The New York Review of Science Fiction Readings on the evening of Tuesday, 7 October 2008, were a special Halloween-themed program featuring a gruesome twosome of tales from The Living Dead, a newly published anthology of zombie stories edited by John Joseph Adams. Produced by the Series’ executive curator Jim Freund, host of WBAI-FM’s Hour of the Wolf radio program on sf and fantasy, and presented at the NYRSF Readings Series’ venue at the South Street Seaport Museum’s Melville Gallery, the evening’s guest curator was the anthology’s editor.
In opening remarks before the audience of about 40, Adams spoke about the popularity of zombies—shambling, rotting corpses that have returned to a semblance of life and seek out human victims. With a nod to George Romero’s seminal Living Dead film trilogy, he noted that zombies partake of aspects of vampires, werewolves, and the Frankenstein Monster—reanimated, they rise from the grave, and are animalistic predators feeding on humans—yet have a basic simplicity. They are primal appetite. Having moved far beyond Haitian voodoo, they are also a metaphor for our fear of the relentless mob swarming and overwhelming us. Adams then introduced the evening’s readers, David Barr Kirtley and John Langan.
Kirtley’s story, “The Skull-Faced Boy”, involved two teen-agers, killed in a freak car accident caused by a zombie, who find themselves, minds intact, still-animated corpses. One soon takes command of a zombie army, using his intelligence to prey cruelly on loved ones, while the other vainly struggles to hold onto his humanity. Kirtley’s reading style, depending on the audience member, was either monotonous or appropriately mournful (like the zombies’ plaintive moans of “Help me!”).
Langan’s offering, “How the Day Runs Down”—from which he read a couple of excerpts—unusually took the form of a play, in particular, one inspired by an overdose of a certain Thornton Wilder drama. “Think of Our Town overrun by zombies,” he said. Indeed, there was a Stage Manager and lengthy monologues, though worldwide news reports on “the Eaters” take events outside the town. Langan’s rapid, nearly breathless reading, a sort of staccato rush, well-suited the excited pace and drove home the scene’s tragedy.
At a time when the scariest stories are found on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and on the very evening of a Presidential debate (on top of which, I’d just been to the dentist and told that I need a root canal), zombies have a lot of fierce (dare I say stiff—get it? “Stiff”, dead body?) competition to terrify us, but Kirtley and Langan successfully managed to affect us, haunt us, creep us out, disgust us, and even raise the odd hollow chuckle. Both tales, I noted, aside from featuring skull-faced zombies, presented zombie-ism as, rather than an isolated occurrence, an epidemic or plague, somehow contagious or something to which people might be “converted”, grist for another metaphor mill. Set, as is so much of zombie literature and film, in societies on or beyond the verge of collapse, we can only hope that they’re not prophetic.
The Living Dead features choice zombie stories, one original (Langan’s) and 33 reprints, exhumed from the past three decades, by 35 writers, including, in addition to Langan and Kirtley, Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite, Adam-Troy Castro, Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg, Jeffrey Ford, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Laurell K. Hamilton, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Stephen King, Joe R. Lansdale, Kelly Link, George R.R. Martin, Susan Palwick, Darrell Schweitzer, Dan Simmons, and Michael Swanwick, and is available from Night Shade Books for $15.95. (For additional information, see johnjosephadams.com.)
The audience included Richard Bowes, Harold Garber (who, serendipitously, helped set the mood before the readings with a CD of Zacherly, “the Cool Ghoul”), Derrick Hussey, Barbara Krasnoff, Gordon Linzner, Jon Messinger, Fred and Dee Phillips, and Robert Rodriguez. Afterward, as is customary, the guests and most of the audience adjourned to a nearby pub for dinner (hopefully not human brains, faces, and assorted body parts) and conversation.
To my surprised relief (and perhaps the authors’ disappointment), I had no nightmares.