Zombie Zora (Book 1- Zora Baker series)If you are a crackerjack shot, the army will overlook your spacing out, but not following orders, they might just throw you to the zombies with a smile. 19-year-old Zora Baker has dozens of problems. She never said she was army material. To keep her out of trouble, they assign her to a rescue squad with Brittany and Matthew. They get separated and as they make their way back to camp, they face old zombies with missing limbs, new fast zombies that leap out of nowhere, people in the midst of the change, and hordes of scavengers eking out an existence.Can they make it back with information to destroy the zombies? Will zombies take them out? What about the scavengers? How many can they take out before it is their turn? Those questions are meaningless. Zora's mission: deliver the information and get back to her brother. Anyone or anything that gets in the way of that goal will get put down. Cross her at your own peril. Watch out Zombie World, here she comes and she plans on sending you all to Hell-Screaming!
“Strikingly dramatic, yet simple and unrestrained . . . an unusual and intensely interesting book richly packed with strange information.” —New York Times Book Review Based on Zora Neale Hurston’s personal experiences in Haiti and Jamaica, where she participated as an initiate rather than just an observer of voodoo practices during her visits in the 1930s, this travelogue into a dark world paints a vividly authentic picture of the ceremonies, customs, and superstitions of voodoo.
Add a gurgling moan with the sound of dragging feet and a smell of decay and what do you get? Better not find out. The zombie has roamed with dead-eyed menace from its beginnings in obscure folklore and superstition to global status today, the star of films such as 28 Days Later, World War Z, and the outrageously successful comic book, TV series, and video game—The Walking Dead. In this brain-gripping history, Roger Luckhurst traces the permutations of the zombie through our culture and imaginations, examining the undead’s ability to remain defiantly alive. Luckhurst follows a trail that leads from the nineteenth-century Caribbean, through American pulp fiction of the 1920s, to the middle of the twentieth century, when zombies swarmed comic books and movie screens. From there he follows the zombie around the world, tracing the vectors of its infectious global spread from France to Australia, Brazil to Japan. Stitching together materials from anthropology, folklore, travel writings, colonial histories, popular literature and cinema, medical history, and cultural theory, Zombies is the definitive short introduction to these restless pulp monsters.
Zombies first shuffled across movie screens in 1932 in the low-budget Hollywood film White Zombie and were reimagined as undead flesh-eaters in George A. Romero’s The Night of the Living Dead almost four decades later. Today, zombies are omnipresent in global popular culture, from video games and top-rated cable shows in the United States to comic books and other visual art forms to low-budget films from Cuba and the Philippines. The zombie’s ability to embody a variety of cultural anxieties—ecological disaster, social and economic collapse, political extremism—has ensured its continued relevance and legibility, and has precipitated an unprecedented deluge of international scholarship. Zombie studies manifested across academic disciplines in the humanities but also beyond, spreading into sociology, economics, computer science, mathematics, and even epidemiology. Zombie Theory collects the best interdisciplinary zombie scholarship from around the world. Essays portray the zombie not as a singular cultural figure or myth but show how the undead represent larger issues: the belief in an afterlife, fears of contagion and technology, the effect of capitalism and commodification, racial exclusion and oppression, dehumanization. As presented here, zombies are not simple metaphors; rather, they emerge as a critical mode for theoretical work. With its diverse disciplinary and methodological approaches, Zombie Theory thinks through what the walking undead reveal about our relationships to the world and to each other. Contributors: Fred Botting, Kingston U; Samuel Byrnand, U of Canberra; Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington U; Jean Comaroff, Harvard U; John Comaroff, Harvard U; Edward P. Comentale, Indiana U; Anna Mae Duane, U of Connecticut; Karen Embry, Portland Community College; Barry Keith Grant, Brock U; Edward Green, Roosevelt U; Lars Bang Larsen; Travis Linnemann, Eastern Kentucky U; Elizabeth McAlister, Wesleyan U; Shaka McGlotten, Purchase College-SUNY; David McNally, York U; Tayla Nyong’o, Yale U; Simon Orpana, U of Alberta; Steven Shaviro, Wayne State U; Ola Sigurdson, U of Gothenburg; Jon Stratton, U of South Australia; Eugene Thacker, The New School; Sherryl Vint, U of California Riverside; Priscilla Wald, Duke U; Tyler Wall, Eastern Kentucky U; Jen Webb, U of Canberra; Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan U.
“A compelling account of the zombi as an anthropological reality and evocative symbol of a state of dispossession, desperation, and death.”—Roger Luckhurst, author of Zombies: A Cultural History “An adventurer’s anthropological quest offering a novel description of the contemporary zombie.”—Sarah J. Lauro, author of The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death “Displays an empathy for the cultural reality of the zombie in Haiti that delivers important insight on the island nation’s people and their lived realities.”—Christopher M. Moreman, coeditor of Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition Forensic pathologist Philippe Charlier—dubbed the “Indiana Jones of the graveyards”—travels to Haiti where rumors claim that some who die may return to life as zombies. Charlier investigates these far-fetched stories and finds that, in Haiti, the dead are a part of daily life. Families, fearing that loved ones may return from the grave, urge pallbearers to take rambling routes to prevent the recently departed from finding their way home from cemeteries. Corpses are sometimes killed a second time...just to be safe. And a person might spend their life preparing their funeral and grave to ensure they will not become a wandering soul after death. But are the stories true? Charlier’s investigations lead him to Vodou leader Max Beauvoir and other priests, who reveal how bodies can be reanimated. In some cases, sorcerers lure the dead from their graves and give them a potion concocted from Devil’s Snare, a plant more commonly known as Jimsonweed. Sometimes secret societies use poudre zombi—“zombie powder”—spiked with the tetrodotoxin found in blowfish. Charlier eagerly collects evidence, examining Vodou dolls by X-ray, making sacrifices at rituals, and visiting cemeteries under the cloak of night. Zombies follows Charlier’s journey to understand the fascinating and frightening world of Haiti’s living dead, inviting readers to believe the unbelievable.
The figure of the zombie is a familiar one in world culture, acting as a metaphor for "the other," a participant in narratives of life and death, good and evil, and of a fate worse than death--the state of being "undead." This book explores the phenomenon from its roots in Haitian folklore to its evolution on the silver screen and to its radical transformation during the 1960s countercultural revolution. Contributors from a broad range of disciplines here examine the zombie and its relationship to colonialism, orientalism, racism, globalism, capitalism and more--including potential signs that the zombie hordes may have finally achieved oversaturation. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
A fascinating read for anyone from general readers to hardcore fans and scholars, this encyclopedia covers virtually every aspect of the zombie as cultural phenomenon, including film, literature, folklore, music, video games, and events. The proliferation of zombie-related fiction, film, games, events, and other media in the last decade would seem to indicate that zombies are "the new vampires" in popular culture. The editors and contributors of Encyclopedia of the Zombie: The Walking Dead in Popular Culture and Myth took on the prodigious task of covering all aspects of the phenomenon, from the less-known historical and cultural origins of the zombie myth to the significant works of film and literature as well as video games in the modern day that feature the insatiable, relentless zombie character. The encyclopedia examines a wide range of significant topics pertaining to zombies, such as zombies in the pulp magazines; the creation of the figure of the zuvembie to subvert decades of censorship by the Comics Code of Authority; Humans vs. Zombies, a popular zombie-themed game played on college campuses across the country; and annual Halloween zombie walks. Organized alphabetically to facilitate use of the encyclopedia as a research tool, it also includes entries on important scholarly works in the expanding field of zombie studies.
The 1932 horror film White Zombie starring Bela Lugosi has received controversial attention from film reviewers and scholars--but it is unarguably a cult classic worthy of study. This book analyzes the film text from nearly every possible viewpoint, using both academic and popular film theories. Also supplied is an extensive intellectual history of the predecessor works to White Zombie, as well as information on the significance it carried for subsequent books and films, its theatrical release around the country, its modern cultural influence, and the attempts to restore the film to its original state. Other noteworthy features of this work include an in-depth biography of White Zombie director Victor Halperin, the first complete study of his life and career, and 244 images and photographs.
Out of the darkness, a gray-skinned, human-like creature lurches toward you. Yet its jerky movements and empty stare let you know it's not a creature from this life it's a zombie. Zombies are people who have been brought back from the dead usually for evil purposes. Over the years, zombies have starred in legends, books, TV shows, and movies. In this creepy title, you'll learn all about the history and popular culture surrounding the infamous undead.
A tale inspired by the early life of Zora Neale Hurston finds the imaginative future author telling fantastical stories about a mythical evil creature until a racially charged murder threatens to shatter the peace in her turn-of-the-century Southern community. A first novel.
