World War Z and Zombie Poultry. The Real Life Story of Mike, the Headless Chicken

Zombies have been on top of the wave of public interest for quite some time now; some may say that for too long. Truth is the genre is fascinating but you can only spin the end of the world by the hands of mindless eating machines so many times. It's getting repetitive and boring. There will always be the hard-core fans, but to the general public, the wave is approaching the beach. Or is it, really? When one of the most popular actors of these times--Hello there, Brad Pitt!--stars in the movie adaptation of one of the most iconic zombie books of recent times, one might be inclined to think the fun has just begun.

But not me. I do think this wave is about to reach the beach, and in true wave fashion, it'll go with a huge splash. World War Z, the movie--which, may I say, looks AWESOME!--will cause the biggest splash, filling theaters with over-excited fans--like me. We'll surely get a few other, smaller splashes and then the genre will fade out for a few years. Hopefully. Not another Romero remake in at least a decade, let's cross our fingers...

But will zombies be forgotten? I don't think so. The zombie figure is a predominant one in our unconscious mind, and then there are all the strange occurrences; like the guy in Miami who ate another man on a busy highway in the middle of the day. Turns out he was under the influence of some kind of drug--what a shocker. Still, for a moment there I feared I might had postponed my bunker buying for a little too long. And there have been more similar incidences. But if that wasn't giving you nightmares, then the CDC decides to post an official memo on Zombie Preparedness... Nop, I think the fear of the dead is quite alive.

Mind you, I haven't bought that bunker just yet. Mostly because I'm penniless. And my neighborhood doomsday prepper is not that friendly.

Come to think of it, I may know just the story to inject the genre with a bit of liveness. A 'real life story' is always welcome in Hollywood, isn't it? So I give you the story of Mike, the Headless Chicken.

It happened in 1945 in a Colorado farm, when one fine morning Lloyd Olsen went out to his yard to kill a chicken for dinner. Now, Olson must have followed the same procedure a hundred times, yet he did a lousy job on this one. Turns out, his machete had missed the jugular vein and left most of the chicken's brain stem intact. So what is the sensible thing to do under such strenuous circumstances? Why, you name your chicken and take it to the carnival! As part of the sideshow.

Mike, the Headless Chicken had almost all of his basic functions, like walking, breathing, and having a pulse. He even attempted to crow, which must've been fun... not. Since he couldn't eat himself--having no beak can do that to you--he was fed via eyedropper. He lived 18 whole months like that, and now there is a yearly festival in his hometown to commemorate this hard-to-kill rooster.

How is this story any scary? Well, granted, Mike wouldn't be able to eat us--being headless and all--but it is freaky. And then it got me thinking... What if the next avian flu does to us what the skillful Olsen did to Mike? Albeit without the actual cutting. What if a new virus just kills enough of our brain that we can actually walk and eat without conscious thought left? Even if we didn't feed on each other, it would mean the end of our race. And that's scary...

So what do you say? Who wants to write the script?

DEAD: The Ugly Beginning, A Review

Zombies are everywhere these days, from the usual b-movies, to TV, to short stories, and lately even in novels. A lot of novels. But with such a deluge, authors are being forced to do the impossible: Reinvent a classic. Even traditionalists, honest-to-god-Romero-lovers are faced with the difficult task of surprising an audience that has been overwhelmed with pretty much the same beat-up story.

It is in this rarefied ambience that DEAD: The Ugly Beginning sets out to start a very ambitious saga. From the get go we are warned that we’ve been treated to the first of what will be a set of twelve books relating this particular zombie apocalypse. Then the action starts. The first third of the book is strong, plunging the reader right into the middle of the action. The characters are interesting, complex, and likable. Simply amazing. And the one-liners, Jesus! Brown is really at his best when crafting spunky dialog. The plot moves fast and there’s so much action, we can’t stop from turning the pages.

Brown’s characters are intelligent and act in a way consistent with their different backgrounds; they also make mistakes and pay for them dearly, which is a wave of fresh air in and out of itself. I found I was never able to foretell the next character that was about to die, adding to the fun.

As the story progressed, there were a few issues that took away from my original excitement. First, there are too many characters, some appear for a brief moment only to be dispatched by the undead, others are staples of the book which back stories are spread so far apart from one chapter to another, that we struggle to remember what was happening with them last time we came their way.

Also, whenever a character goes into a flashback, there is no change in the grammatical tense (say, going from past to present, for example) or point of view, and whatever is written in italics tends to change size from word to word, making the reading experience a bit confusing.

Now, I think there are enough clues pointing to a certain evolution in the zombie, though it is never clear and the characters don’t seem to pay attention to these changes. Is it possible that zombies can learn and are actually conscious, to some degree, of their situation? This would mean they have a low, but still threatening, degree of intelligence. It would certainly be a game changer and may send the surviving pieces of Human Race into a second purge that could very well end with it all. So looking forward to learn how well I read in between the lines!

Finally, I feel like I need to warn all the readers-to-be about the ending of DEAD. No, not spoiler alert should be issued, I’m not going to spill the beans about what’s going to happen to the most important character or ruin any possible plot twists. I just want you to know that DEAD, like so many serial books of our times, doesn’t have a neat ending with some sense of conclusion. It simply ends, leaving all plot lines open to continue in the second book of the series. And while it is a great selling strategy for your already captured audience, I wished we could leave this trend behind. What is it so unappealing about giving the readership some sense of resolution and still letting the door ajar just a bit so we can fathom what adventures may still await?

All nip-tuck aside, DEAD: The Ugly Beginning is a highly entertaining book. I loved the references to paramount pictures or phrases in the Zombie Lore, the sarcasm and intelligence of the narration, and the interesting plot ram-packed of action. I will be reading the second book in the series, waiting anxiously to know the fate of those fantastic characters I grew to love. Definitively a book to be read by every zombie fan who wants a bit of the classic with a lot of spark.

For more details about the book, click on the link.

Last Day: Z

April just went like water through my fingers and here we are now, facing the Z challenge. Unbelievable. I had a blast and hope you did, too. To all my new followers, I hope you continue to find interesting things among the many thoughts that compel me to write in this blog and I'll do my best to give you just that. To all the new friendships and bonds that the challenge gave me, I cherish you all. Thanks for extending me your virtual hand in a gesture of true kindness.

Movie.

Zombieland (2009)
Directed by Ruben Fleischer.

Plot: In the early twenty-first century when zombies have taken over America, a shy, inexperienced college student in Texas has survived by following his 30 rules. He then decides to travel to Ohio to see if his parents are alive. He gets a ride with a boisterous zombie-hating good-old boy headed for Florida, and soon they confront a young woman and her little sister who have survived by conning other survivors out of their food of getaway cars. An unlikely group, circumstances band them together in search of an LA amusement park they've heard is zombie free.

Review: This movie is neither small nor unknown but do forgive me, Z was an extremely difficult letter and my brain is not cooperating after a month long of heavy thinking. Zombie comedies are difficult to execute and hardly ever worth watching but Zombieland is one of those great exceptions. Part hilarious part scary, the movie has a touching backstory that makes sense and is developed with extreme subtleness but to great effect. The acting is superb and the dialogs are just brilliant. This move is up there with Shawn of the Dead and should not be missed.

Book.

World War Z by Max Brooks.
Published By Crown in 2006.

Blurb: The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time.World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.

Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the human factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn’t the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as ‘the living dead’?”

Note: Some of the numerical and factual material contained in this edition was previously published under the auspices of the United Nations Postwar Commission.

Review: I decided to go with this huge blurb because it depicts to perfection the style, voice, and mind behind the book. Narrated as a series of first person interviews, the book contains a hundred individual stories that paint a perfectly clear image of what it was to almost loose the war against zombies. I previously did an extended review of this book for Dark River Press, but suffice it to say it will hunt your dreams. World War Z is a tour-de-force that revived the zombie mythos in 2006, when it was dead and buried. Really zombies-que to bring them back like this, don't you think?

World War Z, My Review

Note: This Review is part of the contest 2011 Spooktacular October Paranormal Reading Challenge. For details or more reviews, please visit Sweetmarie Spooktacular October Paranormal

World War Z by Max Brooks is an iconic book. Not only it single-handily brought new life to the Zombie Genre and became a classic, but the book made zombies so cool and appealing that it kick-started the whole Zombie trend that has been sweeping the literary horror genre for years. I mean, even Stephen King cut a slice of dead meat pie with his book Cell.

For ages Zombies had been monsters for short stories and second rate movies; not since George Romero's mythic movies had the undead been so alive in our psyche. There were no novels solely dedicated to them and they were considered by most like truly dead myths, until in real Zombie-esque style Max Brooks came about and made them walk again.

These days Zombies are hot and everyone who is in the business of writing or selling horror books knows it. We, and them, owe it all to this amazing book. Rumor has it, Brad Pitt will play the lead in the movie version of the book that's in production this very moment.

Okay, back to the book.

It's written like a non-fiction story, very matter of fact, and even scarier because of that. The story starts ten years after the Zombie World War almost annihilated the human race. For twelve years every breathing being on the planet fought an all out war with an enemy that isn't organized, doesn't sleep, doesn't need to eat, and, technically, can't die; where everyone human that got killed in action, raised to fight against you. Three quarters of the world population died as a result of it, the planet got thrashed, and whole ecosystems went the same way Dinos did. Add to that the nuclear winter and you've got the scariest setting ever.

We never get to know the name of the author, all we know is he was in charge of writing a report for the United Nation's Postwar Commission but when he delivered it, the Commission Chair asked him to edit said report because it was all "too intimate", with "too many opinions". He had to prune his report and eliminate, as much as possible, the influence of the human factor. The author is appalled, considering it was precisely the human factor what allowed the catastrophe to occur, so he decides to write a memoir of the war with every interview he did.

The story is divided in three big sections: the first relating how it started and disseminated; the second talking about the moment of no return, when civility went out the window and panic followed suit; and the third telling how is it that the war was finally 'won'. It is redacted as a series of interviews with mostly military personal and a few first person encounters with people critical in either the creation of the problem, or its solution.

Now, allow me to say I haven't slept a decent night in three days and the fact that my husband was out of town didn't help matters. Every noise sent me into tachycardia and I kept dreaming about zombies trying to take my kids away. Seriously.

Even though the stories related to you are not always frightening, the atmosphere is very strong and gets under your skin. Because of its style, it's very easy to read and, to add credibility to it, Brooks used military terms or words in other languages when needed, using footnotes to clarify the meanings to the 'civil readers'. Brilliant.

Over all, it totally deserves the status it has gained and is now among my all-time favorites. If I had to say one bad thing about it, though, it would be that the winding down of the story is a bit slow. After it is explained how the war can be won (remember, we already know we won), the book visits a few of the most important battles fought to make it happen and it gets a bit repetitive. However, one chapter later you have utter brilliance in "Total War" (chapter 10) and you wish the book had two hundred more pages.

If you like horror, post-apocaliptic stories, zombies, or if you simply want to be part of contemporary history, you HAVE to read this book.

The Monster Book of Zombies, My Review

This is a big book and it took me a while but it was worth it as it has many great stories. Most of the authors are English and that gives the whole a fresh and different background, a departure of other anthologies I've read before; this feeling was increased by the fact that most of the stories were written a very long time ago, a century in some cases! That's also very cool because the pieces tend to be more atmospheric and there's nothing better than creepy horror. The settings of the stories vary greatly, from old cemeteries, to elementary schools, to forests that hide ancient megaliths; some are humorous, others sad, there's even romance and a whole lot of dark, twisted irony. What they all have in common, wait for it... is zombies!! So, now you know, the secret's out.

Seriously, it kind of kills a bit of the thrill when you're in the middle of a story wandering what's going to happen and you remember, Oh, right. It's a zombie. But then again, that's what you were looking for, a bunch of zombie stories, otherwise why would you buy a zombie anthology, right?

Now, it could take a while to review each one of the stories since there are more than twenty five but I'll review the first, two of my favorite ones, and of course, Lovecraft's.

The book opens with a bang, a great story by Clive Backer, SEX, DEATH AND STARSHINE, that reflects the life of long dead actors who perform in and out of stage, as they work for a company run by their living counterparts. Originally written in 1984, its poignant humor fits in perfectly with the cannibalistic appetite we show for Hollywood star's rumors and fall downs. It's funny, intriguing, and scary, all together in a great package that makes you feel so good about having bought the book in the first place.

One of my favorite stories was Charles L. Grant's QUIETLY NOW. This one was originally published in 1981; it tells the story of a writer who's been trying to finish a book his editor has been waiting for more time than it was supposed to. The author befriends a few boys from his building and gets too involved when other kids from the school close by start disappearing. I loved the mysterious atmosphere Grant creates when there are several instances of persecution that take place in the woods; you can just feel the tree branches snapping under your feet and the scary monster looking at you hidden from the bushes to the left. So freaky.

My definite outstanding pick would have to be for Basil Copper's THE GREY HOUSE. There are so many great stories in the anthology that the idea of picking just two simply tortured me but, alas, there has to be a winner and Copper's 1966 story made it easy to choose the top spot. It goes to describe the life of a couple who have just bought a house in the english country side; a house with a very bad reputation, mind you. The previous owner lived there almost a century before and slaughtered half of the town and all of his servants in an intent to win eternal life that seems to have evade him. However, the feeling in the house is very dark and haunting, particularly at night, when strange noises from the woods carry on to the house and scare the poor wife half out of her wits; meanwhile the husband seems to be possessed by a desire to renovate the house to its previous glory when the old master was in charge. This story creeps under your skin and leaves you sleeping with the lights on.

Ok, the last of the bunch is Lovecraft's REANIMATOR. I know Lovecraft has a huge fan base; I, for one, love his stories but in this case the story was written very early on his career and only published after his death, when he had achieved fame. The story lacks the classic stamp of his future work and feels a little disjointed and like it could've used a bit of editing before publishing. It isn't at par with what we are used to read from his twisted mind but, in any case, it's interesting. The narration starts with the ramblings of a Dr. who seems to be on the brink of insanity as he recollects how his assistant died and who he suspects to be the murderer. The character is a man with no scrupulous that won't allow something as small as ethics get in his way to become the medical community's star child by achieving to reanimate corpses and halt altogether the process of dying. Attaboy!

There you go, a few of the most representative short stories, and not so short, in this amazing galore of zombie love. Get you newly furbished zombie apocalypse bunker and have a happy comfy reading!

Good News

Well, I can finally call myself a Published Writer.

I left you at the point where I was editing my Short Story and Novelette. It turns out the Novelette was a far cry from ready; upon re-reading it I found it complicated at some parts where a lot of information was cramped and became confusing. You could say I wrote it anew. The bones were there but I didn't like the narrative and, in general, I found it terrible. I worked with it for a few weeks and came out much better and just in time for that deadline I told you about. The other story I sent was "Francis"; complete at 4000 words (more or less) I barely tweaked it after having sent it for the Contest.

Yesterday night I submitted both works and this morning; yes, this morning! (It was so fast!) I got my answer: Post Mortem Press will publish an Anthology of New Horror called "Isolation" where "Francis" will be included; it will be released in late January and the editor added he might be interested in publishing the Novelette, "Perpetual Night", as an anchor for a future publication.

OMG!! I read the mail while in bed this morning and jumped out so fast I almost fell when my feet got caught in the bedclothes. I jumped, cried, screamed... you name it. As you can imagine, I'm beyond happy but I'm also trying to keep my cool and reminding myself that I have to keep working and pray for many encores before I can genuinely call myself an Author.

I will start working in that other story I have in the rough and I have a great idea for a new one; in the mean time I'm enjoying myself today. YAY!!