I love zombies, but I can’t watch zombie movies. The images get stuck in my head and I have nightmares for weeks, waking up at 3 am terrified that the zombie apocalypse is actually happening. Every time I give in and watch a zombie flick anyway, the paranoia haunts me again.
It turns out the answer to my stifled zombie love is zombie BOOKS. Specifically, Lindsay King-Miller’s fiction debut The Z Word, which I gobbled up in one sitting on a rainy Saturday. While King-Miller’s tale features plenty of evocatively written blood and viscera, my imagination just can’t produce realistic-enough violent visuals to ruin my sleep for a month. Best of all, reading The Z Word didn’t feel like a compromise. The perfect blend of campy and gory, this novel has everything I love about zombie movies: characters thrown together; unglamorous fights for survival using household items but also badass battles with real weapons; a viciously literal critique of rampant consumerism; and a subtle but alarming portrayal of the brutal impulses in human nature. King-Miller adds her own spin to all of that and more, creating a fundamentally queer and anti-corporate blast of unsettling entertainment.
Our hero and narrator is Wendy, described on the back cover as a “chaotic bisexual” who never feels like she fits in at Pride. She especially doesn’t fit in at a party where her ex-girlfriend Leah is obviously hooking up with Sam and Aurelia, the hot lesbian couple hosting. Plus, everyone is getting wasted on fruit-flavored alcoholic seltzers made by Seabrook, the local corporation sponsoring this year’s Pride—but Wendy absolutely refuses to drink that garbage, making her even more of an outsider. She ends up in an impulsive hook-up with gorgeous Logan aka gothic drag queen Dahlia DePravity, awkwardly crashing with Logan at Sam and Aurelia’s.
In the morning, Wendy finds herself on a hunt for Plan B, thanks to a Seabrook-branded condom breaking the night before. That’s when things begin to look strange. She sees a car parked haphazardly on the side of the road, and realizes it belongs to the woman who drove home an aggressive drunk girl last night. The drugstore is closed in the middle of the day, and through the glass door Wendy can see shelves toppled and stuff everywhere. A usually-friendly acquaintance tries to run Wendy over with his truck, howling incoherent nonsense. None of these seemingly isolated incidents is enough to keep Wendy from going to the Pride drag night emceed by Dahlia DePravity… but it is in that barroom crush of people that things go horrifically wrong.
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The Z Word
This was the moment I was waiting for. Part of my delight in reading The Z Word was anticipating the apocalypse and awaiting the characters’ realizations. King-Miller hews just enough to a traditional version of zombies that the reader likely knows what will happen before the characters do, and that builds some pretty enjoyable suspense. That said, like in many recent films, these zombies aren’t really the undead—there is a much more sinisterly mundane force at work. Though I guessed the “source” of the zombies quite early on, King-Miller did surprise me with the details of the truth Wendy and her friends discover. Watching them unravel the mystery and head out guns swords a-blazin’ to try to save their community is riveting.
Amongst all the action and devastation The Z Word has a quieter aspect woven in: the history between Wendy and Leah. Though these flashbacks chapters are not the novel’s strong suit, they do illuminate Wendy’s character and develop Leah’s. The relationship dynamic is a familiar one: Aimless Wendy is drawn to community activist and extrovert Leah, and unfortunately Leah’s magnetism never quite loses its grip on our protagonist. Though I appreciated King-Miller’s inclusion of Leah as a deeply problematic queer character, I was far more invested in Wendy on her own than through the lens of her messy romance.
While Wendy is a bit of an everyhuman (which fits horror movie rules), there is a passage early in the novel that made me care for her specifically:
I want to go home, I think. It’s a familiar thought, well-worn and involuntary, like a song that gets stuck in my head sometimes. There’s no image attached to the words, because there’s nowhere that actually feels like home to me.
This is not only a potent repetitive thought for a character in a zombie apocalypse to have as they watch the world crumble. It is also a thought that chases me, similarly without a real-world tether for “home.” In these lines, King-Miller has articulated a moment many of us know: When you’re too tired or upset to have anything but a cliché thought, maybe one you’ve heard dozens of times in TV and movies. It isn’t really a comforting sentiment, but it can get you through.
Here is where I warn readers that there is some real emotional pain in this book. It wouldn’t be a zombie adventure without character death, and King-Miller doesn’t shy away from the obliterating power of immediate grief. There are a few chapters from the perspective of people in the process of transforming into zombies, and they are dark. This is a fun novel, but it is by no means light-hearted. Like the best horror films, its staying power lies in watching people survive, even when that means killing monsters wearing the faces of their loved ones.
You know… maybe I ought to say The Z Word hasn’t given me nightmares YET. The thing is, even if belated bad dreams do crop up, the reading was worth it. And I’d still be keeping my eye out for King-Miller’s next novel, especially given that her satisfying ending leaves the door open for a sequel. I’d read a Z Word 2 in a heartbeat—even if it jolts me awake in the middle of the night, wondering if zombies are real.
The Z Word is published by Quirk Books.
