Deleting e-mails, shooting the undead.
It’s all the same.


You can’t add much depth to a zombie. It can’t talk or think and it’s only motive is the consumption of flesh.

You can’t humanize a zombie, unless you make it less zombie-esque. There are slow zombies, and there are fast zombies ? that’s pretty much the spectrum of zombie diversity.

But roughly 5.3 million people in the United States watched the first episode of the television series “The Walking Dead,” or 83 percent more than those who watched the Season 4 premiere of “Mad Men.” Something about zombies is becoming more intriguing to us. And I think I know what that something is.

It’s not that zombies are changing to fit the world’s condition; it’s that the condition of the world seems more like a zombie offensive.

A lot of modern life is exactly like slaughtering zombies.

If there’s one thing we all understand about zombie killing, it’s that the act is uncomplicated: you blast one in the brain from point-blank range (preferably with a shotgun). That’s Step 1.

Step 2 is doing the same thing to the next zombie that takes its place. Step 3 is identical to Step 2, and Step 4 isn’t any different from Step 3. Repeat this process until (a) you perish, or (b) you run out of zombies. That’s really the only viable strategy.

Every zombie war is a war of attrition. And it’s more repetitive than complex. In other words, zombie killing is philosophically similar to reading and deleting 400 work e-mails on a Monday morning or filling out paperwork that only generates more paperwork, or following Twitter gossip out of obligation, or performing tedious tasks in which the only true risk is being consumed by the avalanche. The principle downside to any zombie attack is that the zombies will never stop coming; the principle downside to life is that you will be never be finished with whatever it is you do.

The Internet reminds us of this every day.

Here’s a passage from a youngish writer named Alice Gregory, taken from a recent essay on Gary Shteyngart’s dystopic novel “Super Sad True Love Story” in the literary journal n+1: “It’s hard not to think ‘death drive’ every time I go on the Internet,” she writes. “Opening Safari is an actively destructive decision. I am asking that consciousness be taken away from me.”

Ms. Gregory’s self-directed fear is thematically similar to how the zombie brain is described by Max Brooks, author of the fictional oral history “World War Z” and its accompanying self-help manual, “The Zombie Survival Guide”: “Imagine a computer programmed to execute one function. This function cannot be paused, modified or erased. No new data can be stored. No new commands can be installed. This computer will perform that one function, over and over, until its power source eventually shuts down.”

This is our collective fear projection: that we will be consumed. Zombies are like the Internet and the media and every conversation we don’t want to have. All of it comes at us endlessly (and thoughtlessly), and ? if we surrender ? we will be overtaken and absorbed. Yet this war is manageable, if not necessarily winnable.

As long as we keep deleting whatever’s directly in front of us, we survive. We live to eliminate the zombies of tomorrow. We are able to remain human, at least for the time being. Our enemy is relentless and colossal, but also uncreative and stupid.

Battling zombies is like battling anything … or everything.

If you like zombies, you like the entire zombie concept. You’re interested in what zombies signify, you like the way they move, and you understand what’s required to stop them.

And this is a reassuring attraction, because those aspects don’t really shift. They’ve become shared archetypal knowledge.

A few days before Halloween I was in upstate New York with three other people, and we somehow ended up at the Barn of Terror, outside a town called Lake Katrine. The best part was when we were taken to a cornfield nearby. The field was filled with amateur actors, some playing military personnel and others what they called the infected. We were told to run through the moonlit corn maze if we wanted to live; as we ran, armed soldiers yelled contradictory instructions while hissing zombies emerged from the corny darkness. It was designed to be fun, and it was.

But just before we immersed ourselves in the corn, one of my companions said: “I know this is supposed to be scary, but I’m pretty confident about my ability to deal with a zombie apocalypse. I feel strangely informed about what to do in this kind of scenario.”

I could not disagree. We all know how this goes: if you awake from a coma, and you don’t immediately see a member of the hospital staff, assume a zombie takeover has transpired . Don’t travel at night and keep your drapes closed. Don’t let zombies spit on you. If you knock a zombie down, direct a second bullet into its brain stem. But above all, do not ever assume the war is over . The zombies you kill today will merely be replaced by the zombies of tomorrow. But you can do this, my friend. It’s disenchanting, but it’s not difficult. Keep your finger on the trigger. Don’t stop deleting. Return your voice mails and nod your agreements. This is the zombies’ world, and we just live in it. But we can live better.


CHUCK KLOSTERMAN
ESSAY