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Anotherealm: Zombie Meth
by Adrienne Ray
Anotherealm.com: A Magazine of Short Speculative Fiction for the new Milennium
“Zombie Meth” raises some difficult questions for me as a reader and as someone who loves literature. Maybe that’s why I like it. It’s provocative in that it compels me to question my assumptions about writing and literature. Adrienne Ray’s “Zombie Meth” is not what I’d call literary fiction. It’s speculative, something close to science-fiction, so that almost automatically removes it from that list of what most people call high fiction. But it’s clever and problematic in other ways.
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The narrator, to me anyway, is a cliché. He’s a redneck. He admits to being a redneck. Between keeping a loaded shotgun over his fireplace and his willingness to kill others, the narrator doesn’t look like much of a human. After all, after the horrendous events of this story, he’s still thinking about the chores he must complete. But while I don’t like the narrator, the story’s premise is still both solid and creative.
This story explores what might happen if there were a narcotic that made people act like zombies. What’s particularly fascinating is how people react to zombies or individuals who act like zombies. This story reflects popular culture in the sense that we have terms for almost every improbable (if not impossible) creature and breed of human. When we see someone irrational, someone overridden with cannibalistic urges, we know that’s a zombie. And we know what needs to happen to zombies. Zombies have their own mythology, a set of assumptions that is deeply ingrained in the American consciousness. That’s the tragedy of this story, and that’s what makes it work.
About the Reviewer
Jeremy Trimble is a graduate student at Sacramento State University in California. He is a writer working on his first novel.
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2 responses so far ↓
1 andar909 // Aug 10, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Hi, Andar here, I just read your post. I like very much. Agree to you, sir.
2 Harold // Oct 19, 2008 at 8:41 pm
A friend of mine working as an EMT in Phoenix once responded to a call about a woman who had had most of her arm severed by an axe blow. When he got there, the woman was just standing in her yard, he neighbors clustered around her and her (grown) daughter screaming her head off as some police officers were wrestling the woman’s boy friend to the ground.
Someone was holding a soaked towel to the stump of the woman’s upper arm and blood was just pouring out of the wound. Because of the shock and blood loss, the woman wasn’t really all there. She was just standing there, propped up by the people around her, oblivious to everything while she watched the officers struggle with her boyfriend and her daughter.
He mentioned, and he laughed like it was a jest but I suspect he was only half joking, that one of the first things he did was to check and make sure she wasn’t a zombie because it was so like a scene from such a film. This would have been the part where she suddenly snaps and tears his throat out with her teeth.
I think zombies stick with us a lot more than other mythical creatures and I think that’s why there’s so many zombie tales where the cause is based in reality (such as a narcotic) rather than magic. For us, the zombie is a combination of two very primal fears: that of being eaten and that of death. Not only do these fears speak to the very core of long forgotten and wild ancestors, but it comes wrapped in the most powerful of guises–that of our dead loved ones.
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