Mark McGurl wrote a fascinating essay on the recent Zombie Renaissance in literature:

We are living in a time when what counts as “life” is in significant scientific dispute, and in the heyday of zombie computers and zombie banks, zombie this and zombie that. Why wouldn’t we also be living in a time of zombie literary forms? Whatever their specific emphases and intricacies, all these zombies represent a plague of suspended agency, a sense that the human world is no longer (if it ever was) commanded by individuals making rational decisions. Instead we are witnessing a slow, compulsive, collective movement toward Malthusian self-destruction. Of course all monsters are projections of human fears, but only zombies make this fundamentally social and self-accusatory charge: we the people are the problem we cannot solve. We outnumber ourselves.

It really is a very thought-provoking piece. I just finished reading Justin Cronin’s The Passage and I kid you not — it is the best book I’ve read in a long time. Cronin is a literary author who takes on the zombie/post-apocalyptic genre in such a compelling and beautifully-written way. And as I read those words in McGurl’s article — “we the people are the problem we cannot solve” — I realised that’s exactly what makes The Passage so hard to put down. It is a story about surviving ourselves. If you’re looking for something to read this summer/winter, I highly recommend it.