{"id":687,"date":"2010-12-05T20:53:20","date_gmt":"2010-12-05T14:53:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/?p=687"},"modified":"2010-12-05T20:53:20","modified_gmt":"2010-12-05T14:53:20","slug":"on-chuck-clostermans-zombie-analogy-and-stephen-graham-joness-the-ones-that-got-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/2010\/12\/05\/on-chuck-clostermans-zombie-analogy-and-stephen-graham-joness-the-ones-that-got-away\/","title":{"rendered":"On Chuck Closterman&#039;s Zombie Analogy and Stephen Graham Jones&#039;s &quot;The Ones That Got Away&quot;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It seems everyone is trying to deconstruct and decode the recent zombie craze, including Gail Collins in the NY Times, who wrote a funny piece about the zombie Congress, and this morning Chuck Closterman has a good(ish) piece in the NY Times describing how modern life is like a zombie attack (failing to mention dinner parties, I might add):<br \/>\nhttp:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/12\/05\/arts\/television\/05zombies.html?pagewanted=2&#038;hpw<br \/>\nIn the interest of &#8220;transparency&#8221; (and so Julian Assange doesn&#8217;t rat me out) I should declare that I&#8217;m not a fan of zombie movies, stories, or the &#8220;zombie mythos,&#8221; as one of my students recently put it. It all seems pretty dumb to me, frankly. As do vampires. Too one note. I live in Pennsylvania at least half my life, which is the setting for the original <em>Night of the Living Dead<\/em> and some of the subsequent sequels, so maybe it seems too close to home. I once told a class at Penn State that <em>Night of the Living Dead<\/em> was filmed here, and proposed that we should emblazon our license plates with the legend State of the Living Dead. (They frowned and didn&#8217;t think it was funny.) But the best writers can always put a new spin on any idea\/metaphor: Stephen Graham Jones has a new book of horror fiction out, titled <em>The Ones That Got Away<\/em>, and it includes his killer story &#8220;Monsters,&#8221; which is (somewhat of) a zombie story, and puts a coming-of-age spin on it: troubled teen meets girl and has incipient romance, only to be undone by the undead. It&#8217;s a great example of genre mixing, a way to reenergize the undead. Or we can just eat their brains. And start saying, &#8220;You know, maybe the Republicans are right.&#8221;<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/OTGA.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-691\" title=\"OTGA\" src=\"http:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/OTGA-194x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"194\" height=\"300\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It seems everyone is trying to deconstruct and decode the recent zombie craze, including Gail Collins in the NY Times, who wrote a funny piece about the zombie Congress, and this morning Chuck Closterman has a good(ish) piece in the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/2010\/12\/05\/on-chuck-clostermans-zombie-analogy-and-stephen-graham-joness-the-ones-that-got-away\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,25,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-booksfilm","category-politics","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}