Book Review #2

We're All Infected: Essays on AMC's the Walking Dead and the Fate of the…

by Dawn Keetley, Dawn Keetley 

The thirteen essays in this collection discuss virtually every aspect of AMC’s television series The Walking Dead from the implications of its sanction of total violence in the war on zombies to the nature of zombie consciousness and how it affects our assumptions about what it means to be human. In short, this is not light reading for the typical horror fan who was raised on Famous Monsters of Film Land. These are college or graduate level articles for use in literature or film classes. (But just think of what it means to have zombie courses in universities!)

The editor’s introduction traces the development of the zombie film genre from the early voodoo zombie movies to Night of the Living Dead and then through the significant viral innovations in movies like 28 Days Later and I AM Legend leading up to the revolutionary concept of universal infection introduced in The Walking Dead. An infected humanity sharing the same ultimate fate as those Others (the “inhuman” zombies) is a recurring theme throughout the book and raises a number of ethical and ontological questions the authors are able and willing to explore in depth.

Part I: “Society’s End” deals with the social, psychological, and moral dilemmas the characters in the series face as survivors in a post-apocalyptic, post-civilized world--especially the issue of the escalating, dehumanizing violence against zombies and other humans.

Part II: “Posthumanity” presents the difficult, shape-shifting concept of posthumanism, which is defined differently in various contexts. One important meaning of the term is explained in this section’s salient essay, “Nothing But the Meat: Posthuman Bodies and the Dying Undead.” The author’s elaborate argument, simplified, is this: Mind is not separate from matter; the zombie’s greatly impaired consciousness will cease when its brain dies; our human consciousness (and mind) will cease when our brain dies; hence there is no essential difference between the human and the zombie. We are “nothing but the meat.” (Cheery thought, isn’t it?) The application of this theory as seen in The Walking Dead with its ubiquitous zombie virus is that the uniqueness and nobility of being human are proven illusory as the series progresses. (But don’t let that stop you from watching—as if it could.)

I believe these essays serve their intended purpose well. But to those who aren’t literature or philosophy majors and just want their zombies to be gruesome fun rather than metaphors, I would say skip this one. Turn on Netflix and watch the series itself again.