Stuck outside in a zombie world? You’re dead

This isn’t actually fiction, but it’s fiction-related, so I’m tossing it on the fiction tab. But I have on particular complaint about zombie movies as a rule, and now’s as good a time as any to voice that criticism.

If there’s a real zombie outbreak, there will be no months and months of outside time. It’s easy to make fiction, like The Walking Dead and the like, where people wander the countryside for months on end and stumble across hordes and have to survive. But in reality, there’s no way we’d have an outbreak that would play out that way.

In reality, should the zombies ever rise up and become, you know, a problem, you have to get inside. Bunker, well-stocked cellar, whatever. If you’re outside, you’re gonna die.

Or you won’t! Really, there are two ways a zombie outbreak would go if you’re outside. Either you could last a little while outside, in the open, before the zombies would overwhelm you. Or you could survive forever, because the zombies would be slow-moving and/or easily defeated, and we’d win the fight quickly. Neither of those makes for great fiction, but it’s true. No long-term zombie outbreak would actually present good fiction, because the survivors would be the ones who managed to find a place to hide.

As good at The Walking Dead is at generating suspense with the random scare of hundreds of zombies whenever a character is out somewhere, it doesn’t make any sense. You get inside and you stay there.

That’s why my books (promotion!) are essentially told in real-time. The characters’ entire motivation is to get inside and stay there. The entire first novel, save for some flashback stuff, takes place over the course of about a day and a half as the people go from “no zombies,” to “zombies,” to “hide from the zombies.” If you aren’t familiar with my novel … first, you jerk, you should have bought it and read it. Second, it tells the story of the second zombie outbreak, 20 years after the first. The adults in my story survived the initial outbreak and have experience to draw from, while the younger generation grew up in basically a boogeyman scenario, hearing stories of zombies but never having anything real to draw from.

But most of the adults survived the initial outbreak by hiding. The ones that didn’t — and there weren’t many — became folk heroes. They were called Out Theres because they survived, you know, “out there,” and the people who lived through it know how insane it would be to make it out in public without any protection.

If zombies come and they’re fast, and you’re outside, you’re just dead. If zombies come and they’re slow, and you’re outside, you’ll win, and there won’t be zombies anymore. Those are really the only two outcomes. Zombie fiction set in, like, the sixth year of a zombie world, with people surviving on the run, always moving from place to place, is just outlandish. (Yes, I know any zombie fiction is outlandish, but you know what I mean.)

Zombie fiction should always be about the quest for a place to hide, or at the very least people with a very good reason to be out. Being out just looking for a place to hide is the story, and while it has to be a short one, it’s the only one that makes any sense.

So, you know, buy my book when it gets re-released in November and see why that’s the case.