In Living with the Living Dead, Greg Garrett shows that the zombie apocalypse has become an archetypal narrative for the contemporary world, in part because zombies can represent a variety of global threats, from terrorism to Ebola, from economic uncertainty to mental illness. But paradoxically this narrative also offers human beings a chance to find emotional and spiritual comfort; these apocalyptic stories about individuals facing the imminent prospect of grisly death also offer us wisdom about living in community, present us with real-world ethical problems, and invite us into a conversation about what it means to survive.

Why has the zombie become such a pervasive figure in twenty-first-century popular culture? John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic seek to answer this question by arguing that particular aspects of the zombie, common to a variety of media forms, reflect a crisis in modern Western culture. The authors examine the essential features of the zombie, including mindlessness, ugliness and homelessness, and argue that these reflect the outlook of the contemporary West and its attendant zeitgeists of anxiety, alienation, disconnection and disenfranchisement. They trace the relationship between zombies and the theme of secular apocalypse, demonstrating that the zombie draws its power from being a perversion of the Christian mythos of death and resurrection. Symbolic of a lost Christian worldview, the zombie represents a world that can no longer explain itself, nor provide us with instructions for how to live within it. The concept of 'domicide' or the destruction of home is developed to describe the modern crisis of meaning that the zombie both represents and reflects. This is illustrated using case studies including the relocation of the Anishinaabe of the Grassy Narrows First Nation, and the upheaval of population displacement in the Hellenistic period. Finally, the authors invoke and reformulate symbols of the four horseman of the apocalypse as rhetorical analogues to frame those aspects of contemporary collapse that elucidate the horror of the zombie. Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis is required reading for anyone interested in the phenomenon of zombies in contemporary culture. It will also be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience including students and scholars of culture studies, semiotics, philosophy, religious studies, eschatology, anthropology, Jungian studies, and sociology.

A brain-bending exploration of real-life zombies and mind controllers, and what they reveal to us about nature—and ourselves Zombieism isn’t just the stuff of movies and TV shows like The Walking Dead. It’s real, and it’s happening in the world around us, from wasps and worms to dogs and moose—and even humans. In Plight of the Living Dead, science journalist Matt Simon documents his journey through the bizarre evolutionary history of mind control. Along the way, he visits a lab where scientists infect ants with zombifying fungi, joins the search for kamikaze crickets in the hills of New Mexico, and travels to Israel to meet the wasp that stings cockroaches in the brain before leading them to their doom. Nothing Hollywood dreams up can match the brilliant, horrific zombies that natural selection has produced time and time again. Plight of the Living Dead is a surreal dive into a world that would be totally unbelievable if very smart scientists didn’t happen to be proving it’s real, and most troublingly—or maybe intriguingly—of all: how even we humans are affected. “Fantastic . . . You'll be thinking about this book long after you're done reading it.” —Kelly Weinersmith, New York Times bestselling coauthor of Soonish

A POST-FALL FANTASY TABLETOP ROLEPLAYING GAME SET IN A RAMPANT OCEAN OF VERDANT GREEN. Some three hundred years ago the empires of the world were toppled by a wave of fast growing greenery, a tide of rampant growth spilling from the West known as the Verdancy. Now chainsaw-driven ships cut their way across dense treetop waves, their engines powered by oilfruit, rope-golems, honey and pride.You play a wildsailor, part of a motley crew consisting of humanity's weathered descendants, cactoid gunslingers, centipedal fungi, silk-clothed spiderfolk, and other, stranger things. With your fellow crewmembers, you'll journey across the lingin' tide discovering charts, pursuing drives, and avoiding mires of the deep.The Wildsea hungers and grows, roots sinking deep into the forest floor as the waves above ripple with life. What will you discover in its depths?The Wildsea is a tabletop roleplaying game from Quillhound Studios for 2-6 players inspired by stories like Sunless Sea, Bastion, and the Bas-Lag Trilogy. The Wildsea uses a narrative, fiction-first d6 dicepool system that draws inspiration from games like Belly of the Beast, Blades in the Dark, and 13th Age.

Ideas are important in shaping the policy choices of governments. But many ideas that have not been successful in the past continue to be used by policymakers, and some good ideas tend not to be adopted. This Element will focus on why governments make these poor policy choices. We will discuss a number of examples of 'zombie ideas' that refuse to die, and then discuss the factors that are associated with their survival. Those factors occur at the elite, the organizational and the societal level. We will also examine some 'ghost' ideas that may well be successful but have a difficult time being adopted, and the factors that are associated with the exclusion of these ideas from the policy process.

After transmigrating into the apocalypse, he acquired a Super Fusion System.Two Level 1 Zombies can be combined into a single Level 2 Zombie, the combined zombie would also be completely loyal.The higher the zombie’s level, the better it looked.The zombies also possessed unique skills and techniques. Some are heaven shattering and groundbreaking, with the ability to take the life of any adversary.In fact, the zombies will even continue to spawn new zombies every day.

When your base camp is overrun by zombies, whom do you save if you cannot save everyone? Is it permissible to sacrifice one survivor to an undead horde in order to save a greater number of the living? Do you have obligations to loved ones who have turned? These are some of the troubling ethical questions you might face in a zombie apocalypse. Bryan Hall uses situations like these to creatively introduce the foundational theories of moral philosophy. Covering major thinkers such as Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill, this is an introduction to Ethics like no other: a practical guidebook for surviving a zombie outbreak with your humanity intact. It shows you why moral reasoning matters as long as you still walk among the living. The book is written entirely from the perspective of someone struggling to survive in a world overrun by the undead. Each chapter begins with graphic art and a “field exercise” that uses a story from this world to illustrate an ethical problem. By considering moral controversies through the unfamiliar context of a zombie apocalypse, the morally irrelevant factors that get in the way of resolving these controversies are removed and you can better answer questions such as: · Do we have a moral obligation to help those less fortunate than ourselves? · Is it ever morally permissible to intentionally kill an innocent person? · Are non-rational but sentient beings morally considerable? Equipped with further reading sections and overviews of the theories that you would usually cover in an introductory Ethics course, this one-of-a-kind primer critically evaluates different procedures for moral action that you can use not only to survive but flourish in an undead world.

A thorough analysis of zombies in popular culture from the 1930s to contemporary society. The zombie apocalypse hasn’t happened—yet—but zombies are all over popular culture. From movies and TV shows to video games and zombie walks, the undead stalk through our collective fantasies. What is it about zombies that exerts such a powerful fascination? In Not Your Average Zombie, Chera Kee offers an innovative answer by looking at zombies that don’t conform to the stereotypes of mindless slaves or flesh-eating cannibals. Zombies who think, who speak, and who feel love can be sympathetic and even politically powerful, she asserts. Kee analyzes zombies in popular culture from 1930s depictions of zombies in voodoo rituals to contemporary film and television, comic books, video games, and fan practices such as zombie walks. She discusses how the zombie has embodied our fears of losing the self through slavery and cannibalism and shows how “extra-ordinary” zombies defy that loss of free will by refusing to be dehumanized. By challenging their masters, falling in love, and leading rebellions, “extra-ordinary” zombies become figures of liberation and resistance. Kee also thoroughly investigates how representations of racial and gendered identities in zombie texts offer opportunities for living people to gain agency over their lives. Not Your Average Zombie thus deepens and broadens our understanding of how media producers and consumers take up and use these undead figures to make political interventions in the world of the living. “Kee provides a compelling synthesis of theory and criticism . . . useful for horror scholars interested in how portrayals of zombie intersect with race and gender.” —Popular Culture Studies Journal “Kee’s Not Your Average Zombie is an important book . . . Put simply: if it's the one book you read about or cite on zombie, you've made an excellent choice.” —American Quarterly “[Not Your Average Zombie] offers a fresh theoretical framework to a fast-growing field . . . A fascinating contribution to the critical conversation about the zombie as a fantastic figure.” —Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts “I’m impressed by Kee’s scholarship across several fields—film history and gender and critical race studies, especially—and her cultural and historical contextualizing of the current zombie renaissance.” —James H. Cox, University of Texas at Austin, author of The Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico

The Gory Guide to the Walking Dead While most people know what zombies look like, do they actually know how they act? What they do during their spare time? What their work ethic is? Probably not. Enter The Ultimate Book of Zombie Warfare and Survival. From bestselling zombie author Scott Kenemore, learn all the tricks to the living dead trade. Whether you’re fighting the zombies or are a zombie yourself, this collection is all that you need to survive on your own. Included in this book are excerpts and illustrations from such helpful handbooks as: The Code of the Zombie Pirate The Art of Zombie Warfare Z.E.O. The Zen of Zombie Zombies vs. Nazis The Ultimate Book of Zombie Warfare and Survival is a one-stop shop for everything you’ve ever wanted to know about the world of zombies. Whether you’re the undead seeking to make it in the business industry, fine-tune your martial arts, master your swashbuckling, or move on up the corporate ladder, this compendium is just for you. With gory full-color illustrations and insightful knowledge from the man who knows zombies better than they know themselves, The Ultimate Book of Zombie Warfare and Survival will scare, teach, and prepare you for everything you’ve ever needed to know about zombies. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

The figure of the zombie is a familiar one in world culture, acting as a metaphor for "the other," a participant in narratives of life and death, good and evil, and of a fate worse than death--the state of being "undead." This book explores the phenomenon from its roots in Haitian folklore to its evolution on the silver screen and to its radical transformation during the 1960s countercultural revolution. Contributors from a broad range of disciplines here examine the zombie and its relationship to colonialism, orientalism, racism, globalism, capitalism and more--including potential signs that the zombie hordes may have finally achieved oversaturation. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.