Zombie Futures in Literature, Media and Culture: Pandemics, Society and the Evolution of the Zombie in the 21st Century

(Hardback)

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An innovative investigation into how zombie narratives over the past ten years have been specifically leading up to a unique intersection with the world as it exists in the 2020s, this book posits the undead as a vehicle to communicate humanity's pathway into, and out of, the ideological, health and environmental pandemics of our time. Exploring depictions of zombies across literature, poetry, comics, television, film and video games, Simon Bacon brings together this timely intervention into how zombies enable speculation about future modes of being in a changing world and represent the fluid notion of old and new normals. With each chapter moving beyond traditional readings of the undead, Zombie Futures situates the zombie as an evolving cultural imaginary at the centre of discourses around how human cognition and embodiment are effected by global realities such as consumerism, new technologies, climate change and planetary degeneration. Structured around contagious partisan ideologies, ecological sickness, mental health crisis and the very literal COVID-19 virus, this book establishes how the zombie figure might manifest post-human and post-normative futures. Works featured include graphic novels and comics like The West + Zombies, Crossed and Endzeit, the South Korean series and films Kingdom, Train to Busan and Peninsula, The Last of Us and the Resident Evil game franchises, Bollywood horror anthology Ghost Stories, Joss Whedon's Serenity, Cargo and literature such as The Girl with All the Gifts, the fiction of Stephen Graham Jones and Ryan Mecum's Zombie Haiku. In a time when popular culture and scholarship has been overrun with the undead, this original study offers a refreshing look at the zombie and what it can tell us about about our world going into and emerging from global catastrophe.

Reviews

They are risen again! This impressive new collection of essays contributes to the ever-expanding field of Zombie/Undead scholarship. Covering rich and varied themes: late-stage capitalism, zombie mermaids, mental illness the undead, eco-zombies and more are examined within this wide-reaching consideration of the future zombie as we stagger on through the 21st Century. * Darren Elliott-Smith, Senior Lecturer in Film and Gender, University of Stirling, UK *

Author Bio

Simon Bacon is an independent scholar working in Poland. He has previously edited works such as Gothic: A Reader, Horror: A Companion and Monsters: A Companion. Previous monographs include Becoming Vampire, Dracula as Absolute Other, Eco-Vampires, Vampires From Another World, and Unhallowed Ground.