Zombie Fever
Oct. 26th, 2012 09:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
commonpeople1I listened recently to an interesting discussion of Victoria Nelson's Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural on the podcast Expanding Mind. She traces the appearance and reoccurence of vampires and zombies in popular culture (with an added final - controversial - theory that we are at the brink of a new world religion based around this type of supernatural creatures.) You can listen to the podcast here.
What interested me about the discussion was how she traced the changing use of zombies in popular culture - starting from the stories related to voodoo in the Caribbean to the rise of the mindless hoards in America post WWII. She then goes on to talk about how what seemed improbable a few decades ago is now a reality: zombies having romantic relationships with humans, and even breeding with them.
Coincidentally, Margaret Atwood is now writing a zombie serial on Wattpad with the writer Naomi Alderman (Atwood is her mentor through the Rolex Arts Initiative.) It's called The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home and it's free to read. The idea appears to be that Atwood writes a chapter and passes it on to Alderman, who then has to continue the story and return it to Atwood, without either one knowing where exactly it's going. They've been posting the chapters every few days, which is a fun sort of way of seeing how writers work together (their pace, their outputs, how their imaginations interact with each other.)
Makes me want to have a Walking Dead boxset marathon.
What interested me about the discussion was how she traced the changing use of zombies in popular culture - starting from the stories related to voodoo in the Caribbean to the rise of the mindless hoards in America post WWII. She then goes on to talk about how what seemed improbable a few decades ago is now a reality: zombies having romantic relationships with humans, and even breeding with them.
Coincidentally, Margaret Atwood is now writing a zombie serial on Wattpad with the writer Naomi Alderman (Atwood is her mentor through the Rolex Arts Initiative.) It's called The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home and it's free to read. The idea appears to be that Atwood writes a chapter and passes it on to Alderman, who then has to continue the story and return it to Atwood, without either one knowing where exactly it's going. They've been posting the chapters every few days, which is a fun sort of way of seeing how writers work together (their pace, their outputs, how their imaginations interact with each other.)
Makes me want to have a Walking Dead boxset marathon.
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Date: 2012-10-26 12:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-26 05:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-28 01:20 am (UTC)i'm taking the blind assassin as a serious recommendation from you; adding it to the list!
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Date: 2012-10-28 10:07 am (UTC)Some of my friends were made to read Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which is a pretty decent book (in my opinion) but I think they were bugged by her "grand" status in Canada. It could also be students-being-students and voicing their annoyance at what they saw as the mainstream.
But I really do love Atwood, even when she doesn't quite succeed. She's never really written a stinker - there's always something interesting in her books, even if you quite bring yourself to like them.
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Date: 2012-10-28 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-26 05:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-26 06:06 pm (UTC)