Familiar Zombies

On April 19, 2020, in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, Kelly Davio tweeted, "What zombie movies got wrong about the actual apocalypse, part 1,487: they omitted scenes of people on the street demanding the right to be eaten by zombies."1 Davio's tweet frames real-life events through the familiar genre of zombie fiction — one grimly appropriate to anti-lockdown protesters demanding the right to die in the name of liberty and freedom. On Twitter and other social media platforms — where, as Danielle Wong explores, virality takes on a different connotation — one now finds a deluge of similar memes allegorizing life during COVID-19 in terms of popular speculative genres, ranging from stories about apocalypses (like Cormac McCarthy's The Road), pandemics (such as Steven Soderbergh's 2011 film Contagion),2 and even zombies.

Days before Davio's tweet, on April 13, 2020, Joshua Bickel snapped a photo of protestors outside the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus.

The image captures these stay-at-home order objectors assembled outside the building, pressed up against the locked doors and screaming into the windows. Their faces twisted, their mouths agape, hands banging on the glass, the photo became a sensation on Twitter, with responses and retweets noting its similarities to cinematic and televisual representations of zombie hordes. In response to the photo, The Washington Post published an interview with Michael Satrazemis, the director of photography for The Walking Dead, discussing how often situations from 2020 have mirrored tropes and imagery of zombie stories.3

Many have recently positioned Ling Ma's Severance (2018) — in which a pandemic reduces its victims to mindless zombies — as a novel for our times.4 Its popularity demonstrates society's fascination with reading real-life through speculative fiction: a practice Severance confronts head on, while also introducing cognitive tensions that mount when familiar fictions do not adequately reflect real life and vice versa. Early in the novel, protagonist Candace Chen joins a group of survivors of the Shen Fever pandemic — a mysterious and highly contagious virus that renders its victims, "the fevered," zombie-like. Candace notes how, unlike in most zombie stories, the fevered do not "attack us or try to eat us."5 But the group leader Bob counters that the fevered do become zombie-adjacent, mindlessly trapped in an endless loop of reenacting mundane tasks from their past: setting the table or folding clothes, as their bodies slowly waste away.6

Despite the fantastic nature of zombies, what is horrific is pointedly familiar and quotidian: daily life becomes deadly when people who once seemed prosaic, mundane, and harmless — such as coworkers, neighbors, and loved ones — can at any moment become rotting monsters.7 The zombie embodies the horrors and consequences of the past coming back to bite us, even when we choose to believe that past atrocities are dead and buried. Even the standard tropes of the seemingly implausible zombie genre are, in their own way, normative and comforting in their narrative familiarity.

While the fevered zombies in Severance remain grotesque manifestations of hauntings from an unresolved (and often unconsidered) past, Severance also subverts generic norms, placing a surprisingly realist spin on standard zombie tropes to explore what happens when real-life fails to mirror the stories we tell. Ma reveals the emptiness of longing for a normal that never existed in the first place, except for a privileged few. In the novel, the post-apocalyptic world is different than anyone expected: "We'd seen it done in the movies, though no one could say which one exactly. A lot of things didn't play out as they had been depicted on-screen."8 Similar invocations and desires for the familiar "reality" of fictional representations ripple throughout the text. Candace was drawn to New York City by an idealized cinematic depiction — Woody Allen's Manhattan — belied by her harsh experience of living in the city. The movie nevertheless makes Candance "wistful for the illusion of New York more than for its actuality."9 Even as the novel depicts a desire to understand the world through the comfortingly familiar — and an eagerness to return to fabricated conceptions of normal — Ma withholds the familiar, often by overtly subverting the tropes that readers expect in stories about the end of the world.

Ironically, this disconnect (wherein the novel destabilizes the reader by upsetting generic expectations) may be what makes the novel feel so familiar, since our current pandemic-affected world both is and is not what we expected.10 While COVID-19 has revealed the extreme lengths some will go to refute science and demand a return to normal, others, such as those in the Black Lives Matter movement, demand a revolution. Ma demonstrates the dangerous allure of familiarity. She reveals the connection between the familiar — often centered on the home — and the zombie-like nature of capitalist consumerism. Desires for the familiar in Severance lead to repeating the past, impeding what should be done to create a new, better future.

***

During Candace's first "stalk," wherein the group enters homes to take supplies, they come across the house's fevered inhabitants. Severance portrays the fevered as "creatures of habit, mimicking the routines and gestures they must have inhabited for years, decades."11 Candace describes the matriarch of an infected family methodically "set[ting] the table with dishes, white with navy trim, from the matching cherry sideboard, her movements rote and systematic" while the father and son expectantly wait.12 The family enacts the trope of zombies as half-alive ghosts who embody and repeat the past, in this case recreating traditional gender roles in the fevered world.

Severance links this repetition to a desire for the familiar or nostalgic, with its connotations of an idealized past that never really was. Candace notes that the fevered "were more nostalgic than we expected."13 She observes the fevered seeking the familiar (and familial) past through ancestral heirlooms, the comforting preserves of relatives, and even old records and cassette tapes. But rather than learn from the dangers of nostalgia, Candace and her group demonstrate a similar, inescapable desire. Though most of what they gather when stalking could be found in strip malls or gas stations, they are, nevertheless, still drawn to homes, stating, "We basked in their homey feeling, imagining the Saturday breakfasts, the TV evening. And we were familiar with the range of layouts, the types of products, having grown up in similar homes."14 Not only are the survivors' practices of "stalking" couched in nostalgia for "homey feeling[s]," "stalking" is linked to consumerist sentimentality as the "familiar" home becomes the locus for gathering "the types of products" from the past that they seek.

 While the fevered may be a grotesque depiction of the allure of the familiar, Ma challenges readers not to view their behavior as unique. After the mother is done setting the table, the members of the family bow their heads in prayer before mechanically seeming to eat off the empty plates. Then they start the process all over again. Ma juxtaposes these actions with a description of the survivors preparing to enter the home by enacting a recurring ritual involving the group holding hands in a circle and reciting a chant, which "corresponded to the rhythm of The Shins's 'New Slang,'" which "made it easy to remember, easy to say,"15 revealing how even this new ritual calls forth the past. Afterward, they, like the zombies, bow their heads and close their eyes as their leader delivers "the recitation, part prayer and part affirmation."16 If the fevered have been infected by a "toxic nostalgia"17 that dooms them to repeat the familiar past, the still-human survivors have not fared much better.

***

In flashbacks, Ma establishes early on how a desire for familiarity often intersects with the aims of capitalism, resulting in the creation of supposedly new futures that are instead zombie-like resurrections of the familiar past. Readers learn that before the pandemic, Candace worked at Spectra, a firm that supports publishers who need to contract low-cost book manufacturing overseas. Candance works in Bibles and reminds us that the Bible "is the best-selling book of the year, every year."18 Conservative estimates for Bible sales in America alone are around twenty-five million a year, in a country where, according to Daniel Radosh, "ninety-one percent of American households own at least one Bible" and the median household already owns as many as four. Relying on real-world publishing practices, Ma highlights how the Bible publishing industry drives repeat sales of the same book by repackaging and marketing the Bible in niche ways that ultimately replicate the familiar under the guise of the new.19

The old as new is most obvious in Candace's final project at Spectra, outsourcing the materials for the Gemstone Bible, which will be marketed to preteen girls and will feature "a keepsake semiprecious gemstone on a sterling alloy chain."20 But Candace is having trouble procuring the stones because Spectra's gemstone suppliers in China have shut down after workers filed a class-action lawsuit to redress how they developed lung diseases from grinding and polishing the stones. It's unsurprising that the factory did not shut down after workers became sick, but only after the start of a lawsuit. Like many aspects of Ma's novel, the Gemstone Bible can be linked to a host of capitalist impulses, human rights abuses, and the complicated ways these issues intersect on the global stage. Furthermore, the Gemstone Bible demonstrates how desires for the familiar result in the old masquerading as the new. Candace explains that "Of any book, the Bible embodies the purest form of product packaging, the same content repackaged a million times over, in new combinations ad infinitum."21

***

Ma's novel challenges readers to question the allure and dangers of the familiar, particularly for a past or normal that never really was, but which nevertheless plays a pernicious role in furthering normative ways of being that privilege the few. Severance anticipates how the End may not be what we imagined it to be. Familiar, generic tropes have failed us. Yet desires for the familiar fuel the continued demands for a return to normal, overlooking COVID-19 statistics that reveal the myriad inequalities that accompanied the status quo. Meanwhile, BLM protestors seek to disrupt the continued violence inflicted upon Black people by the police. While the anti-stay-at-home and anti-mask protestors demand the return of privileged ways of life, BLM protestors remind us that a post-COVID-19 world should do anything but return to more of the same.

In Ma's novel, the consequences of the quest for the familiar and nostalgic normal are best evident in the group's search for "The Facility," where their enigmatic leader promises they will find safety. Their quest is Severance's most overt riff on the zombie genre. In The Walking Dead, most seasons center around a search for sanctuary, only to have their safe haven revealed as unsafe, initiating a search for a new refuge (and a new season). "The Facility" hints at the power of generic expectation, cycles of repetition, and how Ma's characters may be once more enacting what they have seen "done in the movies."22 When they finally arrive, they discover that "The Facility" is an abandoned suburban mall, which had been a refuge for their leader who, in his youth, sought to escape his broken home. "The Facility" illustrates how desire for the familiar impedes their ability to create new futures as the survivors attempt to turn the mall's abandoned shops into a neighborhood. As they settle in, some become fevered. There is a long history of equating mindless zombies with mindless consumerism, but Ma's innovative zombies — along with other key aspects of Severance, such as the Gemstone Bible, rendered similarly zombie-like — go further: demonstrating how capitalism and consumerism create something worse than a senseless ravenous horde, but a nostalgia for the familiar that insidiously infects the present and future with the replicated, repeated horrors of the past.

---

Dwight Tanner teaches courses on speculative fiction and world literatures at Winston-Salem State University. He holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

---

References