The best zombie short-story I’ve read in the last 10 years…

…may well be Neil Gaiman’s “Bitter Grounds” in his 2006 collection Fragile Things, which I have just started reading.

I was totally floored by this tale of contemporary Voodoo zombies in New Orleans.  It is scary, surprising, and delightful.  (Coffee is involved too, so the title becomes a pun on coffee-grounds and the ground in which a zombie is buried.  [I like puns!])  ”Bitter Grounds” also shows that the classical Haitian-style zombie genre is still alive (or, perhaps, “alive”) despite the meteoric rise of the brain-eating, Romero zombie.    I strongly recommend checking out this story if you’re a zombie fan!

An Aside: I like Gaiman a lot, but am well aware I’m coming to him late.  When I was in college in the late 1990’s, I was a “horror-guy,” reading Lovecraft, Straub, Poe, King, and Campbell for pleasure.  When I met Gaiman fans– there were several in my first-year dormitory– they seemed not to be “horror guys/gals” at all, but rather “fantasy guys/gals.”   They collected comics, watched Japanese animation, and played role playing games.  (Also, they all listened to Tori Amos… whereas I much preferred punk rock [and still do].)  Based on this first impression of the Gaiman-loving neighbors assigned me by the housing office, I decided, sight-unseen, that I was not a Gaiman fan because his followers were so unlike me.  I never cracked one of his books or opened one of his comics.

Then, a few years ago, I read a short story by Gaiman called “A Study in Emerald” and was totally bowled-over.  Not only was this guy clever and funny and scary, he was clearly a faithful student of H.P. Lovecraft (and Conan Doyle to boot)!  Gaiman may be a “fantasy guy,” but he is also concurrently a ”horror guy” of the highest caliber.  

Now, I am slowly trying to read all of his books.

Z.E.O. is nominated for a Dead Letter Award

Mail Order Zombie, the zombie culture and DVD review website, has nominated my latest book, Z.E.O., in the category “Best Zombie Book: Nonfiction or Guide” in their 2009 Dead Letter Awards.  How thoughtful of them!  To vote for Z.E.O. (or other books and stuff) click here. 

Review/Interview on Dollar Bin Horror

Dollar Bin Horror, the excellent horror website, wrote a review of Z.E.O. and did a little interview with me.  Click here to read it.

In case of zombies…

Here’s a cool website that sells zombie-themed clothes, stickers, and “Zombie Defense Boxes” which are glass cases with “In Case of Zombies, Break Glass” stenciled on the front, and appropriate items (ranging from Twinkies and Red Bull to machetes and actual machine guns) housed inside. 

The other day I wrote about seeing a zombie defense box (if, truly, convention now dictates that these things shall so be named) at Donnie Dirk’s Zombie Den in Minneapolis that had a bloody chainsaw inside it.  (I didn’t see any bloody chainsaws among the offerings on the In Case of Zombies website, but what they do have is still pretty cool.)

Update 2/5/10:  A member of the InCaseOfZombies.com staff contacts me to report that a chainsaw defense box is currently in development.  Huzzah!

Wait, wait, don’t eat me

A comedy site called Archive of Our Own recently posted this neat zombie-themed parody of the NPR radio show “Wait, wait, don’t tell me”  called “Wait, wait, don’t eat me.”  It’s pretty well done.  NPR is ripe for parody.  (I enjoy a few of their old standbys like Car Talk, but man, so much of their human-interest news programming just jumps to the extremes of boring and depressing, so as to be almost unlistenable by me.)

Zombie Fit

This morning, WGN News profiled a group called “Zombie Fit” which seemed to be a kind of exercise club with the goal of instilling participants with the parkour-like skills needed to survive a zombie attack.

Their website isn’t much, but take a look.  They appear to have regular classes that meet at a gymnastics center just outside of Chicago.  If you want to avoid zombies and get fit, this could be just the thing for you!  (I hope they have “advanced classes” where you get to try to avoid simulated zombies.  That would be delightful!)

I will discuss zombies on internet radio

On Friday, January 15, at 9pm CST, I will discuss zombies as a guest on Pagans Tonight, an internet radio program.  According to their website: “Pagans Tonight is America’s leading nightly Pagan show bringing you news, information, entertainment and ideas from across the world, physically, virtually, and spiritually.”

For more information, or to listen, click here.

A positive review from “The Zed Word”

A Canadian zombie blog has awarded my newest book, Z.E.O., 4-out-of-5 severed zombie heads.  How nice of them.  Click here to read their entire review.

Donnie Dirk’s Zombie Den

Over the weekend, I went to Donnie Dirk’s Zombie Den, a zombie-themed bar in Minneapolis (and, to my knowledge, one of the only zombie-themed bars in the country).  It was totally excellent, and I had a wonderful time!

There were zombie-themed drinks for sale, and zombie movies playing on flatscreen TVs.  Zombie-killing weapons adorned the walls, along with growling zombie heads (and deer heads).  The male staff all dressed like Simon Pegg’s character in Shaun of the Dead, and the female staff wore sequined gowns.   The decor was really neat too, from the reflective trim on the walls to the retro vinyl booths to the leopard-print carpet.

My friend Brian, who was my host in Mpls., explained that the neighborhood containing Donnie Dirk’s is a little dodgy, but that felt right to me.  This is definitely a place you feel rewarded for having hunted-for in a forbidding part of town.

Here are some pictures I took.  (I took these when we first got there at 5pm, right after they opened, so it looks pretty empty.  But by 6:30, the place was totally hoppin’.)

Documentary Review: “Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown”

Last night I watched the 2008 documentary Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown.  H.P. Lovecraft is my favorite writer ever, and I was excited to see what this film would reveal about him. (I wouldn’t call Lovecraft a “zombie author” precisely [he is most-prominently known for creating gibbering tentacled monstrosities], but he sometimes wrote stories with creatures that were very zombielike.  I also think his emphasis on cults, disturbing figurines, and “native rituals” is directly influenced by Voodoo and the traditions of “classical” Haitian zombies.)  

As of last night, I had yet to see a really, really good documentary about HPL.  I hoped this would be it. 

It almost was. 

Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown uses narration, illustrations, and interviews with experts to tell the story of Lovecraft’s life and the evolution of his thoughts and writing.  What this documentary gets 100% right is its panel of HPL experts, which is formidible:  Ramsey Campbell, John Carpenter, Guillermo Del Toro, Neil Gaiman, Stuart Gordon, S.T. Joshi, Caitlin Kiernan, Robert Price, and Peter Straub.  (I met Peter Straub in New York City back in 2001 and tried to get him talking about Lovecraft.  I failed utterly.)  This is most of the All-Star Team of contemporary Lovecraft experts, and, overwhelimingly, their commentary is insightful, interesting, and sometimes very personal. 

Unfortunately, it’s clear from the tone of the production that someone involved in Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown said to himself at the outset: “Okay, Lovecraft wrote stories that were scary…  Therefore… my documentary about Lovecraft must, itself, be scary!”  Maybe this notion sounded reasonable in the planning phase, but in execution it’s asinine. 

The insightful comments of the many Lovecraft experts are interrupted again and again by boring slow-pans over illustrations of Cthulhu whilst horror-movie music plays in the background.  Excerpts from Lovecraft’s stories are read aloud by a hammy actor who tries too hard to sound spooky (with the pops and crackle of an ancient phonograph inserted behind him).  Photographs of Lovecraft and his friends are shown but then sometimes warped or digitally manipulated to make them “more frightening.”  All of which tells the viewer nothing new about H. P. Lovecraft.

I mean, the Marx Brothers were funny, right?  But when you watch a documentary about the Marx Brothers, you don’t expect the documentary itself to be a comedy.  You expect the documentary to tell you about the Marx Brothers.  The narrator isn’t there to throw pies and have a greasepaint mustache and improvise harp solos every ten minutes.  The narrator is there to tell you about the Marx Brothers. 

Same thing here.  Lovecraft’s stories were scary, but that doesn’t mean a documentary about him needs to be.

Anyhow, I’ve made my point.  “Scary” tone aside, this is still the best documentary made so far about H. P. Lovecraft because it features about the best team of Lovecraftian experts you could ask for, and gives a clear, coherent account of his life and work.  If you are a fan of HPL, I advise you to check it out.  (Just try to ignore the “spooky” atmosphere.)