I play video games, and a couple of the ones I’m currently playing feature zombies. There is Project Zomboid, which I have mentioned a few times, and I really like. There is also Minecraft, probably still the most popular game in the world, and I get to play it with my son from time to time. If a person could make a living playing Minecraft, Chris would be a millionaire.

Zombies have cropped up in popular fiction for ages, perhaps as far back as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein if you play fast and loose with the definition of a zombie is. Why do we enjoy zombies in our fiction so much? What is their appeal?

To begin with, we enjoy the thrill and excitement of being frightened, and zombies start off deep in the uncanny valley. Before they take their first shambling step towards our heroes, we are put off by their wrongness. They shouldn’t be able to move. They are a perversion of the natural order. They were once human, and now they’re a monster. If it could happen to them, what’s to say it can’t happen to us?

There are a few different ways in which zombies are depicted. Usually, they are slow, shambling, mindless monsters, motivated to seek out and consume human brains. These are your Walking Dead variety of zombies, though I think they started to change them up in later seasons.

The Last of Us puts its own spin on zombies, though they’re still functionally the same as classic zombies. 28 Days Later featured fast-moving zombies. Then there are all of the Night of the Living Dead movies and spinoffs and movies and media inspired by those movies.

From a writer’s perspective, what is the utility of including zombies in our stories?

To start with, if you like zombie fiction, then you should write zombie fiction. Whatever story you’re working on, you should enjoy it. That’s the first and best reason a writer should write about zombies: self-interest.

Zombies can represent nature gone wrong. Fighting against the hordes of zombies can have the same sense of futility as fighting the wind. The zombies do not care about the feelings of the heroes. The zombies do what they do because they’re zombies, and they will cover the land, devouring people, the way an uncontrolled forest fire might rage on until all fuel is expended.

If you want to have your heroes commit acts of intense violence and still retain the sympathy of your audience, you can have them fight zombies. I’ll talk more about this particular feature of zombies in my post tomorrow. Zombies, robots, and bug-like aliens all fall into the kinds of enemies that can be slaughtered without upsetting the average reader too much.

As a writer, bear in mind that if you’re writing a story that involves the typical depiction of zombies, your zombies are not the antagonist. They aren’t really characters. They’re setting. They’re dangerous monsters forcing the heroes to act and react. They are obstacles in the way of the heroes, rather than villains working in opposition to the needs and wants of your protagonists.

You can change them up and give them personality if you really want a zombie antagonist. There are movies and stories that deviate from classic zombies, and they’re fine and entertaining, but they usually don’t function the way zombie stories function. iZombie treats it as a disease that can be managed, and I Am Legend is really doing something else, which I’ll stop describing since I almost spoiled the twist.

I am suggesting that a conventional zombie story is a story that would still function even if it didn’t have zombies in it. Let me know if you disagree.

As for me, I have included a brief appearance of zombies in a short story, but never actually written a zombie story. I enjoy them sometimes in video games, but not so much in my movies or books. My suspension of disbelief has a hard time accepting them, because just from a pure mechanical perspective, they shouldn’t work.

I have an idea for a short story featuring zombies, however. I’m not sure when I’m going to write it. The basic idea is that zombies exist, eternally shambling undead that want to eat brains. But since they’re not as healthy as regular folks, they’re not actually that difficult to contain. Instead of completely wiping the zombies out and destroying them for good, which is something we could easily do, we round them up and put them on treadmills. We use their weird, endless walking to generate electricity. In such a society, what might happen to someone that pisses off the wrong people? If I ever get around to writing this, I will call it Gray Energy.