It appears that zombies are back – and not just from the dead.
As today’s cultural landscape can attest, movies like Zombieland, television shows like The Walking Dead, and books such as The Zombie Survival Guide – on The New York Times Best Seller List for nine years – continue to feed the masses’ seemingly insatiable fascination with animated, flesh-eating corpses.
Luckily for Dan Waters ’91 (CLAS), many of the main characters in his young adult Generation Dead series are zombies – but not of the murderous variety. On the contrary, the undead teenagers in his books do not prey on the living; they are simply looking to be accepted by their peers and by society at large.
“I’ve always been a horror literature and film fan,” says Waters. “If they really existed, zombies would probably be one of the most oppressed groups in society. I thought writing about them would be a fun way of bringing up serious questions.”
Stitches (Disney Hyperion, 2011), published late last year exclusively as an eBook, is the fourth installment in Waters’ Generation Dead series. It is a compilation of four short stories that follow many of the teenage characters whom his readers have come to know and love, both living and undead – or, as they are more respectfully termed, “differently biotic.”
The first book in Waters’ young adult book series, Generation Dead (Hyperion, 2008), tells what the author describes as a “zombie love story.” Although plenty of humor finds its way into the narrative, the initial inspiration for the books had decidedly dark origins, stemming from one evening when Waters caught a news program about violence in schools.
“The story was that kids were starting fights or committing random acts of violence in order to film them and put them online. There was this idea of getting notoriety for being a violent person,” he says. “These clips brought up a lot of questions for me. What were the reasons these kids did this, at these ages?”
Through two different blogs – one of his own, danielwaters.com, and one written from the perspectives of his fictional characters, found at mysocalledundeath.com – Waters connects with his teen audience.
“A lot of the mail I get is from readers who feel excluded for some reason or another,” he says. “In a way, a zombie becomes a universal metaphor for people. Anything that’s different about you – that’s what zombies signify in this story.”
It was only after he had finished writing the first book in the Generation Dead series that Waters realized the start of a “resurgence” of zombies in popular culture. “It was just dumb luck. … I wanted to write a humorous story about people, but writing about dead people gave me that little bit of arm’s length to treat the subject with a little more humor than I would have otherwise.”
Fortunately for his fans, Waters plans to return to the Generation Dead series –recently optioned by ABC Family – after completing a few other projects, among them his next book, a ghost story due out next fall titled Break My Heart a Thousand Times.
“There’s something about working in that world,” Waters says of the zombie realm. “There’s so much cutting-room floor material. Every time another zombie walks on stage, even a minor role, some story about that person leads to another story.”
