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Comic Book Junkie #2
Zombies, Zombies Everywhere
Review posted: 07 Feb 2006
Writer:
Publisher:
Reviewed by Matt Yocum
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The undead are everywhere. Lurking in your comic book store.
Stumbling in your movie theater. Crawling in your prose. Zombies are
in.
Zombie comics range across the board from movie adaptations (IDW’s offering of George Romero’s Land of the Dead), superheroes as zombies (Marvel Zombies), and apocalyptic character studies (Image’s
The Walking Dead). There are some I’ve not seen in my local comic shop but learned about recently from a piece devoted to zombies in Wizard magazine: Boom! Studios’ anthology Zombie Tales and Goathead Publishing’s comedic Living with Zombies. I’m anxious to check out these new additions to a growing tide of rising dead.
It seems everyone has their zombie story today, and I’m no exception. To date I’ve written two novels. The first is a science fiction adventure titled The Calling. It’s an epic story following someone’s personal journey of faith while on galactic adventures. My second novel, the one landing an agent and a few interested publishers, is a near-future military conspiracy thriller called Honor. It takes place at my alma mater, the Air Force Academy, and follows a young cadet who stumbles on the greatest terrorist conspiracy America has ever faced. As you see, I’m not content to remain in one genre, and my next stop in novels is the world of the undead.
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| Back Cover, Walking Dead #25 |
The birth of this story began with a screenwriter friend of mine. She had a possible “in” with Ghost House Productions, the company co-founded by Sam Raimi (Evil Dead trilogy, Spider-Man movies). My friend had the possibility of writing a low budget zombie movie, yet she didn’t know the genre sufficiently to come up with immediate ideas. She asked for my help, and I spent some time thinking of what’s been done and not been done. I also had to consider the constraints of a low budget which I posited meant limited locations, few characters, and relatively few special effects. Here’s my story.
Titled Devolution, the idea is essentially the movie Panic Room only with zombies trapped in a woman’s home. Christine and her husband recently lost their only child to a psychopath who followed children to school, kidnapped and then dismembered them, burying their body parts over a mile radius. Caught and incarcerated, the memory of what he did haunts Christine. She and her husband become obsessed with security, leaving behind life in suburbia and retreating to a small town on the edge of thick Tennessee woods. Their house is filled with security upgrades, a mini Ft Knox, complete with safe room in their bedroom (steel door, security cameras, the works). However, it’s a malfunctioning Ft Knox, with a repairman over to fix the system.
Nearby, a research center is studying the possibility of using the already existing electrical and neural connections in human corpses as the host for AI robotic technology. An accident in the lab brings forth the undead, their only desire is for sustenance — in this case flesh, the one staple of zombies. (An interesting side note is that zombies in fiction really originated as an extension of cannibalism.)
The zombies escape the facility and stumble through the woods, grabbing what food they can. They emerge on Christine’s street and break in the house, killing the repairman and severely wounding Christine’s husband. She is able to make it to her safehouse bedroom, fending off one zombie who becomes trapped in the room with her, its arm caught in the steel door that slammed shut when Christine hit the panic button. The system then short circuits, and now Christine is in one room, her husband in another, bleeding to death in a storage closet. They find themselves trapped in the house with zombies.
The struggle for survival that follows is a series of successes and failures as the two attempt to communicate and find a way to survive and escape. Days pass, and through a radio, Christine learns the nature of those trapped with them. She learns their real names, finds out who these undead were when among the living. She watches on the restored security video monitors as their hunger forces them to war on each other. She witnesses their evolution as one of them discovers that sharp objects can be used as a weapon, one even discovering fire (from a burner left on in the kitchen).
As days turn into weeks, Christine watches her husband slowly dying. Her own mind splinters and fractures, dreams of her son’s dismemberment blurring with the site of the zombie in her room freeing itself naturally as its pinned arm begins to rot off.
The framework of the story is that the zombies evolve in their fight to survive, and Christine devolves, reverting to a more primal, animalistic state. The undead become more like the living; the living become more like the dead. And that’s where I came up with the title Devolution, a title that chronicles Christine’s journey.
I’m not sure how it ends. I usually don’t with my novels. I figure that if I don’t know the ending until I get to it then hopefully the reader won’t as well. I know there’s an ending there — I (and you) will just have to wait until I get there and see what Christine does.
Incidentally, my friend never got the chance to write this story for Ghost House Productions. She now writes far more horror-filled (at least to men) television movies for the Lifetime network. That leaves it to me.
Like I said earlier, everyone seems to have their zombie story. Devolution is mine. What’s yours?
Incidentally, I’m in a search for an artist. If there are any aspiring comic artists out there looking to break in the industry and you’re interested in trying your hand on a zombie comic, get in touch with me. We may be able to work something out.
Feel free to email me at myocum@comiccritique.com and if you’d like to learn more about my novels and other writing, visit www.mattyocum.com.
—CCdC—
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