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The Great Zombie and Vampire Invasion

I hope you all got a chance to read my interview with Jeani Rector at Examiner.com.  It's a two part article where she talks about her career as both horror writer and editor of the online literary publication, The Horror Zine.  If you haven't had a chance to read it, please do so.  She's a really interesting woman with a lot of great insight and tips on writing horror and other areas of the dark fiction genre.

In that interview, Jeani advises aspiring writers to stay away from the zombie and vampire trends Perhaps they are just a little over used in horror. However, they've always played a big role in dark fiction especially in film but vampires have played more of a role in literature than zombies.  But zombies are appearing more in today's literature.  As far as vampires go, the peak in their popularity is due to the Twilight books and films (the books being much too over rated since they are said to be poorly written) having been so successful in sales. Because of that, there is now the series True Blood on television.  Speaking about television, Walking Dead has played a big part in making zombies more of a fad than ever. Walking Dead actually started out as a horror comic book several years ago. But because of the series the comic book industry has been infected by the zombie craze just as much as it has with the vampire one. 

I've never watched Walking Dead nor read any of the comics, but I've gotten started on a newer comic book series by Vertigo called iZombie, written by Chris Roberson and illustrated by Mike Allred. If there's one thing that series does that Walking Dead doesn't, it's bringing back the four color of '60s horror comics as well as drawing style and so is reminiscent of sci fi horror of that era. I'm very vintage and retrospect when it comes to speculative comic books and so for me iZombie is my "Walking Dead".  Yet this series isn't completely innocent. Its gore scenes and its violence gives it its suggestion for mature readers while, of what I've read so far, not going overboard with the two like many of today's fantasy and sci fi comics. The storyline has not been bad either. Its pre-apocalyptic setting (as of issues 1 through 16) and team of secret agent zombie fighters give it a twist.

We'll discuss the zombie/vampire craze more next time. But let me leave you with this: do you think zombies and vampires have recently been used in the horror genre?  Please feel free to leave your answers in the comments box and we can discuss those in the next post as well.

Until then, take scare!

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