Zombie Futures in Literature, Media and Culture

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.>

Préface

An exploration into how the figure of the zombie uniquely articulates the societal changes prompted by the health, ecological and ideological threats to humanity in the 2020s and what such narratives can reveal about future modes of being and survival.

Auteur
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.

Contenu

Introduction

SECTION ONE: ZOMBIE NORMALS

Part I: Patient Zero: The Zombie Society

Katarzyna Ancuta
J is for Jombi: The Social Concerns of Korean Zombies

Debaditya Mukhopadhyay
Eat or be Eaten: a Socio-Political Reading of the Zombies of Ghost Stories

Carl Wilson
The Future of Resident Evil Video Games: Remakes, Revivals, and the RE Engine

Part II: The Contagion of Consumerism and Neoliberalism

Alberto Añón Lara
Kingdom and the Rise of the Zombie in South Korean Television Fiction

Tom Ue
Rage, Revenge, and Redress in André Øvredal's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

Dave Jeffery
'Consumerism will eat the future' :Consumerism During and After the Apocalypse in Army of the Dead (2021) and Necropolis Rising (2010-17)

Part III: Disability and the Mental Health Pandemic

David Edwards
Zombies and Mental Health: Place, Space and the Post-Millennial Apocalypse

Lynn Huggins-Cooper
Fear and Loathing: Mental Illness and the Othering of the Zombie

Catherine Pugh
'Say Something Human': Identity, Disability and the Self-Aware Zombie

SECTION TWO: NEW ZOMBIE NORMALS

Part IV: Gender, Sexuality, and the Zombie

Eoin Murray
Body and Soul: A Trans-Reading of Resident Evil: Code Veronica's Alfred Ashford

Martine Mussies
Zombie Mermaids: 'The Lake of Mystery' (Tooba 2023)

Renita Sörensdotter
Women and Girls as Survivors in Zombie Films: How Gender, Race and Age Matters for Shaping the Hope for a Better World

Part V: Eco-zombies and the Environmental Pandemic

Beth Michael-Fox
The Future is Ash: Climate Crisis and Human Responsibility in The Fades

Daniel Otto Jack Peterson
A Blackfeet Biology of Postapocalypse: Tracking Ecomonstrous Transmotion in the Zombie Fiction of Stephen Graham Jones

Teresa Fitzpatrick
Fungal Futures: Eco-Zombies in the 21st Century

John R. Ziegler
The Posthuman Eco-Zombie and the End of the Capitalocene in Endzeit [Ever After](Hellsgård: 2018)

Part VI: Beyond the Pandemic, New Normals and New Normatives

Ildikó Limpár
Matters of the Heart When the Brain is Attacked: Zombification and Its Consequences in HBO's The Last of Us

Sharon Coleclough
'A chance to give your life purpose and meaning': The Evolution and Testing of the Future Zombie in Star Trek: Picard

Nikoleta Zampaki and Peggy Karpouzou
The Poetics of Zombification in Ryan Mecum's Dawn of Zombie Haiku

Index