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

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