Stuff Wot I Redd (First Book Review Part One)

I like Zombies.  I think that of all the varieties of spooky things they are the best.  Better than weeny love-struck vampires mooning over pale school girls with questionable acting skills, better than basketball playing werewolves.  Zombies at their most basic do one thing:  eat human flesh.  And that's it.  There should be very little deviation from the Canon of Allowable Zombie Behavior which was codified by the master of all things zombie:  George R. Romero.  I'm not saying that I condone it but zombies might be able to move faster than a drunken lurching stagger, and there MIGHT be the zombie-specialists that dine only on human brains.  And that's pretty much it.  It's their simplicity of purpose that makes them so frightening; that feeling that the very idea of the undead might not be all that far-fetched after all. 

I can pretty much go to bed each night assured that no wall crawling creep with a mean jones for my blood is going to skulk into my bedroom, bite my neck, then turn into a bat and flap away into the darkness.  Likewise, there are long odds against lycanthropy; yet there is the very real possibility of the walking dead.  Respected sources, such as the Bible, do more than merely hint at the possibility of the walking dead, they cite chapter and verse.  No pun intended.  Not only did Jesus die then re-animate, the Book of Revelations also talks about how the dead will also come forth from their places of internment.  Science albeit weird science, also seems to think that life after death might be possible; cryogenics deals with revivification.  The possibility of a horrifying end will scare me more than aliens or the outright impossible, and I think that this is true for most people.  It was a stroke of genius that Stephanie Meyer linked vampirism with love.  Personally though I detest the "Twilighting" of the horror genre; it might make for fat bank accounts but it does nothing for me.

I was excited as I've recently been for anything lately hearing about the book, "World War Z" by Max Brooks.  (to be continued)