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Christie, Deborah, and Sarah Juliet Lauro, eds. Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011. 296 pp. ISBN 978-0-8232-3447-9. $26.00.
Just as zombies are often portrayed as disintegrating bodies shedding body parts, zombie narratives seem to be taking ever more diverse forms and appearing across an array of media. Responding to this proliferation, Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro bring us Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, a collection of essays that attempts to create order from this zombie diversity, while at the same time respecting the chaos.
The thirteen essays in this collection concentrate on the cinematic history of the zombie from an interdisciplinary perspective. Although most of the essay writers teach within English departments, some of the other fields represented include anthropology and media studies. Although film is central, radio shows, novels, performance art, and other media also receive some scrutiny. The collection is divided into an introduction, the essays, and an afterword. The essays in turn are divided into three sections arranged by time periods corresponding to changes in the portrayals of the zombies. The first section looks at the Haitian background of the zombie and the zombie's representation in early films and radio shows. The second section deals with films from the 1950s to the end of the 1970s. No longer created and ruled by a zombie master, these zombies become "a force of nature that moves under its own autonomy, propelled forward by its own instinctual needs" (61). Central to this section are the zombies of George Romero and the influence of his Night of the Living Dead (1968). The final section of the book looks at "the millennial voracious and fast-moving predator" (2) zombies have become. Despite this chronological organization, Lauro and Christie explain that their goal is not merely to trace the changes in zombies, but to consider these changes as evolutionary and to acknowledge "the possibility that the zombie...