I wrote How to Create Your Own Zombie Apocalypse years ago, and going back to it now, it is a little more primitive than I would like.
So I went in to fix it. Then I started working, and realised there was a full novel sitting inside a much smaller book, and the repair turned into a rebuild. I became a better writer in the intervening years and the earlier version shows it.
I like both versions, which is not the usual thing to say about something you have replaced. The earlier one has problems and the idea underneath it never did, so I intend to go back and rewrite the original as a novelette, fixing it on its own terms. Two versions of one premise at two lengths.
The question the rewrite is built on is what it would take for an ordinary person to become a killer. Not rage. Not desperation. Not poverty and not childhood trauma, which are the explanations this kind of book usually reaches for. Careful, patient, internally consistent logic, applied to a premise that happens to be false.
What is Death, Murder, and Zombies about?
What it takes for an ordinary person to become a killer.
Not rage. Not desperation. Not poverty and not childhood trauma, which are the explanations this kind of book usually reaches for.
Karl reasons his way there. Patient, careful, internally consistent logic, applied to a premise that is false. He works it out step by step and every step follows from the one before it, which is what makes the book uncomfortable instead of lurid.
You can follow him the whole way. That is the problem.
The book on this: Death, Murder, and Zombies is a first person novel about a man reasoning his way into becoming a killer, step by careful step, from a premise that happens to be false.
Who is Karl?
A narrator who is always wrong about himself and always right about the facts.
That combination is the most uncomfortable one available to a first person novel. If he were wrong about everything you could dismiss him. If he were right about everything you would have to agree with him. Instead his observations hold up and his conclusions about what they mean do not.
The book opens with Death walking through the wall of a crack house, feeling the pull of a soul about to leave, noting that physical barriers stopped mattering a long time ago. Somewhere in that voice is a part that is still Karl.
Working out how those two things sit together is most of the reading experience.
When do the zombies show up?
Late, and that is deliberate.
Most of the novel is the descent. A game, a family coming apart, an accident, something that happens close to death, and a theory that forms afterward and will not let go.
Then there is the part where a man decides he wants to shoot zombies for real, and starts doing the research, and works out how to fund it, and sets up somewhere to work.
A book that opens with the apocalypse is a book about survival. A book that spends two hundred pages arriving at one is about the person who caused it.
Where does Karl start?
In front of a game, alone, and pleased with himself.
He is killing zombies for experience points and legendary loot, setting personal records, and describing the endorphin hit as a drug. His friend Mike keeps texting. Fresh air, exercise, come out of the house. Karl tells him he is busy, and notes that it is not a lie.
Then a text that says, for real, I am kind of worried about you.
Karl’s reaction to that is the first sign of what the book is. He wonders what could possibly be wrong with knowing what you want and pursuing it with dedication. That is not a stupid position. It is the position, held one degree past where a person should hold it, and the whole novel is the rest of those degrees.
How does the outside see Karl?
Through a pizza delivery driver, which is the only external view the book allows.
Gwynn had delivered to the house maybe fifty times in a year. Same order every time. Large pepperoni and sausage, extra cheese, paid for with crumpled twenties and never a tip. The kid who answered was polite enough and awkward in the way that says he has not spoken to anybody in months.
Karl, she thought his name was. Looked like he had not seen sunlight in a while.
That is fifty visits of accumulating evidence, held by somebody with no reason to act on it and no standing to. A first person novel about a man losing contact with reality needs at least one person outside the head, and she is it.
How does the theory get built?
From an observation in a hospital that he refuses to let go of.
During a near-death encounter he notices that Death avoids electronic equipment. The entity steps back when a defibrillator charges and keeps its distance from the medical machines. At the time he dismisses it.
Later he does not. Certain electromagnetic frequencies disrupt electronic devices, producing temporary malfunction or permanent damage. If Death is a supernatural entity, he reasons, the same logic might apply to it.
Then he builds a cage on that principle, and describes it as the most expensive thing he has ever made and the most dangerous room he has ever stood near, and says the combination felt exactly right.
Every step there is sound. He observed something, formed a hypothesis, and engineered a test. The only defective part is the premise underneath all of it, which is where the book has been the entire time.
Where does the book turn?
At the point where the cage needs something to attract what he is hunting.
That problem has no acceptable solution and Karl finds one anyway, working through it with the same care he brought to the electromagnetic research. His notes on the question read like a design constraint being satisfied.
The reader is ahead of him by then and has been for a while, which is the arrangement the book runs on. He is never wrong about the facts and he is wrong about what he is, and there is no scene where he notices.
Is Death, Murder, and Zombies a horror novel?
It is shelved there and it does not behave like one.
The horror in it comes from method and not from monsters. Animal experiments before human ones. Recruitment. Building the cage. A first test, then an experiment, and a man keeping careful notes throughout because he considers himself a researcher.
The book carries a content warning for graphic violence, murder, animal cruelty, and serial killing shown from the inside. All of it is in there and none of it is decorative.
No excuses are offered on Karl’s behalf. The novel does not supply a childhood that explains him, and it does not stop him being coherent.
Who is Death, Murder, and Zombies for?
Readers of Joe Hill, Paul Tremblay, and Thomas Tryon.
That is horror that works on unease instead of on shock, where the dread comes from a person behaving reasonably inside a frame that is wrong.
If you want a zombie novel, this is not really one. If you want to sit inside somebody’s reasoning while it takes him somewhere terrible, it is exactly one.
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