Audience of Strangers

John has made my day SIX BILLION times better.

ETA: He did it twice. I've mentioned this one nearly seven years ago, and then again three years back.

Feed by Mira Grant

So by the time I was partway through, I had discovered I was liking this book more than I thought I would. I expected to like it--it's about valiant (and snarky) news-bloggers after the zombies rose, after all--but not this much.

I've finished the book. I think the story greatly benefits from my coming to it spoiler-free, so I'm not going to include any spoilers. It is one of those books I need to loan to people--it is smart, funny, involving, and makes sense of the zombies-caused-by-disease idea.

Also, the author said she cried when she wrote one scene. I cried when I read it. Don't know if you will, but I strongly recommend you go and get the book and find out.

Today was pretty awesome, actually. Got up and went out to see family that John was fixing computers for. Nice to see her again, plus she gave us a bag of clementines and me a new hat. Sort of a blue-purple very-thick-knit cloche with a pin that has a bunch of feathers on the side. It is the kind of thing I have always thought of as an old lady hat and I do not care, it is pretty. And warm. Besides, I am past thirty, I get to wear this kind of thing without needing to make a point of being ironic.

Stopped for lunch (possibly breakfast) at a new diner (well, diner under new management) that's not too far from out place. I liked it, will be looking to go back. Stopped home and then went out to see RED, which was pretty much what I expected and I am still really glad we got to see it on the big screen. Partly the big screen, yes, but the lack of distractions made it much easier to get into the movie. Not once did the pets interrupt.

Then we went by Chapters. Really, I am having trouble respecting bookstores anymore. There is so much junk, and hardly any of the books I am looking for. John maintains I should stay home and shop online, but I figure wandering around the shelves gives me a chance to see something I would not have known about anyway.

And I did. Any you know what? It was all either "[classic lit] + [monster]" or zombies.[1] Plus the stuff I expected to see, which was a solid dose of the Buffy the Vampire Shagger genre, King, Koontz, and the Usual Names.

( Tangent, on zombies. )

...right, that did kind of get away from me. As you were. :)
---
[1] Except another Vandermeer anthology, which led to the observation that John is more tired of steampunk than zombies because he hangs around people who squee a lot more over steampunk. I asked him who the hell he was hanging around with. He said me.
[2] I mean, consider the vampire. Yes, the basic idea of the monster is horrific, but at this point I think some variation of the phrase "he's not sparkly, he's a real vampire" would creep into a lot of explanations of that. And when the sparkle gets so deeply associated with the perception of the monster, when it becomes not only familiar but banal, the story-telling power of the tool is weakened.
Of course, you can also say that the association of "destroy the head, and it's okay" with the zombies is an idea with a similarly neutralizing effect on the horror of the monster. Associates them with a purely mechanical solution, takes the focus away from what they are... And I suspect this shorthand, this taking the focus away from the zombie, is what allows zombie stories to be about people.
Okay. Footnote getting way too long, back to text.
[3] Or radiation from a downed satellite, or whatever.

Answers, broken down into broad categories:

Fire
IIIII I (duplicates: I)

Head damage/decapitation
IIIII III? (duplicates: IIIII II?)

Body dismemberment/destruction (woodchipper, crushed under comet, explosion, acid)
IIIII I? (duplicates: IIIII II)

Any way you'd kill a sleepwalking human
I

Using magic
I

Undoing magic
I

Absolutely impossible because 245-Trioxin's effects are absolutely irrevocable, unstoppable, and you're all fucked
I (John, verbally. I note I believe that in fact electricity will kill a RotLD zombie. He notes it's not his fault I've run through that movie five times this weekend.[1])

Of eleven people, three didn't list duplicate methods in their answer. Mind, two of those three also noted that it depended on the type of zombie (although one said he was assuming stereotypical ones, with which his emphasis on head destruction I am guessing means Romero).

Only one person listed anything magical or metaphysical, or explicitly acknowledged that there might be a supernatural way of dealing with them. (It's odd--I'd have sworn a few of the people that posted know about handing them salt, or filling their mouth with salt and sewing it shut.) I am wondering how corpses rising from the grave became such a mundane issue, or is it another example of how horror movies have a tendency to be frankly neophobic?

Mr. Romero, I love your work. I truly do. But apparently somewhere in there its success has gone a fair ways towards burying the concept of a zombie as something to be dealt with by other than mechanical means.
---
[1] It's background noise.

Went to see Quantum of Solace. Really engaging if not particularly complex (and honestly, keeping a movie interesting when that much of it is chase scenes is a feat. I fell asleep during one of the Bourne movies).

Bond, as per the last movie, remains something like a shark in a tuxedo. You wind him up, you put him in a situation, you hope that maybe he leaves someone alive for questioning. George Stark-ish, I tell you.

Random digression on the way home led to a brief discussion of the US Unknown Soldier, and the factoid that no-one guarding him has any rank (which I knew), and that the Unknown Soldiers are awarded the Medal of Honour. Find this oddly fascinating, and think there is a great deal to be said about archetypes right there (although admittedly, the last discussion I had on the topic of unidentified-individual-as-symbol revolved around Jack the Ripper, so I think I'm kind of bouncing around the map here).

On the topic of dead things and archetypes, recently finished Brian Keene's Dead Sea. Fast little read, and while I wouldn't call it remarkable it was definitely decent. Got the impression the professor character was a bit of a mouthpiece, but then I have no objection to listening to digressions on the Hero's Journey and Joseph Campbell, so that was okay. Also, zombies.

It's raining and grey, and generally the perfect kind of day to sit inside with a hot drink. I shall go continue to do this.

Perfect Books, down on Elgin, has the trade paperback of World War Z as their featured book this month. Means it's going for $18.50, 20% off.

Should you be at all moved to pick up this excellent book--and I cannot figure who would *not* want a well-written, smart, neatly thought-out epistolary history of the zombie apocalypse that neatly avoids both schmaltz and schlock--now is a good time to do it.

I am suddenly imagining an alternate history in which Burke and Hare[1] are great heroes for having saved the world from the zombie menace.

There would probably be a Saturday morning cartoon featuring their exploits.

(Tangentially, mrsoles posted a link to I Sell The Dead in unhallowed_met, but I swear the B&H idea came to mind before looking at the site. Also, his The Resurrectionist sounds interesting.)

(Would you believe Firefox doesn't think "resurrectionist" is a word? I am shocked and saddened.)
---
[1] Proactive resurrectionists, who decided that waiting around for someone to die and then digging him up was too much like work, and skipping the "waiting" and "digging" parts.

Romero's apparently writing and directing Diary of the Dead, a movie about students who are out filming a movie in the woods. It's set the same night as the original Night of the Living Dead movie.

I am tripping over assorted comments about rebooting the universe, which are causing faint trepidation in my heart, but I will happily watch this thing as soon as I can get my hands on it.

Mwa-ha.
Mwa-ha-ha-ha.
It's mine, all mine.
My precious.

Mwa-ha-ha!

(Yes, that is only 64 pages of 8-1/2" x 11" paper halved and trimmed. No, I don't want to talk about how much shipping from France was. Mine!)

Oh, fine. Last week it's "I wish I could find a boy who was interested in my brain and not my body" and now you're all "Aaaugh! Zombies!" Seriously, Shel. Make up your damn mind.

ScaryGoRound rocks. Even the guest strips.