Categories
historical fantasy short stories

ghouls vs. zombies

I had told Steve Berman some months ago I was unlikely to write a story for his forthcoming Prime Books anthology Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages. It’s true I happily published Dayna Ingram’s delicious zombie romp Eat Your Heart Out as BrazenHead’s first title but, as Dayna noted in her acknowledgments, I had to overcome my distaste for the trendy monstre du jour to do it. Few of the classic horror-fiction tropes engage me—horror fiction itself is about the only genre of the fantastic I actively avoid. I just don’t get the appeal of being scared or grossed out.

When Steve kept nudging, I suggested I might be able to raise a little bit of enthusiasm for a story involving actual Haitian or West African zombis, which are not at all what George Romero and Dayna Ingram have led you to expect. No go. Readers want the real, shambling, rotting, brains-devouring thing, I was testily informed. So I let it lie with no regret.

Two weeks ago—was it three?—Steve came back at me. First he provided me with a link to the Wikipedia entry on Al-Hakim bi Amr al-Lāh, sixth caliph of the Fatimid dynasty. Then he explained his intention to beef up the historical narrative of Zombies with a series of 500-word flash fictions (“connective tissue,” he called them) reinterpreting various historical enigmas as early outbreaks in the zombie apocalypse. My assignment was to transform the ghūls of Arab folklore into something like zombies and make them responsible for al-Hakim’s disappearance on the night of 12/13 February 1021 CE.

Even as I tumbled down a Wikipedia hole, I blustered out my stubborn and well rehearsed objections to flash fiction*, bolstering those by asserting the religio-politico-historical background couldn’t possibly be addressed in fewer than 3,000 words. Fine, Steve wrote back, write 3,000.

So I did. (Actually, almost 6,000.)

“The Hyena’s Blessing” will appear in Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages, scheduled to be released by Prime Books in August 2013.

* In doubtless unfair essence, “I write proper stories, not anecdotes or prose poems.”

Categories
awards Deprivation fiction

oblique comment

…Ben sincerely believed he was not competitive. He did his best, true, had done his best in such traditionally competitive arenas as academics and athletics. Yet while it was pleasant to sink the winning goal on the soccer field (he had played forward), it was also pleasant simply to attempt sinking that goal. When your team ran a streak, you were buoyed by your teammates’ elation yet your own satisfaction derived not of triumph but of camaraderie, earned exhaustion, and the exercise of skill. You couldn’t be first rate if you believed first to be an arbitrary distinction: if you denied the validity of hierarchies. You could, however, be good. Ben had always wanted to be good. He simply had a hard time with the comparative and the superlative: from better and best you inferred absolute values, from absolutes you were led, however you protested, to absolutism. It had seemed to Ben, in high school, that in a team sport like soccer one needn’t be competitive if one aimed solely to be good, whereas if you went solo (whether one-on-one in tennis or against other singletons swimming) you won or lost. An adequate swimmer and tennis player, he avoided the issue by not trying out for the teams.

The journey not the arrival matters, the act not the result, the means more than the end. Unless you lived in a fascist society or participated in a capitalist economy—they added up to the same thing. You would be bent, you would be broken. Distressed, depressed, Ben took the last drag off his cigarette and threw it away. If you bothered to think you were bound to fetch up against unpleasant conclusions, among them your own innocent hypocrisy. For he wished both to prosper and to excel—if on his own terms—and believed saintliness as a goal or a strategy not so much impracticable or misguided as fundamentally dangerous: a form of absolutism, the silvering of a mirror that reflected intolerance, bigotry, dogma. After best or first came right and soon enough only.

—from Deprivation; or, Benedetto furioso: an oneiromancy