The Dead

Zombies are the new vampires. Just look at our contemporary vampires. What a sad lot of dime-store Byronic heroes, mooning around because they can’t find happiness with youthful hotties among the living. Hell, at my age, I can’t, either, but you don’t see me whining about it.

Now, zombies are just down and dirty, hardcore, full-tilt-boogie badass mofos. Some are fast and some are slow, but they’re all hungry and they don’t know why. At least, that’s the way they’ve come down to us since the glory days of George Romero and Lucio Fulci, the Lennon and McCartney of zombie cinema.

After the initial zombie-movie invasion, but before John Skipp and Craig Spector started the undead jamboree in print, Mark E. Rogers began a zombie novel in the early 1980s. He took it out of the drawer a few years later to do a little reshaping and adding. THE DEAD hit the shelves in 1989 and has now re-emerged from the dead, courtesy of Permuted Press.

It doesn’t feature exactly the kind of zombies we’ve become accustomed to, but if anything, there’s something about them that makes them even more evil than your average brain-eater. Rogers’ zombies don’t eat the brains of their victims — they use their own.

The story begins with a terrific nightmare passage as Gary Holland dreams that he’s alone at the viewing of his father’s corpse, only the casket is closed and locked and no one seems to want to explain why. He begins to figure it all out when a pounding begins inside the box. So violent does it become, the person inside puts dents in the bronze.

This kind of scene is so cinematic, a lot of writers would just set it up and then let our memories of movies seen on late night TV do the work. Not Rogers. Take a look:

“(Gary) saw that something had smashed up through the coffin-lid. His first impression was that it was a knot of dark shining wood. Then he realized it was a fist, its knuckles like studs on a club. If it was human at all, it looked like it belonged to someone long dead, mummified, petrified, not a man two days gone.

“Not Dad, Gary told himself, not knowing whether to be relieved or appalled. Can’t be. Surely it was just coincidence that the class ring on one of those desiccated fingers looked just his father’s …”

Then Gary wakes up to the news that his father just died. Hello. Emphasis on the hell.

At the real funeral, Gary meets up with his brother, Max, and his two uncles, the decent Dennis and the big-time asshole Buddy. Included in the group are the assorted wives and kids, and when the zombie apocalypse gets underway, they will accumulate other breathers as well. The group becomes separated so we can follow two story arcs, but as is the way with pursuit-and-escape tales, the survivors will regroup for the finale.

What truly makes the book unusual is the fact that these characters are relatively smart. They have opinions on the nature of human existence, on life and the afterlife, and they don’t mind sharing them. Discussions of religion — or lack of same — abound. I like that sort of thing, but if you don’t because it slows down the story — and it does — you might end up doing some page-skimming.

THE DEAD is the book that suggested what this new subgenre of dark fantasy — zombie horror — could be if it didn’t succumb to brainlessness. You know, like what happened to vampires. —Doug Bentin

Buy it at Amazon.