Abstract Horror (Part 1a)¶
Zack
Zombies lower the tone, in innumerable ways. Socio-biological decay is their natural element, carrying life towards a zero-degree affectivity, without neutralizing a now-repulsive animation. They exist to be slaughtered — in retaliation — which in turn furthers their descent through the pulp-Darwinism of entertainment media, to the depths of senselessness where victory is all-but-assured. As the world comes apart into dynamic slime, popular horror is increasingly infested with zombies.
When envisaged as a military antagonist at the global scale, Max Brooks calls ‘them’ Zack (amongst other things). If ‘Charlie’ abbreviates ‘Victor Charlie’ as a casual jargon noun for the Viet Cong, how is ‘Zack’ derived? Brooks offers no specific answer. It seems at least plausible that ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ is the term that undergoes compression. In any case, ‘Zack’ is name with a future, providing a concise collective — or dense — noun for a monstrous syndrome that looms beyond the historical horizon.
‘Zack’, like ‘Charlie’, is the enemy, nicknamed with an informality designed for stress reduction. The intensity of the tag is associated with its ambivalence, as an affectionate moniker that liberates or legitimates unrestricted killing. ‘Zack’ sounds like ‘he’ could be our buddy, so we can unleash violence upon ‘him’ without qualm or inhibition. However odd this psychological formula may sound, it is one that Brooks inherits, rather than invents.
Charlie is already an abstraction from ethical familiarity, but nothing like Zack. Where we end, Zack begins, recruiting our corpses into undead swarms. Our calamities are ‘his’ ammunition, because Zack is sheer weaponry, the first true instantiation of total war, perfectly incarnating antagonism to human survival. Zack is nothing but the enemy, ‘who’ — entirely devoid of non-belligerent purpose or interests — cannot be terrorized, intimidated, or deterred. Scare Zack? One has no less chance of scaring a cold virus. So things always return to the same basic conclusion: Zack has to be killed, as nothing has before (even though — or especially because — it is already dead).
Brooks is a zombie neo-traditionalist. His re-animated undead shuffle (slowly). They propagate by cannibalistic contagion. Only head-wounds terminate them. But zombies are not the monsters. Zack is the monster. It is the syndrome — the convergent wave — that realizes the phenomenon, as a matter of spreading swarms, or irreducible populations.
Tactically, Zack’s strength is number, overwhelming resistance, and replenishing itself from the casualties it inflicts. Strategically, it prevails through system shock, patterned as epidemic, and registered not as the ‘individual’ humanoid ghoul, but as an emergent, global outbreak. There is no prospect of rational or ‘dispassionately’ effective counter-action until it is understood that Zack is no mere ghoulish horde but a singular planetary trauma. Zack is total stress.
Brooks insists upon the realism of his methods:
The zombies may be fake, but I wanted everything else in “World War Z” to be real. Just like with “The Zombie Survival Guide,” I wanted the story to be rooted in hard facts. That’s why I researched the real geopolitics of the world in the early 21st century, the military science, the macroeconomics and the cultural quirks of each country I was writing about. As creative as I think I am, I also know that I can’t invent anything as interesting (or scary) as the real planet we live on. As a history nerd, I also wanted to ground the book in our species’ life story. Nothing in “World War Z” was made up, it all really happened: Yonkers was Isandlwana; the Chinese cover-up was SARS. There’s nothing zombies can do to us that we haven’t already done to each other.
Take the world, exactly as it is, and postulate a radical stressor as historical destination. Engineer, with all possible precision, a speculative collision with utter disaster — a total world war that is also a plague, a precipice of bio-social degeneration, and a universal psychotic episode — that’s Zack. Understandably, people will be reluctant to describe this method as ultimate realism. Nevertheless, as things messily unwind, we’re going to hear much more about it.