Like so many other classic “monsters,” the “zombie” category in books, movies, etc., has been slowly expanding its definition, perhaps more than any other and especially in the last ten years. What used to be the exclusive territory of the mindless, flesh-eating walking dead has broadened to include a variety of afflictions.

For example, the recent remake of The Crazies generally falls into the zombie category, but the threatening hordes are alive and they don’t eat human flesh. In fact, it seems the “zombification” agent served merely to amplify people’s innermost violent emotions so that the afflicted would pursue revenge fantasies they harbored in life (where it is revealed that high-school principals dream of stabbing their students with a pitchfork).

[Fair Warning: this post contains some adult language and spoilers for several movies, including The Crazies, Shutter Island, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. If this warning scares you, read no further.]

I don’t have a problem with this expansion of the category – but I do think we need to start finding new endings for zombie/apocalypse/pandemic stories. Today’s Hollywood writers have only a handful of ending options in their bandoliers, and an astute viewer can see them coming before the movie is half over.

One, end of the world (implied or real) as the threat continues to spread after a failed attempt to contain it. The containment is invariably draconian, usually with a nuclear explosion. The Crazies (and the sad AVP:R) falls into this category. I think The Return of the Living Dead pioneered this type of ending, at least in modern horror cinema, but even for that classic, I don’t consider it a very satisfying final.

Two, some ultimate “fuck you” from an indifferent universe – e.g., the last survivor from a night of zombie raids and carnage gets shot through a window by a bunch of rednecks. (If you don’t know the origin of that ending, you’re probably reading the wrong blog.) The Dawn of the Dead remake used this motif as the survivors reached the “safe island.”

Three, the protagonist(s) emerges on the other side of the immediate conflict to face either a hopeful or hopeless solution. This is really a variation on the first option, done with subtlety in The Birds and the original Dawn of the Dead, but lately it has become much more about cocked guns and swinging dicks with Ghosts of Mars, Doomsday, and (dare I say) Maximum Overdrive.

Fourth, everything gets better. Reserved only for “serious” fare such as Outbreak. “We found the monkey!”

Each one of these endings, in its own way, is overused and predictable. Not that I claim any special abilities, secret knowledge, or superiority in the area of crafting finales. Endings are tough. And the wrong ending can seriously tarnish an otherwise exemplary work (I’m looking at you, Battlestar Galactica), so there’s lots of pressure to get it right.

For example, I liked Shutter Island (the movie) all the way to the end. It was compelling up to the point that we are told all events have been a ridiculous and overly complicated stage play done for the benefit of our wacky protagonist. It threw cold water on the whole drama, where we found we were invested in nothing. (If you want to see this type of ending done right, see Inception. It’s odd to think of Christopher Nolan outdoing Scorcese, but there it is.)

Compare the vague dissatisfaction of Shutter Island to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. This one is easily the weakest movie in the series, thanks to a screeching Willie and its pervasive (and borderline racist) notions of paternal colonialism, but aside from Raiders, it has the best ending by a mile. For a movie in the tradition of the serial cliffhangers, does it get any better than the hero stranded on an old footbridge, suspended above a pit of crocodiles, with goons closing in on both sides? That ending is the only reason left to watch this movie more than five times, mainly because the awesome ending makes you forget how lame the rest of the movie is.

The main character equates good ideas to winning the lottery, and the desperation in his life leads to changing plans and shifting loyalties, with an old writers’ workshop I attended over 10 years ago used as inspiration.

“…if all the human race ever stops moving at the same instant, the surface of the earth will seize, solidify: there are too many of us; humanity will destroy itself not by fission but by another beginning with f which is a verb-active also as well as a conditional state…” (193)

The book also has a long passage where he rates the animals of the world based on intelligence, starting on page 121 of my edition (First Vintage International Edition). It is too long to post it all here (and you should be reading the book anyway) – but the comments on cats, who rank third behind rats and mules, were particularly poignant:

“There is the fable … of a period on earth when the dominant creatures were cats: who after ages of trying to cope with the anguishes of mortality – famine, plague, war injustice, folly, greed – in a word, civilised government – convened a congress of the wisest cat philosophers to see if anything could be done: who after long deliberation agreed that the dilemma, the problems themselves were insoluble and the only practical solution was to give it up, relinquish, abdicate, by selecting from among the lesser creatures a species, race optimistic enough to believe that the mortal predicament could be solved and ignorant enough never to learn better.” (121-122)

That is why your cat lives with you, is dependent on you, and yet lifts no paw in assistance or love. That’s “why your cat looks at you the way [he] does.”

That’s probably why online publishing is having a hard time shaking the stigma of lesser quality. No matter how many tweets the Library of Congress preserves, online content still carries that sense of impermanence.

It would be difficult to go back to the “old ways” though. I do miss the sound and sensation of the typewriter, but I don’t know if I could still use that tool, what with all the deleting and copying and cutting and pasting I do on the computer just to put one story together. This new technology has altered whatever modicum of skills I have as a writer, just as the printing press ruined our memories. It used to be within the realm of human ability to memorize and recite The Iliad or Beowulf. Now it seems we barely have the capacity to remember what we read ten minutes ago, much less the complete text of an epic poem exploring our place in the universe.

“Teach your children to speak Chinese, because if we’re going to play around with windmills and solar panels, we’ll fall behind.”

That’s some good fear-mongering. Seriously, he could be an adviser on the remake of Red Dawn. He debunks science with a linguistics argument, which is really a subtle reference to a popular global-warming conspiracy that falls under the rubric of larger “one-world government” fears. Because the claimed environmental damages from Blankenship’s industry are so “greatly exaggerated,” there’s no need to make actual arguments against them, right? Unless of course one’s opponents are arguing in Chinese.

I used his dribble as inspiration for the actions of Ardo Reslo in “Year of the Turtle” – and I had intended to mention that interview when I first added the story (since I am all about idea genealogy). But I forgot to write that blog, probably because I didn’t really picture Blankenship as Ardo Reslo, who seems to be smarter than his prototype, more of a Bond-type villain such as Dr. No at the head of another conspiracy theory, this one of the Dr. Strangelove variety.

And for those of you keeping count, that’s my second reference, however indirect, to Terry Southern.

It gave me a certain reputation in school – I was, for lack of a better label, the weird one. It is an odd social phenomenon that you can get branded as the creepy outcast by reading one of the most popular writers in the history of English – but that’s for another discussion.

Naturally, once I came out on the other end of my Stephen King phase, I bared my pimply, teenaged ass to him, disparaging such drivel in favor of more erudite works by Tolkien and Melville (yes, those two can go together). The dizzying juices of teenage rebellion pushed me to turn against King – because he is The Man – and I use that term with all the heavy connotations it can carry. He sells millions of books, so he’s a sellout, right? He has scored the mass appeal that should be possible only with a giant compromise in one’s artistic integrity.

And he makes it all look so easy. He is easy to read, easy to digest, even when he goes on a bit too long – see It and Needful Things, for example. And that, I have to admit, is a great skill, one not possessed by many in this world.

Given that, plus his prolific career, King can cast a long and oppressive shadow on other writers – one that darkened my recent addition “Year of the Turtle.” This story is part of the Highway Virus series, and it and its companion piece “Little Things” are about two brothers trying reconcile their relationship and their own places in the world amid the chaos of a civilization in decline. Also, water is one of the themes, as you might expect from a story with “Turtle” in the title.

Then I read King’s story “The End of the Whole Mess” in the collection Wastelands. It was the first King work I had read in a long, long time. The story, in keeping with the theme of the collection, is about the end of the world. It focuses on two brothers – the narrator is the older brother and the younger brother contributes mightily to our end. And the active agent that ends it all moves through the water.

Damn, that all sounds really familiar. Given my ambivalence to King’s work in general, I can’t help but feel the same about these parallels. It is flattering that I share at least some of the same creative juices with such a successful writer. I have talked about the Noosphere before – and it should be at least a partial boost to my confidence that I might have bumped into him within that rarefied space.

On the one hand, I feel like I am a few more feet underground, on the bottom of the literary dumping ground, pelted by concepts eerily similar to my own work. I have done something that seems derivative – even though I wasn’t aware of the “progenitor” until after it was done. I guess that will always be the risk in any apocalypse fiction. In the end, you are always chasing The Road Warrior.

(Doomsday may not have been all that good, but at least Neil Marshall had no illusions about the type of movie he was making.)

Of course one reason why I may not be too psyched about the comparison to King’s story is that “The End of the Whole Mess” isn’t the strongest in the collection. I don’t say that to be snarky or vindictive. I honestly feel that the best story so far (and I’ve read only about half the book) is Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The People of Sand and Slag.” Great story – and a really unique look at a possible future for “humanity.”

Now, “Starkiller” – that doesn’t sound right. It sounds crude, immature, like the caption, written in pencil, under a comic filled with bulging muscles and bouncing breasts and scrawled in a junior high notebook.

Lucas should get an award for the Star Wars nomenclature (although he damaged his rep with later names like “Dooku”). The names in his universe – at least his first trilogy – are equally iconic and natural. Even with the Ewoks. I remember both times – pre-Ewoks and post-Ewoks – and there was never a time in between when I had to get used to that word. It fit.

The challenge in properly naming things in a sci-fi or “speculative” universe cannot be underestimated. A bad name is like a bad special effect – it takes the reader or viewer right out of the world. Margaret Atwood, for all her diffidence to the label “sci-fi,” should take a lesson from that. For that unabashedly sci-fi epic Star Wars accomplished something she could not. In her book The Year of the Flood, she has a variety of hybrid animals running around, the products of gene splicing, with names like “rakunk” (the combination of a raccoon and a skunk, get it?). One of her characters eats something called a “Joltbar” – seriously. Did she come up with that name in the cab on her way to her publisher’s office?

I am not one to criticize – and I am still reading the book, which is entertaining for the most part (and the Website for the book is a great example of cross-platform marketing). It has some big ideas, expressed well, but as a reader, those names bother me. They strike me as lazy – or the crass attempts by an amateur with paparazzi sensibilities newly introduced to the joys of portmanteau. Maybe she should venture out from the protective shell of “speculative fiction” and see how real sci-fi writers do it.

“Year of the Turtle” names the previously unnamed narrator in “Little Things” and gives a different perspective on their fraternal dynamic. Actually the two stories show two different approaches to the end of world (as we know it). It wasn’t my intention for Theodore to turn into an extreme Malthusian by the end of “Turtle.” I guess that’s an example of a character leading the writer – and that’s supposed to be a good thing, writing-wise. I thought of him as more of a sympathetic character when I started – but by the end, I imagine most readers will be ambivalent about his worldview, if not downright repulsed.

But that’s just how he copes. Devon, the narrator in “Little Things,” doesn’t turn out much better – so maybe it’s a family thing.

My initial inspiration for “Year of the Turtle” was the origin story of the world emerging and thriving on the back of a turtle, which was an image from early in my childhood – and which Theodore leans on as he tries to cope with societal collapse. The pic below is a scan from an old book from 1961, The LIFE Treasury of American Folklore, which I looked through a lot when I was single digits. (The book has pictures of naked women and mermaids!) As a myth, we could do worse – the world that sustains us is itself a living entity.

The myth appears in other places, too numerous to mention, but one of my favorites is in the beginning of A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking, which recounts the misnamed “Infinite Turtle Theory” (obviously it is not a theory by any scientific measure). Scoff all you want, but keep in mind, if there’s any truth to this worldview, the end of the Earth will likely come in a pot of boiling water somewhere in China.

Still, for me, Burgess falls into a certain category of writers – they are, despite an extensive bibliography, known mainly for one novel, and for whatever reason, I have a difficult time reading outside their one famous work.  This group includes Kingsley Amis, David Lodge, John Wain, Muriel Spark, and (perhaps to a lesser extent) George Orwell. I have started and failed to finish the Enderby novels, Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Anti-Death League. Sometimes the beginning is slow or ungripping – it was a bit of work for me to get through the first few chapters of Honey for the Bears, for example. Other times, the middle parts start to drag. A few middle chapters in One Fat Englishman were a slog.

I am not sure how to classify this phenomenon. Maybe it is just a British thing – could it be I am an insufficient Anglophile? I do recall one of my English professors, the great Dr. Phillip Parotti, once saying he had similar difficulties at first getting through Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, but that American doorstop didn’t give me any problems. Perhaps I am that annoying fanboy who knows Sir Alec only as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Could that be true, even though I watched the whole of the original The Ladykillers (over the course of a few days)?