I was rather disheartened to catch a re-run of ABC’s often insightful (dare I say novel) program, First Tuesday Book Club, in which the genre of horror was examined – specifically the monster – and not once was the zombie mentioned.  Oh, there was plenty to be said about narrative uber-kingpin Dracula, more than enough on Frankenstein, and even the Cenobites from the always twisted imagination of Clive Barker rated a mention.  But, no zombie.

I knew the zombie was the poor cousin, but this is ridiculous.

Yet, as First Tuesday Book Club continued into Sunday afternoon (I said it was a re-run), the panel of authors and researchers hit upon a curious concept.  It was claimed that Dracula and even the Werewolf were the most popular of the monsters and the most sustaining; given the recent success of Twilight and the new Wolf Man film coming out with Benicio Del Toro in the titular role, it’s hard to disagree.  Yet, the underlying reason for their sustainability was their ability (ahem) to ‘mirror’ the anxieties and complexities of human nature that so define humanity.  Example, the wolfman can be thought of as a thinly veiled metaphor for what happens in adolescence – hair sprouting, and the like – while the vampire has morphed into a figure of tragic love, a romantic icon more than a deadly one.  Look at Edward in Twilight; I’ve had several female friends say the success of the book is due to Edward’s highly romanticised character, a man so perfect, so romantic, that his vampirism runs second to his sensuality.

And then you have the zombie.  A rotting, animated hunk of flesh, with no personality and no yardstick of analogy to measure him to.  He is neither romantic, nor metaphorical; he is simply a remnant of humanity seeking sustenance.

Maybe that’s why the zombie is such an unrecognised horror figure, at least to the First Tuesday Book Club.  It’s because he is actually too close to human, a monster that can’t be held at arm’s length, looked in the closet, or kept under the bed.  Zombies are us.  Us fundamentally – the spark of life and the burning desire to sustain it.

Maybe zombies are a little too much like us to truly be termed a monster…