Zombie Narrative Still Shuffling Ahead

The zombie narrative in film is far from dead. This is a piece of goodness recognized by Rafael Motamayor writing for BloodyDisgusting magazine.  Motamayor cites as proof the heart-wrenching drama of Cargo from Australia, the overwhelming rage of Overlord, the complexity of Rampant from Korea, and the ongoing pleasure of zomcom in Anna and the Apocalypse from Scotland and One Cut of the Dead from Japan as proof that decent zombie cinema is still being made both in Hollywood and around the world.

I'm not sure if we need to ask "why" the zombie narrative remains relevant, but I am glad to see that the juvenile mass market influence that has stained the genre both in film and print is facing noticeable pushback from directors around the world. To verify this I would add the French Canadian film The Ravenous (Les Affames) and the French film The Night Eats the World, and The Cured. Add to this the new zomcom film Zombiepura from Singapore (the nation's second zomcom film, though this one stirred up some controversy) and Zombiology from Hong Kong. I should also mention that a new zomcom has just begun production in India's Tamil Nadu state.

"Rosewater" is Absolute Brilliance

As well as being a captivating read, TadeThompson’s 2016 science fiction novel Rosewater has a awful lot to offer scholars interested in the zombie narrative and horror studies, as well as philosophers interested in ethics and what it means to be human.

Set in the “near future,” Thompson’s Rosewater follows the career of a psychic named Kaaro who has been recruited by “Section 45,” a secretive branch of the Nigerian government whose purpose is to gather information on an alien “entity” known as “Wormwood” that has literally invaded the planet. The narration begins years after the alien had in 2012 crash landed upon Hyde Park in London before burrowing into the depths of the planet where it would, like a cancer, metastasize throughout the planet’s mantle before sprouting, plantlike, in Nigeria—not far from the nation’s most populous city Lagos. This alien cancer metastases aboveground, as well. “It turned out this sentient being had seeded the entire biosphere with new macro- and microorganisms as a result, although it took decades for us humans to find out” (75). The alien forms an impenetrable biodome, around which grows the titular city of Rosewater. Within the dome are a host of alien species—Wormwood is not a single creature, but an entire biosystem of flora and fauna—and humans who have been caught within this strange alien colony.

If this is an extraterrestrial invasion narrative, the invaders seem rather benign and quite in contrast to the standard alien conquest narrative established by H.G. Welles’ War of the Worlds. The dome built by Thompson’s aliens provide Rosewater with an abundant supply of electrical power and a miraculous “healing” of the sick and injured who flock to the site for an annual-but-brief opening of a door into the alien territory. Like the faithful in attendance at Christian evangelical tent healings, the crowds that encircle the Wormwood dome are rapt with an awe that is best described as religious, although the dome is, “as always, indifferent to their reverence or sacrilege” (12).

It is the gradual unraveling of the perception of the outside invader as a beneficent force that gives Thompson’s novel much of its narrative thrill, even as the ongoing rendering of Kaaro and his journey from street thug to high-performing secret agent embodies the book with a ceaselessly enjoyable narrative direction. Much of the pleasure is available thanks to Thompson’s sensitive caricature of Kaaro as a selfish and inconsiderate youth who slowly grows into a generous and compassionate adult. Thompson gradually reveals Kaaro’s weaknesses as his strengths, highlighting his protagonist’s tumble into a curmudgeonly cynicism that is halted by the arrival in his life of the charming Aminat, who would become his first encounter with the commitment of loving someone else. Through his love of Aminat, Kaaro would discover the heroic quality of self-sacrifice. “Aminat is a change in the equation an imbalance” (108).

Thompson also energizes the narrative flow by shifting between “then” and “now” as various (mis)adventures and encounters shape Kaaro’s life story and drive him to shed his selfish hedonism and take on the mantle of compassionate heroism.

Kaaro is a uniquely powerful “sensitive,” or psychic. His special ability—in addition to mind-reading, psychic control, and occasional glimpses of the future—is as a “finder” who can locate lost objects. “I begin to find things for people,” Kaaro says. “It is an obsession, compulsively done, with a strange, erotic need for completion. I find car keys, memories, heirloom brooches, squirreled-away money, PINs, mobile phones, photographs of loved ones, mathematical formulae, and spouses” (49).

But this street-smart Saint Anthony uses his abilities to not only find lost things, but to uncover hidden treasures as well as safe avenues of entry—and escape. “I do not plan to become a thief. It just happens naturally” (49). The teenaged Kaaro enjoys his ability to steal hidden treasures from any home because “I can buy things without having to ask or justify to my parents.” Kaaro uses his ill-gotten money “to purchase junk food, premium pornography, alcohol, lap dances, drugs, alcohol, clothes, shoes, alcohol and other dissipations.” The ability to steal is “sweet and fulfilling,” Kaaro notes. “Until you get caught” (50).  

Families in the small Lagosian suburb around the teenaged Kaaro’s house wonder how the thief has been plundering their carefully concealed hiding places stuffed with jewels and cash.  They eventually discover Kaaro, and attempt to bring upon him the mob’s justice in the smoking shape of the burning auto tire necklace. “No thief ever believes this is their destiny until there is a tyre around their neck and the petrol is wetting their hair, fumes choking their ability to cry out for mercy” (51). But even from this Kaaro can find the way out. His “sort-of-girlfriend” Fadeke is less fortunate. Wrongly assumed by the mob to be in partnership with Kaaro’s criminal acts, the vigilante mob turns on her as an outlet for their fury. Scholars interested in a psychoanalytical or even ethical reading of Kaaro have a source of study in this incident, as Fadeke’s death and Kaaro’s broken relationship with his family will become a source of emotional trauma and actual danger for the middle-aged psychic.

His regrets become both a weapon his enemies can use against him and a source of psychological self-healing. In an encounter awash with a sense of karmic justice, Kaaro becomes aware for the first time how his early life as a thief and hustler had ruined, even killed, a number of his victims. It will be his first real experience of guilt (228).

What Kaaro the youthful street hustler doesn’t expect is to be recognized as a “finder” and recruited by the government’s “S45” program, which trains him in how to use his psychic abilities for espionage, interrogation, and state security.

As noted above, this novel has a good deal to offer scholars eager to dive into the intricacies woven together by Thompson’s craft as an artist. Scholars of the Zombie Narrative may find interest in the phenomenon of the reanimates that wander the streets of Rosewater following the annual opening of the alien biodome’s portal. Not only is healing brought to the chronically ill and wounded who gather around the portal—though held back from entering the alien zone by soldiers who are more than willing to shoot to kill—but the dead are literally brought back to life. “Most of the graves around the camp are shallow,” and after the opening they empty themselves and send forth reanimated corpses. “Healed, hearts beting, eyes open, bodies warm, but no … life. No memories, no soul, no recognition of what they used to be” (87).

These alien-revived zombies roam the streets of Rosewater, even finding their way into distant cities. Most are harmless, but some reanimate with a chip on their shoulders. “When the dome brings a body back to life, sometimes it simply drools. And sometimes … it wakes up angry.” Filled with a rage that they then direct to everyone around them, these reanimates violently attack any and all who fall within their sight. “Scientists haven’t worked out what makes them go one way or the other,” Kaaro says. “I think it might have to do with temperament, some people being more aggressive than others. Or maybe … how they die” (33). The police and military are busy for weeks attempting to hunt down and “kill again” these reanimates, though many of the mindless undead elude capture and roam the back alleys of Rosewater for months after the opening.

It is the alien entity’s ability to “heal” and raise the dead that provides a source of thought for Zombie Narrative scholars. This healing comes about through the invasion and replacement of damaged human tissue with alien bioforms that replicate the human biology at the cellular level. This alien “invasion” is taking place at the cellular level, much like the various biological agents that zombify and drive the undead (or the living “infected”) in popular zombie fictions and films such as Mira Grant’s Feed, Mike Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts, or Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead. Literary scholars and philosophers alike will be inspired by the idea of cellular invasion and the location of subjectivity. At what point does a re-constructed individual tip from being human and becoming alien? What does the individual’s willingness to partake of this cellular transformation suggest about self-consciousness?

Thompson generously nourishes Rosewater with an abundance of ideas and arguments that deserve academic contemplation and comparison. For example, Thompson adopts George Romero’s willingness to set aside the abject aspect of the zombie and allow a sympathetic glimpse of the reanimated corpses that are set upon to satisfy the violent pleasures of street gangs and professional practice experiences of aspiring boxers.

Through the narrative voice of Kaaro, the author expresses a stronger astonishment or even contempt for the body horror of those who “experiment” with the healing powers of the biodome by “transforming” their own bodies.  These are “the reconstructed.” They differ from “the deformed,” those who have attended the opening seeking healing but have been “incorrectly” stitched together. One such example is a man with a “gigantic” goiter who had gone to the opening expecting it to shrink, but the healing alien forces incorrectly enlarge his goiter, accidentally striving for “bigger and better.”

“The healed are miraculous, the deformed a tragedy and the reanimates a horror, but the reconstructed are perhaps comedy or … whatever” (123). The reconstructed are those who seek to modify their normal human bodies, such as the man who “has latched hawk wings to cuts in his back,” which were then healed with muscle and blood vessels enough to allow the wings to function with life. “The wings are unimpressive but the man seems elated” (124). Many attempts at reconstruction end up in bizarre, even nightmarish forms. “There are men and women with multiple and displaced orifices, like a girl with two mouths, one above the other” who “tried to remodel her lips” (124). Such are the reconstructed who carry their bodies as evidence of “the grotesque changes they have brought upon themselves” (124).

Thompson flirts with this form of body horror enough to allow comparison with author Jeremy Robert Johnson who first displayed a fascination with the “altered” body horror in his debut novel Extinction Journals (2006) and continued to caress self-transformation as body horror in various disturbing ways throughout his dozen years of publication—most especially in his short stories “When Susurrus Stirs” and “The League of Zeroes” as well as within his 201 novel In the River. (It should be noted that Tade Thompson had garnered attention for his ability to write body horror with his 2017 novel The Murders of Molly Southbourne—though I’ve not yet read that text and will save it for a future review.)

Thompson’s novel Rosewater also provides a deep and dark pool within which scholars of Postcolonial Studies can dip their toes. The fertile source of this approach comes not only from the alien invasion narrative, but from the author’s placement of the plot in Nigeria. References abound to Nigeria’s experience as a former colonized nation and the nation’s contemporary infection by alien ideas such as rabid homophobia inspired by a Christian faith brought in by the former British colonial powers. Thompson also exposes structural remnants of imperial rule, from the potential despotism of the chief executive to the inequalities advanced by the upper echelons of a society shaped by class differences—including the violence of the elites as paralleled at the local level by the criminal class.  Indeed, as a nation that can still feel the former chains of colonization; the citizens of Nigeria are quick to become “unimpressed” by the idea of Wormwood as an invading power. “We’ve seen colonizers before, and they are similar, whether intercontinental or interplanetary” (225).

As a psychic, Kaaro is especially attuned to the lingering ghosts of Nigeria’s history as he navigates the “detritus of the nation’s communal consciousness.” He can almost feel history: “The blood and sweat of slaves in a stew of their own anguish … the guilt of slavers, the prolonged pain of colonization, the riots, the CIA interference, the civil war, the genocide of the Igbos, the tribal pogroms, the terrorism, the killing of innocents, the bloody coups, the rampant avarice, the oil, the dark blood of the country, the rapes, the exodus of the educated class …” (225).

Scholars interested in Game Theory, Virtual Reality, Hypnosis, and Dream Vision Narratives will also find in Rosewater a treasure of inspiring ideas worth pursuing. This comes through the novel’s absorbing exposure of Kaaro’s abilities as a “sensitive” and the connection between this psychic powers and the alien entity. Wormwood has infected the entirety of the earth’s atmosphere with “alien fungilike filments and neurotransmitters” that enmesh the earth and create a single communications platform—a spiderweb that sends signals back and forth around the world. “It is everywhere” and forms “multiple links with the natural fungi on human skin,” showing a special affinity for nerve endings that provide access to the human body’s central nervous system. “Everybody linked to this network of xenoforms, this xenosphere, is uploading information contantly, passively, without knowing” (76). Those with special abilities—“adepts” such as Kaaro—are able to access this “worldmind” (76).

The xenosphere, that “worldmind” or neural net, is similar to the contemporary realm of social media, where critical authority is too-often abandoned for a zombielike state of unquestioning acceptance. It is also a space of tremendous potential, “a psycho-field, a thoughtspace, essentially unstable” It is a space where “every notion can potentially become reality” (224). Is this similar to the “alternative facts” and conspiracy theories that find nourishing compost in our modern age of social media domination?

As Kaaro enters into the depths of this constructed space, going beyond his normal zone of comfort and protection, he witnesses the minds of “hundreds, thousands of people suspended unmoving … eyes rolling here and there or not at all.” This “school of human souls” is composed of “everybody who carelessly thinks or does not think.” They exist in the realm of the xenosphere “in the unprotected state, passive, oscitant, uncritical, naïve” (224).

One of Kaaro’s roles as a secret agent is the interrogation of “criminal” suspects, a task he approaches much like a modern-day Internet thieves and hackers engage in “phishing” methods to attain private data.  Using spoken trigger words, Kaaro remains open to the resulting thoughts and images flowing from the subjects of his interrogation. “My questions are racist, homophobic, and offensive in every way. This is my job” (110). Kaaro also holds a part-time job in bank security, using his abilities to “confuse” the xenosphere with his thoughts (while reading a novel) and muddy the water enough so that “wild” psychics are unable to pick up the passwords and data of bank customers. 

Kaaro can also heal those suffering from self-inflicted “attacks” of guilt within their subconscious. In one instance he deals with a woman whose “mind is a decaying temple” in which her deceased husband suffocates her with a vampiric grip that is anything but a lover’s embrace (155). Those who are unfamiliar with this method of healing see what Kaaro does as “a kind of exorcism,” imbuing him with a fearful mystical authority. The “religious people” dislike psychics such as Kaaro “because you challenge the concept of their various gods” as only deities can possibly “know the hearts of men” (275).

But this connection with the idea of supernaturalism is not the only reason why “adepts” are unpopular with even those in the highest levels of government. “Nobody should be able to do what you do,” Kaaro is told. “The mind is supposed to be the last sanctuary of a free human. Even prisoners are not meant to give up the sanctity of their thoughts. …There is bound to be resentment” (275). Here, then, may be another area of interest for scholarship and critical review of Rosewater. Scholarship in the philosophy of horror is richly interested in the human experience, consciousness, and what it means to “be” human. To that end Rosewater offers an intriguing starting point for this discussion, as both the connection of all minds to the alien xenosphere and the alteration of human bodies at the cellular level call into question the point at which the human ends and the alien begins.

Rosewater is meant to be a trilogy, to be followed by The Rosewater Insurrection and The Rosewater Redemption—this last being a turn against alien imperialism. 

Rosewater, meanwhile, ends with the ongoing, slow “invasion” of earth, a terraforming of sorts that may well result in humanit becoming “full xeno.” But much like the great majority of citizens in today’s developed nations who see Global Warming as a crisis that is either unstoppable or best left for later generations to deal with, the citizens of Thompson’s Rosewater likewise “think we’ll be dead and gone by the time the carnage begins.” But then again, that may be wishful thinking. As Kaaro considers the future conquest of earth, he intuits that “we will all have front row seats” (390).

Podcast Interviews

Fictitious Podcast

This is Horror Podcast

Death of 1,000 Cuts Podcast

Zombie Fun with Fungi?

Yeah, that's a terrible post title. But I'm desperate, lately. It's getting more difficult to see growth in the genre, and I'm wondering what that means. In the meantime, I found this newspaper item in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch summarizing the benefits and dangers (to humans) of various fungi throughout history. The really "frightening" thing is the the now (in)famous Ophiocordyceps unilateralis sensu lato fungus (Thank you Wikipedia). The fungus "hijacks" the brains of insects (typically ants, it seems) and drives them to climb to the highest branches of trees where the ants will hold on tight in a literal death grip while the fungus eats them from inside, eventually growing out of the insect body to produce spores that will become air-borne. The higher this blossoming takes place, the more likely the spores will spread. For a plant, this is an ingenious way of achieving two modes of locomotion: first through the feet of the insect host, and second on the gusts of wind that will make for a much wider disbursement of the spores. It was this method of parasitism that M.R. Carey used so successfully in his zombie novel The Girl with All the Gifts (and the later film adaptation built from Mike Carey's screenplay). But the fungus is not the only parasite that takes control of the mind of its host. Apparently the Dinocampus coccinellae wasp is itself infected with a virus that it passes to other insects.This process works when the host insect is captured by the wasp and injected with the wasp's eggs. Also injected into the host's body is the virus, which rapidly increases and paralyzes the insect. This living statue soon becomes a food store as the wasp eggs hatch and the wasp larvae feed on the host. The mature stage wasps that then emerge from the (now dead) insect become new carriers for the zombie virus. Of course, we are not ourselves immune from the single-celled parasite known as Toxoplasma gondii. This parasite is most commonly found in mammals, in a predator-prey cycle that can even involve humans. Mice pick up the organism through contact with infected feces, and pass it along to the predator mammals that eat them. Scientists have found that the Toxoplasma gondii "zombifies" the mice by somehow making them fearless or less willing to run from their hunters. Indeed, the hunted rodent may even develop a bizarre liking for it's hunter, making it easy prey indeed. More distressing, the parasite infects but does not affect the cat, which serves as a host that transfers the organism to another prey animal: humans. Is it possible that a human infected with Toxoplasma gondii (through contact with the dirty litter box or sandbox) develops a love for cats? Could the "crazy cat lady" be a zombie of sorts? 

Since we are on the subject of parasites, have you read Jeremy Robert Johnson's short story "When Susurrus Stirs" yet? It is available in his Entropy in Bloom collection. It is a wholly disturbing tale of parasitical zombification. Of course most of the the stories in this collection qualify as "disturbing," but that's to be expected when you are as incredibly "wild" of mind and talented of pen as Jeremy Robert Johnson. A disquieting short film adaptation of "When Susurrus Stirs" is available online, and that should be enough to encourage you to click over to Amazon.com and search for anything available from this brilliant writer.

That's enough talk about parasites today. But be reassured that when I toss together my salad for today's lunch, each leaf will be washed and soaked thoroughly.

Martial Arts Film Kicks Zombie Ass in Pure Action

This looks like it will be pure fun in full motion: Johnny Z.

Wesley Chu to Write "Walking Dead" Novel Set in China

Taiwanese American science fiction author Wesley Chu has agreed to write Walking Dead: Typhoon, expanding the franchise started by Robert Kirkman into a Chinese setting. The book should be ready for publication by 2020, according to publisher Skybound Books as quoted in The Hollywood Reporter. Skybound editor-in-chief Sean Mackiewicz told The Hollywood Reporter that Chu's work will be much sought after as it will answer a question that fans--and characters--of the AMC television show have been wondering about for quite some time: “What’s happening to the rest of the world?" Mackiewicz noted that having as talented a writer as Chu throw his imagination into The Walking Dead universe with talented authors like Wesley Chu will allow Kirkman's dark vision to become "an even greater global phenomenon than ever before!” This is really something to look forward to.