Watch or read any zombie based entertainment these days and you’ll find one common thread that joins most of them together. Zombies always seem pretty easy to kill. Everyone knows that to destroy a zombie you destroy the brain. Shoot it, stab it, crush it, pummel it with your feet and fists; as long as you obliterate that blob of grey matter inside the skull you’re golden.
This is where I find the big problem. The skull. In fact, when I was writing my own serialized zombie novel, DISEASE, the first serial of which is to be released September 18th, 2014, I had to stop and do some research. And, do you know what I came up with? The skull takes an incredible amount of force to penetrate. Your standard issue bullet will do the trick, if you have any, but what if you don’t? Or what if you don’t want to shoot off your amazingly loud zombie killin’ handgun.
Take a show like The Walking Dead for instance. Although I’m a huge fan, I find myself laughing out loud many times when a zombie is killed, and it’s not because seeing the head of a ghastly flesh-eating monster explode is so much fun (which it is), it’s because destroying skulls seems to be as easy as smashing watermelons. A well placed stomp or knife blade and you have a dead zed on your hands.
Sure we could say zombies are so decomposed that their skulls are soft, but then too, wouldn’t their brains be so rotten as to have leaked from their nostrils long ago? Never mind the fact that if all the zombies rotted and decayed away the world would be cleared of the zed problem in a few years, maximum.
This brings us to my next point. When researching DISEASE, I quickly decided that for zombies to be a credible threat, decomposition must be very slow, or halted all together. Since my novel takes place three years after the zombies have destroyed everything we hold sacred and dear, my zombies had to have some staying power. To me a zombie is dead through and through. Not even the microbes on the corpse survive. Everything is dead, and nothing can live on or in a zombie. This in turn means very limited and in many cases halted decomposition.
With decomposition at a standstill we come back to the fact that skulls are damn hard to penetrate (or crush, or bash in). If they weren’t they wouldn’t be very good protection for our thinkers, would they? Answer? No.
This is why I find zombie killing to be a major problem in today’s zed entertainment. But it’s not a problem limited to zombies. It’s pretty easy in books, TV, and movies these days to knock someone out, strangle them, or inflict any other means of violence and death. In real life these acts are brutal and require large feats of strength and determination to see through. Not to mention the fact that people can often survive an attempt on their life, including a bullet to the brain. Why would the same not hold true for zombies?
When I set about writing DISEASE, I tried to make a point that the zombies, and the people that inhabit the world, are as hard to kill as you and me. Life may be delicate and short, yes, but life is also determined and always seems to find a way, against all odds, even if that life is already dead.
How do you feel about the state of zombie killing these days? Do you feel, as I do, that it’s too easy, or do you think I’m just crazy? What’s your zombie pet peeve? Let me know in the comments below. And, if you’re interested in my book DISEASE it’s available as an eBook on Amazon, iBooks, Smashwords, and more, and soon to be available in paperback. Head on over to www.mfwahl.com for more information.
As a child M.F. Wahl quickly ate through the local library’s entire sections on the paranormal, true crime, serial killers, magic, and hypnosis. By the age of 11  “IT†by Stephen King was the reading material of choice, hidden in a school desk (much to the dismay of one math teacher who wrote home that Wahl “read too much!â€).
As an adult M.F. Wahl spends as much time writing as possible. Days are spent funneling creative energies into penning dark tales. Nights are spent watching horror movies and TV curled under a blanket with the family. At the end of the day when eyes finally close other people’s nightmares are fuel for M.F. Wahl’s dreams.
DISEASE is a serialized novel and is M.F. Wahl’s debut. Currently it’s available for purchase on Amazon, iBooks, KOBO, Smashwords, and more. The paperback is slated to be released just is time for Halloween, and an audiobook is in the works as well.
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