This may be social suicide, but I’m going to say it anyway.
I don’t like zombies.
Not too thrilled with vampires, either.
I mean—hell, they’re dead. Dead. And motivating. The contradiction alone is…
I am tired of zombies, though. And vampires.
In the last several months, I have picked up at least two novels I was very much looking forward to reading because their premises looked really cool. I put both down because zombies got dragged into them, and I thought unnecessarily. Zombies are cool right now, though, and apparently a lot of people like reading about corpses shambling around trying to eat the neighbors. Never mind that they don’t seem to move very fast and an octagenarian with a hip replacement could outrun one, but…
Now, I liked Michael Jackson’s Thriller. I even liked the zombie dance in it. I thought it was a neat twist on an old theme. But it’s an old theme and while even I wrote a story that sort of dwelt on the possibilities of vampirism explaining certain religious rituals, it was a short story and I didn’t make a career out of it.
To be fair, I have never been much of a horror fan. I don’t find having the crap scared out of me particularly fun. Some do. Certainly a lot of people in my life have had fun scaring the crap out of me, but that’s another story. So I was never a wolfman fan or a mummy fan or a Dracula fan or any of that. I could appreciate these things as one time motifs for a specific work of fiction, but to turn them into cottage industries…
I even liked Buffy, but not really because of the vampires and such. I thought it was funny. (And Willow was hot.) Angel not so much.
I find the fannish obsession with dead things a bit disturbing. Necrophilia is not healthy. But each to his or her own, I say. Not for me to judge.
But I do dislike it ruining otherwise good fiction because it’s, you know, trendy.
I wouldn’t mind having a good explanation for it. I like to understand things. Knowledge is power, after all, and even for the purposes of self defense…
Anyway, there. I’ve said it. I don’t like zombies. And I would really like them not in what appear to be otherwise perfectly good steampunk novels that I would otherwise read with delight.
I do wonder how many others feel the same way…