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A book does not have to be about zombies to be a zombie book. Let me explain.
Okay, this probably has nothing to do with the crash of the industrial age, but it sure has something to do with the rot in our culture. I refer to the practice of book publishers who bring a long-dead best-selling author partially back to life by hiring someone to keep writing in the style of the deceased, so they can keep the cash registers going ka-chink. The book stores and sites are stuffed with “Robert B. Parker’s” new Spencer novels and “Tom Clamcy’s” latest military-industrial-complex romps, despite the fact that both men have long gone to their reward.
Of course there’s nothing new about publishers and writers trying to guarantee bestsellerdom in advance. They want all book sales to be way above normal. I had several college friends in English Lit who analyzed best sellers — number of pages, number of sex scenes, number of pages between sex scenes, length of car chases, etc. — in order to design a best-seller template. Oddly I have never seen any of their names on any best-seller list.
Publishers are just as dumb. They want every book from now on to be just like their last big hit, or to be written by whoever wrote the last big hit. I worked for one of the biggest book publishers ever, and their marketing department did what they called “mall intercepts,” which consisted of approaching people who were carrying stuff to their cars in mall parking lots and begging them to describe a book they would be willing to buy. Seriously, they did that. That company no longer exists.
It was bad enough that children of famous authors traded on their parent’s reputation to juice sales of similar books. Jeff Shaara wrote a dismal prequel to his father Michael’s brilliant novel The Killer Angels, about the Civil War battle of Gettysburg. Annie Hillerman moves her father Tony’s characters around their familiar desert locales but they and the plots they follow lack his grace, and sense of mystery. Alafair Burke will never come close to the glittering prose turned out by her father James Lee. (I feel sorry for her — he’s just too damned good. Plus, thank God, he’s not dead yet.)
But for cringe-worthiness, the zombie books are far worse. It’s as if they published Will Shakespeare’s Romeo, Juliet and Diana (“couple of kids from the wrong side of the tracks do a threeway with a princess, Hilarity ensues.”) by John Doe. Or Joseph Heller’s Catch 23 (“A young billionaire tries desperately to enlist in the army, but is rejected because of bone spurs. He overcomes his grief and goes on to become president anyway.”) by Harry Smith.
I enjoyed Robert Parker’s series about Jesse Stone, chief of police in Paradise, Maine. So I tried one of the zombie sequels. It was a zombie jamboree. A guy called Jesse Stone lumbered through a place called Paradise, but he didn’t have a dog, he didn’t live in a cool cottage across a footbridge (but in a condo, for crying out loud), he didn’t drink (but spent an inordinate amount of the reader’s time not drinking and sermonizing about it) and he didn’t have endless, pointless phone conversations with his needy and annoying ex-wife (okay, so that was a plus). As a Jesse Stone impersonator he was about as authentic as that space alien in the movie Men in Black who could never get the human body he was inhabiting to work right.
I don’t know what gets to me most about this: the gall of the publishers who engage in this macabre practice; the gullibility of the reading public who apparently falls for it big time; or the fact that I actually bought one (okay two, but it was research) of the damn books.
I did it so you don’t have to. And I feel better, now that we’ve had this little talk, and now I promise I will get on with writing about something that matters.
“Pride and Predjudice…” by 13jorn is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
What hurts me most is the movies. I can always find a good book, no matter happens, they can’t stop me from doing that!
Giggle. I shouldn’t speak so fast. But for sure, what they can prevent me from doing is watching a good movie, and they’ve going a damn fine job of it for about two decades now.
And think about Parker, the incredible waste. In the old days, more than half of his novels would’ve been made into movies, and then either he, or the Hemingway or Faulkner or Hammett of our time, would’ve written or co-written the script.
Oh well, who cares about producing potential cinematic masterpieces when Superdog has yet to be made, with big budget prequels and sequels to follow, and in no particular order.
Note: Have you read any of Ralph Peters’ Civil War stuff? I put him well above Papa Shaara, which is saying something – Killer Angels is a classic. Truthfully, on the down low, I might put him above Tolstoy as a historical fiction writer, if I wasn’t so afraid of the losing my seat at “the table.”
I’ll check him out, although I am not a big fan of historical fiction. That’s one of the things I admired about Killer Angels, both the book and the movie Gettysburg based on it — they weren’t fiction.
Well, if it’s veracity and historical accuracy you’re looking for, then Peters is your man.
Thanks Tom. Reminds me of the microtonal composer Harry Partch (1901-1974) who was extremely disturbed that after his passing future biographers were ‘free’ to spew any fabrications and untruths about him or anyone without being able to defend oneself. Of course, today it happens continuously in real time.
Loved the book ‘Killer Angles’. Didn’t read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ but I’ve seen both film versions (1940 and 2005) and found them deadly dull. In fact, with the notable exception of ‘Remains of the Day’ (both novel and film) I find British place-setting pieces self-indulgent and damn silly – yes, even the acclaimed ‘Downton Abbey’.
There is another exception – the film ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’. It is innovative and truly inspired. The addition of an actual adversarial element into an otherwise tedious plot, along with credible production standards gives this dull, dusty tale new life.
Two points: (1) Creativity is always confrontational – always challenges out comfortable ideations. (2) All art is derivative.
I’m not a reader of fiction, but I watch plenty of movies. The two that spring to mind as retellings of familiar stories and/or characters are Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, the latter of which is about ready for another version (why?) called Gretel & Hansel. They’re all dreck. What they share is an odd ambition to create or revise national mythologies on top of all the preexisting ones. Comic-book superheroes fit in there, too. The antagonists are typically alien or supernatural but ultimately reflect our discomfort with ourselves as (arguably) the most destructive species on the planet. Someone by now must have written a book-length analysis of this bizarre narrative preoccupation.
“…our discomfort with ourselves.” Indeed, I believe that all myths deal with this human quandary. From Gilgamesh to Genesis to Shakespeare to Forbidden Planet – they all address, at least to some extent, the ongoing anxiety fest of simply being the half-evolved creature that someone artfully dubbed ‘the clever ape’.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/books/review/the-storytelling-animal-by-jonathan-gottschall.html
Dear Mr. Lewis – Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, I managed bookstores, for both major chains (long gone, now). I often wondered about dead authors, that still kept cranking them out. V. C. Andrews, comes to mind. I figured they had their brains, in jars, hooked up to some computer. Lew
Never thought of that. You think?
Gather round children, and listen carefully. These are books you absolutely have to read before you die:
1> All 11 volumes of Kierkegaard’s works (the Hong & Hong Princeton UP hardcovers). The most intellectually consistent thinker I’ve read.
2> ‘Cyclonopedia: complicity with anonymous materials’ by Reza Negarestani, who in all likelihood is a collective pseudonym for a ragtag band of bloggers. The definitive work in the speculative-realist movement. A middle-eastern Odyssey exploring the relationship between oil, jihadist doctrine, US imperialism, Iraqi punk rock and Phoenician deities.
3> Goethe’s ‘Elective Affinities’ – if you’ve ever asked yourself the question ‘can the laws of chemical affinity demonstrate the validity of marriage as an institution?” this book is for you. In case you haven’t, you should still read it for the numerous cheesy 18th c romance subplots.
4> Céline’s ‘Death on the Installment Plan’. This is it… the saddest lament and bravest defense of the spirit of the 20th century.
5> ‘La Terre’ and ‘Germinal’ from Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle.
6> Ibsen’s ‘Peer Gynt’ – imo the most beautiful work in the canon.
7> ‘Memoir of a Russian Punk’ – semi-autobiographical account of the author’s childhood in Soviet Kharkov. Invests a vanished outlandish world with a profoundly silent charm. Seriously, read this book.
8> ‘The War Nerd Iliad’ by infamous journalist/podcaster John Dolan (also known as the War Nerd and Gary Brecher). His other, original fiction books (can’t remember names) are good too.
Last, but certainly not least, J Sakai’s ‘Settlers: the Mythology of the White Proletariat’. The book is like a political spectrum quiz because you can tell where people stand by how uneasy it makes them feel.
re: War Nerd
Have you read War Tard? I ran into him or her the other day. At first I thought it was War Nerd assuming a new name, for whatever reason. But right off the bat, something wasn’t right. So I Googled it, and sure enough it’s a blatant rip-off.
But is this strictly theft, or could it be partly tribute? Rembrandt and one of his pupils? Does that fit? This much is clear, War Nerd was a master, but this War Tard person is capable of producing a decent facsimile, which means, he or she is definitely worth reading.
War Nerd to my knowledge has stopped writing, so there is hole that needs filling, even if it’s only part way. Maybe that’s the way I’ll choose to look at it.
The War Nerd (real name John Dolan) now hosts a podcast with Mark Ames (ex-editor of Exiled), “Radio war nerd”.
https://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/t687i-9b79d/War-Nerd-Radio-%E2%80%94-Subscriber-Feed-Podcast
It’s the only podcast I follow. Recommend ep 205 as a starting point. I also vaguely remember reading a 2018-ish Intercept article by him, but could be wrong or just a different John Dolan.
As far as Western lit is concerned, my favorites remain the fairy tales — the sanitized versions with the horrible contents edited away anyway. Aesop, La Fontaine, Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Andersen and Oscar Wilde; their simple yet infinitely charming tales with their simple message open a door into a world of innocence and magic where virtue gets rewarded, bad people get spanked and everything looks more colorful. I guess I just don’t want to grow up…
I pray they don’t disfigure those stories by adding things like zombies into them. Or have they already?…
What the hell is so wrong with zombies? Osiris, Tamuz,
Heracles, Samuel and Jesus – just to name a few – were all reported to have been re-animated in some corporeal form after their deaths. Zombieism is an ancient and revered institution. It is our culture that has over-commercialized zombies…but we do that to damn near everything!
All I have to say is that you’re entitled to what you like. I just wouldn’t consider a zombified Rapunzel or little match girl to be in particularly good taste. If you think such things would be cool (face palm), then I can only say: to each his own. (Shrugs.)