Zombie Nation by Miz Pink

So I was visiting my sister and noticed her stack of zombie novels on the desk. I guess zombies have been popular for  a while since there in plenty of horror flicks now and going back to what, the 70s? But I hadn’t realized it was such a fertile genre for printed fiction as well lately. My sister even says there was a short lived comic series that turned Spiderman and Wolverine and most of the other superheroes in those comics into zombies.

As we talked and as I thought about it later it wasn’t hard to see why zombies are popular. Sure we get excited about vampires too because there’s that taboo sexiness goth mind control thing going on. Probably some oral sex connotations too really. But zombies are popular for a whole other reason I think. They are mindless creatures that typically shamble around and overwhelm society and consume out of some imperative that has nothing to do with staying alive since…well, they’re dead right?

Isn’t that what we’ve been for too long in this country? Mindlessly following everyone else around us and consuming for the sake of consumption. We’ve been rotting like corpses (or at least our lives have been rotting from the inside out) and yet we motor on with our endless hunger.

Zombies are what we fear I guess. But I don’t think too many people realized they have been a mirror for our own selves. We fear having our brains eaten by zombies but many of us joined their ranks long ago and just never noticed.

I hope hope hope that the events that started with us elected a new leadership with functioning brain cells signals and end to our brain-eating zombie days. I like to think this is our moment where we take back the world from the zombies and when we give up our own zombieness to become fully realized humans again.

In short I hope that zombies can just go back to being another monster like the wolfman or the mummy. Something that doesn’t mean anything except some thrills and chills on screen instead of being something that bears metaphorical witness to our own hellish shortcomings as a society and as humans.

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