light. Imagine.