Mac Montandon - The Proper Care and Feeding of Zombies: A Completely Scientific Guide to the Lives of the Undead

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Table of Contents

For my dad, Henri, who showed me how science can be fun.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the following people for their great help on this book. Jase Miles-Perez and James Weinheimer provided invaluable research assistance and too many wonderful ideas to mention. My dear old friends Jeremy Kasten and Aaron Ruby gave me excellent insights and an exhaustive list of must-watch movies. Matt Haber let me bend his ear about this for several months and is a fantastic source on just about anythingreally, try him. The enthusiasm of my mom, my grandma, and my aunt Jamy; my cousins Zack, Eli, and Rose; and my friends Joanna, Aaron, April, Heather, Bill, Plato, Abe, Peter, Paul, Billy, Pinn, Katie, Mike, Tyler, and Dylan helped keep the project fresh and interesting. Professor Maurine Neiman, Dr. Mark Mahowald, and several other researchers and scientists were quite generous with their time, expertise, and PDFs. Connie Santisteban at Wiley is an extremely supportive and smart editorthanks so much, Connie, for dreaming up this book and giving me the chance to write it. My agent, Anna Stein, is as relentless as the undead (in a good way) and responds to pretty much every e-mail with amazing, very much appreciated quickness.

For a book like this to exist, it needs a robust history of past masters: Thank you, Bela Lugosi, George Romero, Sam Raimi, and Max Brooks (and Mel, too!), among many others, for paving the blood-soaked way. Finally, as always, I truly couldnt and wouldnt have done it without the Big Three: my wife, Catherine, and my two daughters, Oona and Daphne. They are the best reasons ever to avoid being turned into a zombie.

INTRODUCTION

FANDOM starts young. I was not much older than seven when I first saw the original Star Wars, and I have wanted, at times desperately, to be Han Solo ever since. Zombie fandom can strike at an even younger age than that.

My daughter Oona was five and a half years old when she came home from school one day and excitedly told me about a new game that was all the rage on her kindergarten playground: Bye Bye Zombie! This was before Id mentioned working on the book you are now holding, which means I hadnt influenced the test subject (my daughter). She arrived at her fandom all by herselfwith the help of a few rambunctious little classmates capable of impressive and alarmingly real-looking zombie imitationsand her passion ran deep. She played it all the time throughout the year. It was also complex: in the game a player could choose to be a zombie, a human, or an animal; the zombies could eat the humans but not the animals, and the humans had guns with which to battle the undead. (Now that I think about it, Im not sure what the animals did.)

Fortune cookie wisdom says that if you love someone, you should set them free. Most people ignore this advice. Instead, if they love someone, they stammer and sweat and eventually stalk their love interest until the person relents and finally, miserably agrees to go on a date. One. Date. The suffocating attention continues until the less than happy couple is married, knocked up, and in it for life.

In this way, a person in love is like the ultimate fanin it for life. Zombie fans are arguably the most committed of all. Or, at any rate, I will put their collective passion up against that of fans of vampires, werewolves, mummies, and Oprah any day. When it comes to supernatural or metaphysical creations, few if any creatures inspire collective crushing like zombies. Theres a good reason for the intensity of our feelings: for when we love someone, not only do we never want to set them free, we want to know every last possible thing there is to know about the person. Or the zombie. The ultimate zombie fan wants to know everything that can be known about our undead brethrenfrom their speed (fast or slow) to their diets (brains, brains, brains) to their sleep habits (hardly at all). The ultimate fan knows that a closer examination of how the other half lives (or not) is well worth a scientific explanation.

By now we know a good deal about our favorite ghouls. Thanks to the incisive efforts of some of our most gifted writers, filmmakers, and Italian math whizzes (Max Brooks, George Romero, and David Cassi, to name a few), we know what a zombie apocalypse looks like, how radiation from a fallen space satellite can cause an outbreak, and what modeling can tell us about escaping the brain-licking beasts. (Speaking of, if youre hiding in the basement right this minute and need to kill some time while waiting out the zombie horde, you may enjoy the Killing Time bits sprinkled throughout the book. They are, as the name suggests, really good for killing time, if not zombies.)

But surely we dont yet know everything there is to know. After reading this book, you still wont know everything there is to know about zombies. As my daughters game underscores, zombies are complicated folk. But hopefully you will have learned a lot and will have had fun along the way.

So, thanks, zombies! While its true that your bite is not exactly a love bite, our love for you goes on nonetheless. We love your lumbering ways, your gruesome moans, your flaking faces, and your appetite for life. Darn it, zombies, we love practically everything about you! (That slurping of our spleen thing is not too coolplease do something about that, if you dont mind.) More than other monsters, zombies are close to being us. They are us, in fact, just a little more decomposed. And slobbery. So of course we cherish them, as we cherish our friends, neighbors, and ourselves. Unfortunately, however, we still have to shoot them in the head.

Zombie Quiz

If you are unabashedly unmatched in your undead trivia knowledge, you will undoubtedly get a kick (to the sternum region) out of this quiz. For the rest of you, theres always cheating.

1. What was to blame in the original Night of the Living

Dead for the dead living that night?

a. Ancient Indian burial ground

b. Ancient Pakistani burial ground

c. Radiation from fallen spacecraft

d. Vegas

2. In the 28 Days series (excluding the movie of the same title with Sandra Bullock), the easily communicable zombifying virus was:

a. Rage

b. Slayer

c. Anthrax

d. Megadeth

3. According to Caribbean folklore, what is a surefire way of returning a zombiefied individual to his/her/its senses?

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