I just got back from a public library event “An evening with Max Brooks”, Max is famous for his Books; “The Zombie Survival Guide”, “World War Z” (my personal favorite, and soon to be made into a motion picture starring in and produced by Brad Pitt) and now his newest book “The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks”. I tried to go two years ago when he was last here, but got stuck at work, so being able to see him in these last few weeks of my being Vegas was a real treat for me. He spent the last hour taking questions, and I actually got to ask one. I asked “Zombies are penetrating into the collective consciousness of our society more now more deeply than any other time in history, What reason would you guess why that is?” and he had a very interesting answer, which was not at all what I expected, he said “Well you remember back in the 70’s, there was un-popular wars, a huge financial crisis, environmental catastrophes. Then along came George Romero’s Dead movies and they were a hit because…” and then he went on a little tangent about how Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” was a blistering indictment of the Baby Boomer generation, and then returned to his point to summarize, “ and they were popular because they are a problem you can solve by shooting them in the head!” So, in some sense, zombie fiction, at least with Romero zombies, they are a horrifying, and yet still manageable problem. I had always had a nagging suspicion that there was a Marxist interpretation to blame for most horror icons, for example, I had always thought that most iconic horror monsters tapped into a kind of economic fear about life-force, and that poor people, by and large, feared vampires ie Dracula, because he is wealthy (he has a castle, he wears a silk cape, has a title, etc), and survives by draining their life-force (blood as metaphor for work or wealth) and that, by and large, wealthy people has nightmares about zombies, vast hordes of those who do not have plentiful life-force (or wealth) rising up to take it from those who have it in abundance. I think that Max Brooks explanation is interesting though because it highlights an interesting controversy about the classic slow-walking Romero zombies and the newer fast-running ones, and that perhaps the classic zombies actually were fun in some way because they were scary but you could still handle them, and that the modern ones reflect despair and hopelessness in that they are terrifying and not manageable, they run forever with out getting tired, they attack with the fury of a cheetah and they truly are a force beyond any control. I wonder if these differences really reflect the different social mindset of these generations?