Readers of this blog may have seen my recent thoughts on "vamp lit" (very much on my mind again these days now that Stephenie Meyers' Twilight saga has come to Playaway).
Zombies are a different sort of undead, and, as a genre, "Zomb lit" doesn't have literary roots quite as deep as vampire literature. Nor does it seem to have much if any pretension about being "serious" writing. As a rule, it appears to be mostly concerned with campy genre-bending, metaphors stretched to the breaking point, and generally going for laughs.
If you want to gauge the full extent of Zombieland for yourself, try some basic Googling. In WorldCat, I found 669 results for "Subject Descriptor = Zombies -- Fiction". Here's a selection of recent zomboidal titles now available on Playaway:
What could be more all-American than high-school football? How about high-school football with zombies? That's exactly what's on offer in Ryan Brown's Play Dead from Brilliance Audio, in which a team of newly undead varsity atheletes must fight to win the championship -- and save themselves from eternal damnation.
Following on the heels of Seth Graham-Smith's very successful Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Ben Winters' Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, mash-up books like Jane Slayre by Sherri Browning Erwin (and Charlotte Bronte) simultaneously make fun of the popular preoccupation with the living dead and skewer the mannerisms of sacred authors like Bronte and Jane Austen.
And the latest form of mash-up is historical rather than literary. Graham-Smith's most recent offering, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, imagines Honest Abe the rail splitter splitting open the heads of vampires to avenge the death of his mother.
Also in the pseudo-history category is the cleverly titled Paul is Undead by Alan Goldsher, which imagines a zombie Fab Four that try to take over the world in a slightly different way from the actual lads from Liverpool. The subtitle is The British Zombie Invasion, and the audio version from Blackstone Audio is read by the very talented British narrator (fresh from reading Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy).
It's hard to know how long the trend may last. The possibilities seem endless -- limited only by the reading and listening public's interest in paranormal literary pranksterism. What's next? Maybe Moby Dick with a zombie whale? Or Huck Finn and the Mississippi Werewolf? How about a vampire Great Gatsby? (Actually, I'd kind of like to see that last one.) Almost as fast as I can make the jokes, these stranger-than-the-original-fiction titles keep rolling out. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
To receive blog posts in your e-mail inbox or RSS reader, click on "subscribe to this blog's feed".
Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta
