Maybe I do like the undead

I’ve never really thought I enjoyed zombies.  Specifically, I mean.  I’ve known that I love end-of-the-world scenarios.  The apocalypse is my favorite genre!  I’ve also been aware that I prefer the apocalypse to the post-apocalypse.  In other words, I like the place where society is ending and everyone is scrambling to survive.  It’s fascinating.  Whether that’s aliens (not my favorite) or a natural disaster (love me some natural disaster).  I got sucked into The Walking Dead a long time ago (this is not an endorsement by any means).  And what I thought I loved about that show was that there was really no re-building.  Re-building after an apocalypse is boring.  It’s just regular old society, but maybe in  a primitive form.  Yawn.  I want the thrill of survival!  When you have a major catastrophe, it happens, you survive, and then you rebuild.  Because a tsunami really only lasts a few minutes.  Same for an asteroid hitting the earth.  It only happens once.  But the cool thing about zombies is that they are always there.  The threat never goes away.  So it’s day in and day out survival.  All day, every day.  Week after week, month after month.

So yesterday I was at the library.  The kids were reading books and I was wandering around aimlessly.  I wanted something to read but was completely overwhelmed, not having anything specific to look for.  And so many books these days are full of R-rated and X-rated themes that it’s hard to know what you’re getting.  So I was just walking around when I just decided to grab a book an sit down.  I grabbed the first two books in a series I had passed a couple times.  I read the description and it sounded dumb, but I sat down to read anyway.  It was a book about zombies.

Don’t think I didn’t know that beforehand.  I did.  Like I said, I had eyed these books earlier while in the library.  I knew exactly what they were.

It turns out though that the book isn’t actually ABOUT zombies.  I mean, sure the undead are a threat but the story line is actually about something else really interesting and the zombie apocalypse just happens to be the setting.  So I was 200+ pages in before a zombie was even figured into the story.  The interesting story.  The interesting story that is written so poorly that sometimes, even though I’m sucked in, I get sucked right back out.  You know that kind of thing where you are hyper aware of the writing and of the author instead of being oblivious to anything but the characters and the story?

Anyway, Wiyah saw me reading the book and asked if it was about zombies.  (Because–the cover.  Had a hard time explaining THAT to Wink!)  I said yes and she said, “Of course!”  And I started thinking about it.  The Walking Dead, World War Z, I am Legend…These are all awesome and I could watch them over and over again.  Then there are the TV shows I’ve liked and watched–too many to name and most we gave up on because writers don’t know how to write a good story without gratuitous filth.  And this book.  And maybe others now, too, come to think of it.

So what I’m saying is, I thought the whole zombie thing was just one way to have an end of world scenario.  But maybe I actually like undead more than I realized.  And I wonder what that actually says about me.