Gourds Gone Gory

Zombie Pumpkins? No, not the website where you can download an array of jack-o-lantern stencils.  I'm talking about pumpkins that emulate the undead.  Here's a horde of fantastic images, showcasing the handiwork of crafty amateurs and highly-skilled sculptors (such as Ray Villafane) alike:

Walker on the Wall

For those of us who happily reside in the Macabre Republic, it's never too early to start thinking about Halloween decorating.  So I just wanted to call everyone's attention to the Wall Monsters project: a series of "limited edition paper art beasts" (including the zombie pictured above) that hearken back to vintage Halloween silhouettes.  For more details about the project (and the treats that can be reaped from the design team Steam Crow's current Kickstarter campaign), click here.

Freaky Physiques

Zombies are so prevalent in pop culture, they have even infiltrated the fitness industry.  There are a slew of videos on YouTube where trainers present zombie-apocalypse-survival workout routines, but I prefer the following satirical skit (courtesy of Ontoe) that features an exercise class for decadents determined to put more pep in their shamble.

Kingly Trivia

In honor of Zombie Awareness Month, here's a little quiz concerning King's most Romero-esque work of fiction, "Home Delivery":


1.Who edited the zombie-themed anthology in which "Home Delivery" first appeared?


2.King's story is set on
(A) Little Tall Island
(B) Staten Island
(C) Gennesault Island
(D) Roanoke Island


3.The source of the zombie plague in "Home Delivery" is identified as Star Wormwood.  True or False?


4.What did Maddie Pace's husband Jack do for a living (before he died and came home zombified)?


Answers appear in the Comments section of this post.

Dark Passages: Zone One

Colson Whitehead's Zone One (2011) might be the finest work of post-apocalyptic/literary horror ever written; its extraordinary prose almost makes Cormac McCarthy's The Road read like pulp fiction in comparison.  Whitehead's narrative--which traces an armed "sweeper" unit's efforts to clear a walled-off section of lower Manhattan of its remaining zombie population--works on many levels, variously offering grim realism (the evocation of devastation), sharp satire (of American consumerist culture), and profound philosophical speculation.  Zone One not only delves into the angst and anxiety of the human survivors, but also deliberates upon the existential condition of the plagued (the zombies here come in two types: the nastily cannibalistic "skels" and the catatonic "stragglers" stuck in pathetic pantomime of acts of prior life).  The following passage references the latter type, a grotesque perennially posed as a fortune-teller inside a palmistry shop:

Gary [who fools with the unmoving fortune-teller] could have addressed his brothers, had he been able to evade and outwit his own denial over their deaths. Any séance was doomed, in [POV character] Mark Spitz's estimation, even if the young psychic had functioned properly, if she had still owned her talents.  He'd sifted through the failed proofs of an afterlife many a cold night.  There was a barrier at the end of one's life, yes, but nothing on the other side.  How could there be?  The plague stopped the heart, one's essence sloughed off the pathetic human meat and dog-paddled through the ectoplasm or whatever, and then the plague restarted the heart.  What kind of cruel deity granted a glimpse of the angelic sphere, only to yank it away and condemn you to a monster's vantage?  Sentenced you to observe the world through the sad aperture of the dead, suffer the gross parody of your existence.  Outside Zone One, the souls sat trapped in the bleachers, spectators to the travesties committed by their alienated hands.

Turn randomly to any page in Whitehead's novel, and you are likely to find a stand-out passage like the one above.  Zone One is a national treasure for any inhabitant of the Macabre Republic who values sophisticated American Gothic fiction.

Why Won't Zombies Ever Accomplish Apocalypse?

Because they keep dragging their feet.

Dire Haiku

Some zombie poetry, 5-7-5 style:












Undead and Dentulous

...Could eat you right up,
Gram always used to tell him.
Tonight she proved it.



Crimson Anniversary

Cooing, she tries on
Her husband Don's pricey gift:
Intestine necklace.



Macabre Marathoners

Breathless, staggering,
Striving for the finish line
Of the human race.



The Horror at Asbury Park

Deranged defender:
Sniper at a zombie walk.
Actors get head shots.



Outreaching Indigent

Rank clothes, rheumy gaze.
Mute, beseeching stumblebum.
Can you spare some parts?



Insomniacs

Late, neighborhood stroll;
He couldn't catch any ZZZ's.
The restless dead pounce.



With Apologies to Eliot

Wasteland taste-testers.
I had not thought undeath had
Redone so many.

Cruel Tees: Zombies Edition II

[For last year's edition, click here.]

Short Story Spotlight: "Heaven of Animals"

From Joe R. Lansdale's Dead in the West and Steve Vernon's Long Horn, Big Shaggy to Roland gunslinging against "slow mutants" in "The Little Sisters of Eluria" and Sheriff Rick riding his horse into the hostile territory of Atlanta on The Walking Dead, zombies and the Western have proven to be an excellent mix (perhaps the seamlessness of the genre blend stems from the technological rollback that is a corollary to apocalypse, and the sense of a re-opened frontier created by the collapse of civilization).  John Horner Jacobs is the latest writer to join the Weird-Western wagon trail, with his story "Heaven of Animals" reading like a cross between Lonesome Dove and Night of the Living Dead

In the piece, Jacobs details a splattery version of a cattle drive, as cowboys in a post-pandemic Arkansas round up and lead a "herd" of shambling revenants from the wilds and into modified slaughtering pens.  The author does a fine job of building a new-world variant of the Old West, complete with ambushed caravans and seedy saloon scenes.  There's plenty of suspense and bloody gunplay, but the most entertaining aspect of the story might be the banter between grizzled herder Jake and his mystic-minded, "phony Indian" sidekick Red Wolf (whom Jake sardonically dubs "Tonto").  "Heaven of Animals" (collected in the Kindle ebook Fierce as the Grave: A Quartet of Horror Stories) is a quick, vivid read that dispels the romantic aura of the cowboy lifestyle with haunting horror.

Reading Entrails

As Zombie Awareness Month draws to a close, the national news has grown disconcertingly gruesome.

In the (severed) vein of the recent cannibal attack down in Miami: this lurid report of self-evisceration and intestinal strewing (in Hackensack, New Jersey, mere minutes from where I live).  Amazingly, the macabre masochist has survived his own gutting.

Isolated incidents of psychotic behavior or presages of a horrific pandemic?  We'd better stay tuned to the news, while keeping a wary eye out for strangers and neighbors alike...

Macabre in the Blogosphere: Honoring the Undead

We've been observing Zombie Awareness Month all May long here at Macabre Republic, but how have the undead been faring elsewhere online?  Here are links to some blogs/sites that have been spotlighting zombies:

Zombie Awareness Month: Four Ways to Prepare for the Coming Undead Apocalypse

Head to Toe Zombie Clothes!

Zombie Pinup Calendar

The Guilded Earlobe: My Top 10 Zombie Novels and Series

Book Review: Pay Me in Flesh

LEGO Zombie Creation: Zombie Nation

First Look at Michonne of "The Walking Dead"

The Zombie Apocalypse Is Upon Us

The Zombie Autopsies (Book Review)

The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks from the Apocalypse by Stephen C. Schlozman, M.D.  (Grand Central Publishing, 2011)

The Zombie Autopsies--an epistolary novel of the apocalypse penned by a learned doctor but a fledgling fiction writer--is a study in paradox.  Its strongest point is also its most glaring weakness.

The book is framed as an assemblage of classified documents meant to brief members attending a critical meeting at a U.N. Outpost bunker in the South Pacific.  Primary among these documents is the recovered notebook of the late Dr. Stanley Blum, who had been performing the eponymous autopsies at a research facility on Bassas da India (a coral atoll located between Madagascar and mainland Africa).  He was part of a desperate effort to analyze the virus that causes Ataxic Neuro-degenerative Satiety Deficiency Syndrome--or zombieism, in layman's terms.  His ongoing journal--accompanied by medical drawings that would be more at home in Tales from the Crypt than in Gray's Anatomy--is replete with gloriously gory detail (e.g., the volcanic eruption of deliquescent brain matter from a subject's sawed-open skull; the infestation of the abdominal cavity by long, parasitic worms).  The grayed pages filled with Blum's handwritten text, though, are anything but friendly on the reader's eye.

Schlozman aims to lend an air of verisimilitude to zombieism, positing an airborne contagion as the cause and providing neurological and physio-logical  explanations for familiar undead traits such as the staggering walk, decaying flesh, and insatiable appetite.  Still, the (presumably human-engineered) virus that Blum studies is so nefariously efficient as to defy plausibility and compromise the sense that This Could Really Happen.

The main problem with the book's format/approach is that it tends to read like a dry report more than a dramatic narrative.  Despite the fact that Blum's account grows steadily more unreliable (as he succumbs either to the stress of his job or the onset of the disease) and that the autopsy subjects are animate, conscious, and quite hostile, the novel is conspicuously short on character and incident.  Schlozman's zombie-autopsy premise is a captivating one, but regrettably, the author could have put a lot more meat--rotting or otherwise--on the bones of the idea.

More interesting as a quasi-scientific investigation than it is entertaining as a story, The Zombie Autopsies perhaps will appeal more to horror writers conducting research than it will to seasoned fans of zombie fiction. 

Zombie Autobiography

Brains brains brains, brains brains brains.  Brains brains brains brains brains brains; brains brains brains brains, brains brains brains.  Brains brains brains brains brains brains brains brains!  Brains brains brains brains brains brains brains brains brains brains brains brains brains brains brains brains brains brains brains brains brains brains brains; brains brains, brains brains (brains brains brains brains brains brains brains).  Brains brains brains brains brains brains--brains brains brains--brains brains brains brains brains?  "Brains brains brains brains," brains brains, brains brains brains brains brains brains brains brains. [...]

Anatomy of a Weird Tale: "Ghost Trap"

Not all zombie narratives are splattery efforts rife with images of decomposition and evisceration.  Some works veer more toward the genre of weird fiction, putting the emphasis on the haunting more than the horrific.  Rick Hautala's "Ghost Trap," as its title immediately suggests, is one such tale.  This is not the familiar story of putrescent masses bringing apocalypse to a metropolitan scene, but rather that of a single--and singularly disquieting--postmortem lingerer.

Readers learn the literal significance of Hautala's title in the opening paragraph: it's lobsterman lingo for a trap that has been broken off its mooring rope by too-stormy seas.  The lost trap sinks down to the ocean floor, where an unfortunately investigative lobster might still crawl inside.  "If more than one lobster ended up in a trap," the third-person narrative voice informs us, "the bigger, stronger one would kill and eat the others, but that only prolonged its captivity until, eventually, it died of starvation" (263).  Such description of desperate yet ultimately hopeless cannibalism also sounds like an apt gloss on zombie existence.

Perhaps what it most noteworthy about the opening of "Ghost Trap" is the sense of suspense it creates.  Skillful as any Maine fisherman, Hautala hooks his audience with the very first line: "Although it was often part of his job, Jeff Stewart hadn't been expecting to find a body today."  From here, though, further discussion of the discovery is held in abeyance for two full pages.  Exposition is sketched in, much of it focusing on Jeff's experiences working as a rescue diver for the U.S. Coast Guard.  The narrative remarks on the strangely animate appearance of recent drowning victims: "Their arms invariably would be raised and extended, like they were reaching for something to cling to, something solid so they could hoist themselves back up to the surface" (164).  If the corpse had yet to be ravaged by carnivorous scavengers, its eyes "would be wide open and staring with an expression of stunned surprise.  It was as if the victim still couldn't believe he or she had actually drowned."  The figuration of the life-like quality of the average drowning victim leads at last to a consideration of the odd state of the dead man Jeff accidentally discovers while searching for ghost traps on his off-day.  Here Hautala's prose presents an uncanny underwater tableau:

The man was sitting with his legs out in front of him, his toes pointing upward.  Jagged black shreds of rubber boots still clung to his feet and lower legs.  His arms were extended and swaying from side to side like thick fronds of kelp moved by the deep-sea currents.  The man's hands were extended, his fingers hooked.  Long yellowed fingernails looking like chipped old porcelain stuck out from the ends of the withered bone-white hands.

Jeff couldn't help but think the man looked like he had been waiting patiently for him...or someone...to come along and find him in the darkness seven fathoms below the surface. (264-265)

The corpse proves all the more disquieting as Jeff continues to scrutinize it.  Along with the tattered clothing, the corroded, barnacle-encrusted cement block chained to the man's waist suggests that this victim has been down here for some time.  Yet the dead man himself seems unnervingly preserved; his head even still possesses the pair of eyes that should have long since been gobbled by fish or crabs.  Though frightened by his find, Jeff briefly surfaces to retrieve a rope so he can mark of the location of the body for later retrieval.  "As he dropped back down into the depths," Hautala writes at scene's end, "his heart felt like a cold, tight fist in his chest" (266)--another fitting image, apropos of a zombie's penetrating clutch.

A still-shaken Jeff is overheard later that evening sharing his story with his drinking buddies at the local watering hole.  Pappy Sullivan--a knowing weirdo who might have wandered out of the pages of H.P. Lovecraft's fiction--approaches Jeff and opines that the mysterious drowned man must be Old Man Crowther (Hautala's choice of surname here perhaps a nod to fellow horror writer Peter Crowther).  Alluding to a "plague" that gripped the seafront community back in the early 70's when Jeff was but a young child (Jeff vaguely recalls hearing talk at the time of "something weird going on in town" [270]), Pappy claims that Crowther represented the last of the infected.  Crowther's subsequent suicide (presumably by drowning, since his empty boat later washed ashore) was actually a noble gesture, an act of self-sacrifice aimed to save the town from further horror.  Pappy's spook story does little to comfort Jeff, who goes to bed that night stuck with the unpleasant mental image of "the dead man--whoever the hell he was--sitting on the ocean floor down there in the pitch darkness" (271).

Despite Pappy's warning that the body should be left right where it is, Jeff and his Coast Guard companions move to retrieve it the following day.  Jeff descends with fellow diver Wes Evans, and for the former, the scene is bathed in ominous atmosphere: "The daylight shimmering above them quickly collapsed, plunging them into a preternatural gloom, which gradually blended into an inky darkness below" (273).  Jeff is filled with a "nameless apprehension" of what he knows is lurking on the ocean floor, and when he encounters the corpse once again, the sight of it strikes him like a portrait in a Gothic mansion: "Jeff was convinced that as he moved, so too the dead man's eyes moved, tracking him with a dull, blank stare" (274).  Ever wary, Jeff also frames the recovery operation in terms reminiscent of a Universal horror movie: "Like a mummy's curse, Jeff thought, some things are best left undisturbed" (275).  Like a belatedly enlightened seeker in a Lovecraft narrative, Jeff frets that he "should have left well enough alone," but now that the authorities have been alerted and the dive undertaken, there's no turning back.

Hautala continues to tantalize readers with suggestions of the corpse's sentience (e.g. Is it just the currents that make the body look like it's straining against its chain?).  The extended scene grows almost unbearably tense before the figurative trap is finally sprung: eyes now clearly moving, the deep-sea zombie suddenly lashes out against an unsuspecting Wes.  Using its talon-like fingernails, it fatally rakes the diver.  As Jeff attempts to intervene, he feels a sting in his left calf, but it's not until he surfaces with Wes's body that he realizes that he, too, has been wounded by the undead Crowther: "Within seconds, the coldness radiated up his leg and into his groin and chest, where it started to squeeze his heart" (278).  This last bit of description brackets perfectly with the story's earlier, foreshadowing line about "a cold, tight fist" in Jeff's chest.

To the others aboard the Coast Guard boat, Jeff's calf laceration appears to be a minor injury, but Jeff is convinced that he has been infected and is now a modern carrier of the old-time plague.  That's why the despondent protagonist plots his own demise in the story's last sentence: "As soon as the boat got back to the dock, he would have to find a cement block and a length of chain and head right back out to sea" (279).  To avoid the temptations of flesh-savaging, Jeff--like Old Man Crowther before him--opts for a conscientious (quasi-)suicide.

"Ghost Trap" perhaps suffers slightly from its inclusion in a zombie-themed anthology (The New Dead).  In such context, readers naturally expect Crowther to come to life in a climax of overt violence.  Whatever Hautala's narrative might lose in ambiguity, however, it makes up for in mordant irony.  Jeff, who has made a career out of recovering drowned bodies, is now set to commit himself to a watery grave.  A man who has hitherto "relished the freedom, the sense of weightlessness and total isolation" (263) that diving provides, will join Crowther in self-imprisoning submersion.  Such turnabout makes for a haunting conclusion to this nautical weird tale, a story that proves there are still fresh waters to be explored in zombie fiction, and reminds us that an eldritch entity from the deep need not be named Cthulhu or Dagon. 


Work Cited

Hautala, Rick.  "Ghost Trap."  The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology.   Ed. Christopher Golden.  New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2010.  263-279.

Cruel Tees: Zombies Edition

Habiliment for the decadent:

Hangmany

[For the previous game of Hangmany, click here.]


Can you solve the following puzzle within twenty seconds, or are you going to choke?


CATEGORY: SONG TITLE AND ARTIST

"__   __   V   __   N   __          __   __   A   __          __   __   __   __"


B   __


__   __   B          __   __   __   B   __   __


MISSES: C, F, P, S, T, U












HINT: Blood on her skin / Dripping with sin / Do it again



Answer appears in the Comments section of this post.

Beelzebub Tweets

BLZ, Bub








[For previous tweets, click here.]


"When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth."  Great tag line, but honestly, there's always room at the Inferno.
--7:51 A.M., May 16th


The world is a zombie's Chinese buffet: all you can eat, yet you still end up hungry.
--2:35 P.M., May 11th


Blame Jesus for the coming zombie pandemic: Lazarus was Patient Zero.
--6:49 P.M., May 5th


If a bulimic got turned into a zombie, would she spit out everything she chewed? Just wondering.
--4:20 A.M., April 30th

Core Gore

(Macabre Republic took a vampiric turn over the weekend, but now it's time to get back to Zombie Awareness Month.)

As a personal trainer, I'm always advising my clients and gym members about the importance of a strong core (the musculature girdles the inner organs and helps stabilize the body during exercise motions).  Perhaps, though, I should save my breath and just use the following clip as a gruesome p.s.a.:

Dark Passages: "Eye Gouge"

Extreme Championship Wrestling meets E.C. Comics in Del James's "Eye Gouge," a short story that stages a zombie battle royal for its audience.  The piece is a biting satire of the American appetite for blood sport, and while the writing won't be mistaken for Shakespeare (just as wrestling will never be confused with ballet), it is wickedly vivid.  Here's a highlight from the story's macabre main event:

The back door opened and with much strain the zombie wranglers [the undead as livestock] let another contestant into the ring.  But this was no ordinary zombie.  He barely fit through the door.  The massive Bulldozer was in all likelihood someone who had eaten his way to an early heart attack.  No Richard Simmons Deal-A-Meal cards [pop culture invoked parodically throughout the narrative] could've stopped this man from doing what he loved most.

The Bulldozer saw his next meal.

There was a loud groan [zombie-like behavior] in the crowd as the massive, hairy bulk [emphasis on grotesquerie] who wore nothing but gray sweatpants and engineer boots waddled across the ring.  He moved like a rubber-suited monster set upon wreaking havoc and destruction on Tokyo in a low-budget monster movie [a foreshadowing of the climactic carnage when the action spills outside the caged ring?].  With each step the ring shook a little.  The Bulldozer had pasty breasts the size and texture of hams [flesh as food] and his gut was a barrel of stretched girth.  He shoved the Masked Enforcer halfway across the ring and stalked the Convict.  A large hand shot out and grabbed the hanging eyeball.  With one yank, the Bulldozer ripped it free, shoving the eye in his mouth like an olive [garish variation on a martini garnish], but when he bit down the eye shot out of his mouth like a superball [a grim but whimsical image that perfectly captures the story's playfulness].  (358-59)

Work Cited

James, Del.  "Eye Gouge."  Mondo Zombie.  Ed. John Skipp.  Baltimore: Cemetery Dance, 2006.

Me, Zombied

I'm not quite myself today, thanks to some grotesque photoshopping over at the ZombieMe website.

Looking to bring out your inner ghoul?  Then click on over to the site, upload a head shot, and get creative.  It's free, it's fun, and it's guaranteed to make you seem so much better looking in person.