So we move to the sub-sub-genre that perhaps can most easily blend the post-apocalyptic subgenre with the horror genre—the zombie apocalypse! Judging by the number of books written about the battles between undead zombies and the remaining humans, it is one of the most popular sub-genres. I have to admit, for a long time the idea of zombies didn’t interest me. My first experience with the sub-genre was probably seeing the black and white version of Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD—approximately a hundred times! So many times that I was kind of bored with it. I’m afraid that the experience of seeing that film a lot on television, with commercials, probably jaded me to the entire sub-genre.
Even though I was never the biggest fan of this sub-sub-genre, I later found out that zombies can be pure fun! The dead coming to life, or some facsimile of that event, can straddle the line between, and blend together, the horror and PA genres. I think the first stuff I read was indie fiction from Amanda Hocking (remember her?), and I liked it. It was kinda epic, written over more than one book—like so much PA fiction is. Others took that formula and followed it. Scott Nicholson’s name comes to mind. Piperbrook, Clausen and Evans wrote epic zombie apocalypse series. Honestly there are too many to mention. A lot of early indie fiction writers latched onto the sub-sub-genre to write in.
Probably because it sold.
Zombie PA fiction can pull in some of the tropes of other sub-genres of PA fiction, especially the infectious disease apocalypse. M.P. McDonald does a pretty cool job pulling together the tropes from the apocalyptic pandemic and the zombie sub-genres with her Sympatico Syndrome books. People are behaving like zombies but it is due to a virus, and as usual for me, the really interesting parts are reading about how her characters deal with the aftermath. There are plenty of others, also. One of the first I read in this sub-genre was Bobby Adair’s Slow Burn series, and in it, people were infected. Except some of the infected did not become zombies—not exactly, at least. They were the titular “Slow Burns,” humans who retained their humanity while having some of the physical manifestations of the zombies of this story’s world, including an elevated normal body temperature. (I flew through the Slow Burns, but finally petered out somewhere around eight or nine books into the series.)
It can also be supernatural, or of an unexplained origin. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, the seminal George Romero film, has the dead crawling out of graves and arising from the newly-dead. It was implied that the cause of these zombies was some sort of radiation from a space probe returning from Venus, but I certainly never got that from that first classic film. Being the first of its kind to have any sort of mass awareness, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD gave us the model for the zombie apocalypse for many years.
Other supernatural causes include voodooism and old curses. THE MUMMY’s titular character is sort of a zombie, I think, although the story is more a horror story and less an apocalyptic tale. I can’t some up with an example, but reanimated corpses can feature in some voodoo mythology.
WORLD WAR Z, both a novel by Max Brooks and a movie starring Brad Pitt, is another of the most popular of a crowded sub-sub-genre. Though I didn’t get it from the movie (and haven’t read the book), apparently the back story cause is a virus. Same with the extremely popular TV series THE WALKING DEAD and all of its spinoffs—viruses cause the zombie apocalypse. In FALLOUT, there are zombies, seemingly created by the radiation from the world-ending nuclear apocalypse. (There is a lot going on in FALLOUT, besides zombies!)
One Reddit poster summed up possible causes as follows: “Bio-Engineering, Space Rabies, Alien Parasite, Black Magic Voodoo, etc etc.” And I think that pretty much follows along with everything I’ve talked about above (and below).
Even YA fiction gets into the act! One of my favorites was Howard Odentz’s DEAD (A LOT) series, where the zombies are created by a parasite and have some unique characteristics (I won’t spoil it for potential readers). This one inspired me to write a bit of fan-fiction set in Odentz’s world (but in a different part of the country), and I had a blast writing it! I tried my hand at one where my main character was a zombie, with his own mind trapped somewhere within the zombie urges, but it didn’t go anywhere. (WARM BODIES, a movie starring Nicholas Hoult, did a fun light treatment of the subject with a safe resolution of the problem of the zombie-human relationship!)
While zombies are super popular, and seem to be a common apocalypse and post-apocalyptic setting, we still have more to explore—in my next post!