The Truth About Zombies

Fear of the dead returning from the grave, dragging their fetid, rotting bodies closer and closer to their targets to torment, exact revenge, or eat brains is something that has gripped humanity from time immemorial. For as long as humans have dreaded death and feared the dead -- which has been always -- the thought of corpses returning to haunt the living has provoked great fear. 

Recently, zombies have become more popular than ever. There have been numerous blockbuster movies and TV shows that explore zombies in completely traditional ways, some with new takes on the concept, some even flipping the narrative on its head. Sometimes, modern depictions of zombies are seen as being representative of the existential dread so many feel in the modern era, or of some slowly creeping doom, or even the drudgery of work. Either way, the "zombie apocalypse" is a well-known trope of modern storytelling. 

But I know something those who only tell stories don't, something those who don't actually chronicle the evil of the Atrocissimus never could: Zombies are kind of pathetic, actually. 

As I say in The House on Blackstone Hill:

Zombies? Zombies are real, too, but don’t get too impressed by that. A corpse can only become re-animated by a demon or a magic-user, and they are mindless tools used for the most mundane of tasks. They also have one specific weakness: They’re rotting flesh. The magic that reanimates a corpse does nothing to prevent normal putrefaction, so eventually, they will literally fall to pieces. That, and they tend to freeze in the winter and attract predators in the summer, so all in all zombies are not nearly as amazing as modern culture would suggest. Nonetheless, they serve their purpose. 

It's actually a little like slavery.

Think about it: Here is some person who has lived their life, whether for good or evil doesn't matter. Their soul has passed over to wherever it belongs, and now their body is laid to rest, to decompose, to return to the Earth. What happens instead is that some magic-user or demon decides to reanimate the body for their own fell purposes, usually as a worker or killer of some kind.

Zombies aren't just pathetic...they're actually rather tragic.