John Skipp, along with his former partner Craig Spector (and a handful of other writers), revolutionized the horror fiction genre in the 1980's. He ushered in a new breed of horror: One that grew up on creature feature movies, rock and roll, and hip rebellion. It was an amazing time for the genre and I loved every second of it. Had you told me then that I would one day publish John Skipp, I'd have said you were high. And you probably would have been. It was, after all, the 80's.
I'm honored to have John here at Horror Drive-In.
The stiffest nipples in the history of zombie horror fiction jut defiantly from the pages of The Loving Dead, Amelia Beamer's eye-popping fornicopia of fiercely literate laughs, provocation, and mayhem.
It’s a brave, funny, frightening book for the young-at-heart NPR crowd – less a Jane Austen mashup than Chuck Palanhiuk meets George Romero – and very much the sort of thing David Sedaris might take on vacation, cackling madly, in order to avoid the beach.
The story centers around Kate and Michael, a pair of bright but rootless twenty-somethings who work at a Trader Joe’s in Berkeley, California. They were pretty morally flexible even before the outbreak happened. Just part of being young, and not always as wise as one might hope.
But when Kate’s toothsome yoga instructor gets accosted face-first by a shambling homeless person, a new kind of cootie starts to make the rounds within their social circle. Sexily at first – very sexily at first – but rapidly devolving into the kind of problematic behavior that puts everyone on undead red alert.
In postulating zombiedom as a sexually transmitted disease – with a slow burn of compulsive and irrational horniness that’s not easy to distinguish from the regular kind, until it’s too late – Beamer has deliciously tweaked the zombie mythos just when it needed it most: at the height of its ubiquitous popularity.
In the process, she has sliced through the great and horrible corpse-banging taboo with penetrating wit and astonishing verve, taking us intimately inside this weirdly emotional experience as no author before her. Horror writers, take note.
Because everyone in Beamer’s book is pop-culture savvy – and therefore somewhat zombie-savvy – there is none of the wearisome “AIM FOR THE BRAIN!” tutorial nonsense that hide-binds so much straight horror fiction to this day. They’ve all seen the movies, or at least know the jokes.
So when the nightmare actually descends, they’ve already spent way too much brain time cultivating their own zombie contingency plans. Idly speculating as to what they might do, should such particularly unlikely shit ever manage to hit the fan.
But hit the fan it does. And they very quickly discover that none of them are even close to action heroes. They are bumblers and stumblers, making it up as they go along, trying desperately to pretend it’s not really happening at all.
As the situation spreads from the party-personal to envelop all of San Francisco and beyond, The Loving Dead ups the ante like a sonofabitch. Try to take a nice zeppelin ride over the city, act like a tourist, maybe forget about your troubles, and a couple of gray-skinned iris-deprived lesbians might just gut-munch you into wishing you’d stayed back at the Holiday Inn.
Try to take a boat over to Alcatraz, and your worst nightmare has only begun.
THE LOVING DEAD is sharply, subversively funny for the bulk of its literary running time. Not just funny like Palanhiuk, but like Sedaris as well, coupling crisp verbal economy and stream-of-consciousness candor with a genuine desire to both provoke and entertain.
But because it’s a real horror novel as well as a true social satire, there are savage set-pieces galore, all building to a shattering climax. Yes, it's all fun and games till the emotional hammer comes down. You may walk in with a hard-on, but you won't come out unscathed.†
Let me state this very clearly: I fucking love this brilliant book. For those of us who care about the burgeoning New Zombie literature, and the powerful cultural metaphors it contains, The Loving Dead is a pivotal work.
And for those literati who sorely doubt that any good can come from dancing with the tropes of genre fiction, prepare to have your transcendence gland fondled by Amelia Beamer’s dangerously knowing hands.
I'm honored to have John here at Horror Drive-In.
The stiffest nipples in the history of zombie horror fiction jut defiantly from the pages of The Loving Dead, Amelia Beamer's eye-popping fornicopia of fiercely literate laughs, provocation, and mayhem. It’s a brave, funny, frightening book for the young-at-heart NPR crowd – less a Jane Austen mashup than Chuck Palanhiuk meets George Romero – and very much the sort of thing David Sedaris might take on vacation, cackling madly, in order to avoid the beach.
The story centers around Kate and Michael, a pair of bright but rootless twenty-somethings who work at a Trader Joe’s in Berkeley, California. They were pretty morally flexible even before the outbreak happened. Just part of being young, and not always as wise as one might hope.
But when Kate’s toothsome yoga instructor gets accosted face-first by a shambling homeless person, a new kind of cootie starts to make the rounds within their social circle. Sexily at first – very sexily at first – but rapidly devolving into the kind of problematic behavior that puts everyone on undead red alert.
In postulating zombiedom as a sexually transmitted disease – with a slow burn of compulsive and irrational horniness that’s not easy to distinguish from the regular kind, until it’s too late – Beamer has deliciously tweaked the zombie mythos just when it needed it most: at the height of its ubiquitous popularity.
In the process, she has sliced through the great and horrible corpse-banging taboo with penetrating wit and astonishing verve, taking us intimately inside this weirdly emotional experience as no author before her. Horror writers, take note.
Because everyone in Beamer’s book is pop-culture savvy – and therefore somewhat zombie-savvy – there is none of the wearisome “AIM FOR THE BRAIN!” tutorial nonsense that hide-binds so much straight horror fiction to this day. They’ve all seen the movies, or at least know the jokes.
So when the nightmare actually descends, they’ve already spent way too much brain time cultivating their own zombie contingency plans. Idly speculating as to what they might do, should such particularly unlikely shit ever manage to hit the fan.
But hit the fan it does. And they very quickly discover that none of them are even close to action heroes. They are bumblers and stumblers, making it up as they go along, trying desperately to pretend it’s not really happening at all.
As the situation spreads from the party-personal to envelop all of San Francisco and beyond, The Loving Dead ups the ante like a sonofabitch. Try to take a nice zeppelin ride over the city, act like a tourist, maybe forget about your troubles, and a couple of gray-skinned iris-deprived lesbians might just gut-munch you into wishing you’d stayed back at the Holiday Inn.
Try to take a boat over to Alcatraz, and your worst nightmare has only begun.
THE LOVING DEAD is sharply, subversively funny for the bulk of its literary running time. Not just funny like Palanhiuk, but like Sedaris as well, coupling crisp verbal economy and stream-of-consciousness candor with a genuine desire to both provoke and entertain.
But because it’s a real horror novel as well as a true social satire, there are savage set-pieces galore, all building to a shattering climax. Yes, it's all fun and games till the emotional hammer comes down. You may walk in with a hard-on, but you won't come out unscathed.†
Let me state this very clearly: I fucking love this brilliant book. For those of us who care about the burgeoning New Zombie literature, and the powerful cultural metaphors it contains, The Loving Dead is a pivotal work.
And for those literati who sorely doubt that any good can come from dancing with the tropes of genre fiction, prepare to have your transcendence gland fondled by Amelia Beamer’s dangerously knowing hands.
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