MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

After the terror attacks of 9/11, zombie stories experienced an unprecedented boom or, for some critics, a renaissance. Fears of mass death, infiltration by the Other, and life before and after the apocalyptic moment were played out through zombie stories. The longevity of the boom also saw the zombie myth move into new cultural areas, including Young Adult novels, resulting in what I refer to as the “Gen Z Zombie.”

In his discussion of the sympathetic zombie, Kyle Bishop Williams mentions YA zombie texts, including Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth and Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies, but groups them with other contemporary zombie story types, including the zombie comedy. He suggests that this kind of zombie offers a seductive escape from the pressures of modern life, but my survey of YA texts (including Warm Bodies, Daniel Waters’s Generation Dead, and Darren Shan’s Zom-B) suggests that the Gen Z zombie is more than empathetic – it is reflective of the target audience’s experience.

These books are not merely part of the zombie renaissance but also an important reaction to it. Many of these newer narratives are set in a post-apocalyptic landscape, where the triggering catastrophe is a part of past history. The young protagonists (some of them zombies themselves) live in a world of anxiety, distrust, and fear created by the generation that came before. Thus, the morality of the typical “hero” of typical post-9/11 zombie stories is called into question in these YA texts. After all, the undead cannot help their physical state, but adults, formed by and during the apocalypse, often become soulless and horrific by choice. Ironically, as monstrosity is displaced from the zombie to the older generation, adulthood becomes the new sickness that the young protagonists struggle to avoid.