Waching daily Jan 3 2018

One of the things that's really interesting about the phenomenon of

zombies in our culture and this whole story of the zombie apocalypse that I'm

writing about in Living with the Living Dead,

it has splashed across the boundaries that stories like this used to be

confined to. Robert Kirkman who created the Walking Dead originally as a comic

book, was interviewed recently and it wasn't even something that there was any

contention about, it was the idea that what used to be called 'geek culture' has

now become 'mainstream culture' and so there's not only zomie movies like

Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, but there are games, there are apps, there are

zombie runs where you can sign up to be either a zombie or a runner. In the book,

I read the zombie apocalypse in two sorts of ways. First, I read it as a post

9/11 phenomenon, because the first really important zombie film after 9/11 was 28

Days Later and it came out in 2002, shortly after 9/11. And a vast number

close to about 1/2 of all the zombie movies ever made have come out since 9/11. And

so when people talk about why that might be, why all the zombies, why the products,

why the the civic involvement where people stream across our meadows chasing

each other with intent to harm or eat, and what most critics are saying is that

the zombie is the perfect monster for our current phenomenon, our 9/11 world.

That they can represent whatever it is that we're most afraid of, whatever it is

that keeps us up at night. So Max Brooks who is the author of World War Z, the

novel and of the Zombie Survival Handbook, which is supposedly nonfiction

but it may in fact, I don't know, be fiction, it may in fact be fiction, both

of those books, he has spoken really eloquently about the zombie phenomenon and

he should know a little something about it because he's been at Ground Zero of

it. And he talks about how zombies are multivalent in these stories. They can

stand in for terrorists, or for refugees, or for zika, or ebola, it

can stand in for economic unrest, it can stand in for financial problems in our

own homes, it can stand for political instability, or violence in our

communities and what makes zombies so useful is that they can be whatever

we're most afraid of. And as Brooks says, the nice thing about it then is when the

movie is over, when the TV show is done, when you finish the book, you can close

it and put it away. One of the things that I always tend to do in the books

that I write about religion, story and culture is to ask the question: why are

stories important to us at a certain time? And this zombie story is, in one way,

important to us because it's a post 9/11 phenomenon, because we are living in a

world which feels to us very unsettled and full of menace.