Author Interview: Ross Payton (Zombies of the World)

Ross Payton, director of the horror comedy Motor Home from Hell, is also the podcaster behind Role Playing Public Radio and the author of two roleplaying books, Curriculum of Conspiracy and Road Trip. Most recently, he is the author of Zombies of the World, a social history of zombies and a field guide to twenty species of the living dead. “I kind of wrote it from the standpoint of a scientist who is very pro-zombie, but it’s not a very enlightened world,” he says. “Even the zombie rights activists are focusing on not shooting all the zombies.”

As you might expect if you have read Zombies of the World, Payton cites a wide range of influences for his work. “Obviously, films were a large part of it, but there were several real books,” he explains, covering the spectrum from Peter Dendell’s The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia through the stories of H.P. Lovecraft (whose characters are referenced throughout the book) to B,ullfinch’s Mythology and a 1904 text on Japanese folklore calledKwaidan. He also cites Japanese horror films and comics like The Walking Dead as inspiration. “I tried to touch all the bases,” he says. Some of those bases might be unexpected to the casual zombie fan. “One book that was an inspiration was called Dancing at Armageddon, and that’s a book, actually, about survivalists. I wrote a paper for a pop culture conference comparing the zombie genre to survivalists.” He adds “There are several books that I’ve read on zombies and pop culture and academia, and I can’t remember when I read them; it’s sort of an ongoing topic for me. “

Payton turned that enormous body of research and inspiration into a concise zombie field guide. “One of the first things I did,” he says, “was write a list of every potential monster I could call a species of zombie. Anything that was undead but not vampiric, I kind of used or thought about using.” Wanting to go beyond the dichotomy between fast zombies and slow zombies, he “started examining each of the common tropes you see in zombies” and put together a list of 20 species of walking (or hopping, or dancing) dead drawn from film, literature, and folklore from around the world.

In developing the fictional social and evolutionary history of his zombie species, Payton asked himself “If zombies were real, how would they be in the real world?” It turns out that “there’s actually a precedent in nature,” for zombies, and Payton can cite well-documented examples. “It’s pretty horrific,” he says enthusiastically. “There’s a type of fungus called cordyceps that infects insects, particularly ants, and what they’ll do is they’ll mind control the ant to alter its behavior to go to the highest branch possible so that it’s highly visible, so it can be eaten by something else, and that helps the fungus spread.” Zombies of the World, he conceptualizes zombies as a similar kind of parasite, and points out that “the zombie microbe, or whatever it is, is harmless until it has something to control.”

Such a parasite would not have spontaneously arisen out of nowhere. “They would evolve over time. You wouldn’t go from zero zombies to billions of zombies overnight, which is kind of the norm.” Too many zombie stories, in Payton’s opinion, “treat zombies as being outside of history. They show up en masse and nobody knows how to deal with them. If zombies were real, people would have incorporated them into their worldview, because that’s what they do, even with relatively extraordinary things.”

There are plenty of extraordinary things in Zombies of the World, and some are stranger than others. One of Payton’s more surprising creations is the Dancing Zombie, which he said is a nod to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” Payton explains that all zombies are psychologically motivated; they have no biological need to eat and cannot actually digest anything they consume, so the drive to feed on human flesh is purely psychological. He also cites the example of the Revenant, which “is psychologically motivated by the desire to murder, to get revenge. Why would their motivations all be murderous? Why wouldn’t there be essentially a harmless species with a desire so deeply ingrained into it that it wants to dance, to entertain us, to create art?”

In fact, despite the ravenous and deadly creatures cataloged in Zombies of the World, Payton reminds readers that humans are more likely to cause the “zombie apocalypse” than are the zombies themselves. “The zombie apocalypse would probably happen due to overreaction on our part, using nuclear weapons on a zombie-infested city, which would cause a cascading effect on the environment. You’d kill a few of the zombies, but you also destroy a whole city’s worth of infrastructure and resources, and you have a bunch of radioactive zombies now. When panic or bad decision-making happen, what can save you from that?”

That grim possibility is why he says zombies are enjoying such popularity in recent years. He traces the zombie genre’s history beginning with the debut of I Am Legend in 1954. “You have over a decade between that and Night of the Living Dead, and then you have Dawn of the Dead in 1978, and from 1978 to 2001 they’re kind of relegated to low-budget B movies,” which horror fans liked well enough but the general public was mostly unaware of. “It started changing in 2002 with 28 Days Later,” Payton says, and “then, of course, you have 2003, the Max Brooks survival guide, and everyone’s thinking about it.” That timing lines up in interesting ways with society’s history, according to Ross Payton.

Drawing on his own research on the survivalist movement, he explains that the idea of survivalists is that with “the right consumer goods, the right firearms, the right dry rations, and if they learned the right skills, they could survive a nuclear war with the communists. That was very popular in the 1980s,” he says, and in fact worried citizens were digging bomb shelters well before then. Survivalists “kind of died down with the fall of the Soviet Union and kind of bubbled up again in the Clinton era” with events like the Branch Davidian incident, Ruby Ridge, and the Oklahoma City Bombing. The parallel Payton draws is that during these periods of identifiable threats, the zombie genre remained relatively obscure.

“The finale of it is the Y2K thing; they freak out about that and then realize that wasn’t going to happen. A lot of people still have these insecurities about living in this world, but there’s no convenient Soviet Union to be afraid of.” Two years later, 28 Days Later revived zombies in the popular imagination.

In the contemporary age, society faces “vague amorphous fears” and “nebulous threats” like terrorism and epidemic disease. Payton says zombies provide a useful outlet for these fears. “You aren’t crazy if you’re a zombie apocalypse fan, because everyone knows it’s a joke. It’s a way of indulging or massaging those insecurities without being a conspiracy theorist. People think it’s relevant because people don’t necessarily think zombies are going to show up anytime soon, but yeah, society is unstable.”

In the face of that instability, zombie stories are almost comforting in at least one way. “Zombies are a cozy catastrophe; it wipes out the world, but there’s no inconvenience to it. The mall is still there.”

Fortunately, so are the bookstores, because Ross Payton is writing a novel set in the Zombies of the World universe. “Writing a novel is a totally different beast,” he says. “Writing one narrative as opposed to a bunch of shorter standalone chapters is a very different process.” Entitled Dead Power, the story is set in “a scientific research facility, and they have all these zombies that they’re studying. One group of the zombies gets loose, obviously. The government is going to bomb the island unless the human staff and some of the intelligent zombies work together. The Talking Zombies are very untrustworthy because they’re addicted to human flesh, and they want to eat your brains, but they’re smart enough to realize that if they eat the humans, they’ll be bombed, and they won’t survive. They work together, and they survive the airstrike.” Dead Power should be available in the spring of 2012.

As for his own favorite undead literature, Payton says “of course, there’s I Am Legend and of course there’s World War Z. I did read a steampunk zombie novel, Boneshaker, by Sheri Priest; it’s very good, and I enjoyed that quite a bit. His favorite zombie movie, he states, is easily Night of the Living Dead. “I saw that as a kid; this was the first movie I saw period as a kid that had such a dark ending. Every human character dies in it. It’s so primitive; it’s like you’re watching surveillance footage somebody smuggled out, a home movie, not a real movie. I didn’t realize movies could be like that.”

Payton observes that “the zombie is a great monster for a lot of different reasons. It shows what we are when the rules of society and civilization break down, and they show us what we’ll be sooner or later- we’ll be dead.”

To see more of Ross Payton’s work, including a web series based on the book and a Zombies of the World blog, or to order copies of Zombies of the World, visit zombiesoftheworld.com.

An unedited transcript of the interview is now posted on One Day at a Time.

Zombie Book Review: Newsflesh, by Mira Grant

The best zombie story I have ever seen begins with FEED, set in 2040. It is twenty years after the Rising, the initial and catastrophic outbreak of the Kellis-Amberlee virus that caused the dead to rise again (with an appetite for living flesh). The world survived, but society and culture have been forever altered by fear of the infection.

The novel is narrated by news blogger Georgia Mason (named after George Romero, like many of her generation) and follows the adventures of her crew- her brother Shaun (an unconfirmed Shaun of the Dead reference) and their colleague Buffy (seriously)- on the presidential campaign trail with a surprisingly respectable candidate, Senator Peter Ryman. Along the way, there are zombies, explosions, conspiracies, and witty dialogue.

From the opening scene through the ending, FEED is a captivating, exciting, fascinating, and compelling read.

The best books tell a great story and use it to explore interesting ideas. It's common enough for zombie literature to be used as a medium for discussion of social issues and underlying societal fears, and the Newsflesh trilogy does that brilliantly, taking on not just government control and the trade-off between freedom and security, but tackling the sociology of fear itself.

More overtly, the way that Grant used the fictional post-Rising world to explore the very real rise of online media was unique and fascinating. The books are about blogging and online media as much as about zombies. The focus on bloggers and online news gave Grant's social commentary a fresh, current, and relevant perspective.

In the author interview at the end of FEED, Mira Grant expresses displeasure with zombie stories that offer no further background on the zombie plague than noting that it was a disease. She did her research for this book; if her writing itself did not make that abundantly clear, the long list of highly qualified people in various fields in her two-page Acknowledgments certainly should.

Grant put together a unique, plausible, and utterly terrifying model for the zombie virus. In the vein of The Omega Man and I Am Legend, she worked from the premise that the Kellis-Amberlee virus had been developed as a cure for other things entirely and turned out to have unintended and horrific consequences; in an entirely unique twist, she designed a virus that was endemic in its dormant form in nearly all mammals over 40 pounds but amplifies into active (zombie) state when the host either dies or is exposed to active virus (bitten, for instance). Grant’s idea is novel, and her application of it is incredible.

Sequels occasionally disappoint, but DEADLINE follows through with more of the complex, believably real setting of the United States after the Rising, the intelligent, plausible virus scenario, the dynamic and memorable characters, and the engrossing, well-paced story and compelling, strikingly real characters.

Mira Grant's work has arguably earned its place near the top of the genre, and room on the shelf among the greatest zombie literature yet written.

The first and second books in the Newsflesh Trilogy, FEED and DEADLINE, are available now. BLACKOUT, the third and final installment, is due in bookstores in May of this year.

The Zombie Apocalypse as Deconstructive Literature

The English word apocalypse comes, via Latin, French, and then Middle English, from a Greek word apokálypsis, meaning "uncovering" or "lifting of the veil." Thanks mostly to the context of its appearance in the Book of Revelation, modern connotative usage typically associates apocalypse with the end of the world; actually, the apocalypse itself was not that event, but its revelation to John.

The best zombie apocalypse stories are inherently revelatory. As author Robert Kirkman writes in the introduction to The Walking Dead, Vol. 1: Days Gone Bye:

"Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in society... and our society's station in the world. They show us gore and violence and all that cool stuff too... but there's always an undercurrent of social commentary and thoughtfulness."

The literature of disaster in general relies on the breakdown of infrastructure as a significant element. These major changes in environment and social structure provide a good vehicle for exploring how people interact and how society functions in the absence of established order. The stress of crisis is revelatory on an individual and a societal level; a familiar adage claims that crisis brings out the best and the worst in people, but what crisis actually does is reveal their real nature.

Stripping away the superficial layers of a culture can reveal things about that social structure through the act of deconstructing it. The result is a literature of deconstructive discourse like that in the latter chapters of the 2006 novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Wars, which author Max Brooks uses to explore how modern Americans respond to the loss of the highly technical, sedentary, comfortable culture most took for granted until the dead began to walk and the pandemic stressed the world's infrastructure past functioning. In examining the loss of the infrastructure, superficial culture, and social order most people take for granted, zombies and other disasters reveal how much of that superficial culture is artificial and not necessarily in humanity's best interest.

Much of zombie film and literature is explicitly focused on the revelation of a deliberately concealed truth. In Mira Grant's novelFEED, the characters themselves are journalists actively engaged in the pursuit of facts and the process of deconstruction, discourse, and critique. The Resident Evil video games and movies are centered on the characters' process of learning the truth about the outbreak and their role in it. This tendency reveals something interesting about the mindset underlying modern culture, since this zombe literature historically seems to tap into underlying cultural anxieties; pandemic disease is an obvious source, along with hubris and misuse of science and technology, but this focus on secrecy and conspiracy is interesting and rather telling.

In a genre very concerned with truth and its concealment and revelation, the most important revelation of all is that the veil existed to be lifted.