Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

It might seem like a bad pun, but there are few literary genres that have been as vibrant and animated lately as zombie fiction. While zombies have been around for a long time, there’s been a veritable undead renaissance over the past few years, spawned from a wide body of works ranging from Max Brooks‘ world-spanning, zombies-meet-Studs-Terkel epic World War Z to David Wellington‘s blog-born Monster Planet series to Robert Kirkman‘s Walking Dead comic book series. And the zombie craze isn’t just satisfied with moving forward. The undead are even shambling into our literary past – well, at least the public domain past – with new zombie reinterpretations of classic works like Quirk Books’ upcoming Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. That’s right. Jane Austen and zombies. The first line has us sold on the idea already:

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.

Since we’ve got zombies on the brain, it got us thinking about how and when zombies first lurched their way onto the literary landscape. Fortunately, we found some answers in this amazing look at the origins of zombies in pulp fiction, which originally appeared in the 2007 edition of What Do I Read Next? Enjoy.

PULP ZOMBIE FICTION by Stefan Dziemianowicz

It is generally accepted that horror’s iconic monsters have a long and colorful literary history. The ghost and vampire, for example, both trace their heritage back to distinguished works of fiction from the nineteenth century and earlier. Such is not the case for the zombie. Although an integral figure for centuries in African and West Indian folk beliefs, and an occasional presence in stories from the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the zombie really did not become a part of American popular culture until the publication of William Seabrook’s classic portrait of Haiti, The Magic Island (including its oft-reprinted chapter “Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields”) in 1929.

A riffle through the pages of the weird fiction pulps shows that even after the publications of Seabrook’s book, zombies didn’t exactly start beating down the doors (the way they do in George Romero’s modern zombie movies) of the horror canon. Although the pulps overflow with tales of Creole voodoo and Haitian black magic, they yield only about a single-anthology worth of genuine zombie stories. The reason why the zombie achieved only limited popularity in the pulps can be surmised from the uses to which zombies are put in the most representative stories from the pulp era.

In their traditional guises, zombies are hardly the stuff of nightmares. According to Seabrook, the zombie is “a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life – it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive.” Resurrected from the dead to work as cheap labor harvesting sugar cane, the zombie makes a better metaphor for capitalist exploitation of the proletariat than it does a manifestation of supernatural horror. The zombie’s distinguishing trademark – its mindlessness – puts it a distant second to the more sinister vampire as a fearsome representation of the undead.

Weird Tales

Henry S. Whitehead surely realized some of the zombie’s shortcomings as a dramatic figure when his story “Jumbee” (West Indian patois for a disembodied spirit, corrupted as “zombie”) appeared in the September 1926 issue of Weird Tales. Although touted as one of the first zombie stories, “Jumbee is really more an evocative introduction to the mystic side of daily life on the West Indian Island of St. Croix Drawing on lore that he learned firsthand during his brief tenure as an archdeacon in the Virgin Islands, Whitehead has his native narrator, Jaffray Da Silva, tell visiting American Granville Lee about a typical evening encounter with a specimen of zombie known as the “Hanging Jumbee”:

Well, there were the usual three jumbees, apparently hanging in the air. It wasn’t very light, but I could make out a boy of about twelve, a young girl, and shriveled old woman … The Hanging Jumbee have no feet. It is one of their peculiarities. Their legs stop at the ankles. They have abnormally long, thin African legs. They are always black, you know. Their feet – if they have them – are always hidden in a kind of mist that lies along the ground whenever one sees them. They shift and ‘weave,’ as a full-blooded African does, standing on one foot while resting the other – you’ve notice that, of course – or scratching the supporting ankle with the toes of the other foot. They do not swing in the sense that they seem to be swung on a rope – that is not what it means; they do not twirl about. But they do – always – face the oncomer …

I walked on slowly, and passed them; and they kept their faces to me as they always do. I’m used to that …

The fact that these unusual zombies are upstaged in another paragraph or two by the appearance of a chien, or “weredog,” only goes to show that Whitehead probably found the jumbee about as horrible as the nonchalant Da Silva did. Indeed, although Whitehead was to write about two books-worth of weird tales set in the West Indies, “Jumbee” remains his only treatment of the zombie theme.

The Horror Chambers of Jules de Grandin by Seabury Quinn

When zombies made it to the American mainland three years later they first showed up in what was either the likeliest or most unlikely locale, depending on the reader’s taste for weird fiction: Harrisonville, New Jersey. This was the setting for all of Seabury Quinn’s popular tales of psychic sleuth Jules de Grandin, including “The Corpse Master,” the cover story for the July 1929 Weird Tales. In contrast to Whitehead’s benign portrayal of the zombie, Quinn explored a dramatic possibility in the creature’s unquestioning obedience to its master: an unthinking servant who could be programmed for ceaseless labor could just as easily be instructed to commit methodical murder without a twinge of conscience.

In this story, the fingerprints found on three murder victims correspond to those of several recently buried corpses. The intrepid de Grandin investigates the backgrounds of the three victims and finds they were all members of a club that recently expelled a member for telling lurid stories of his overseas travels. He conducts a posse to the man’s house and comes upon a bizarre ritual in which three “young … and comely” beauties dance semi-nude for the man’s benefit. Only when one of them lifts her arm does the medically trained narrator, Dr. Trowbridge, detect a telltale blemish in her armpit:

No surgeon leaves a wound like that. It was the mark the embalmer’s scalpel made in cutting through the superficial tissue to raise the axillary artery for his injection. The woman before me, the woman who had danced like an houri not five minutes before, was dead; dead as any tenant of the graveyard.

Weird Tales

Quinn might be forgiven his indulgence in this kind of mortuary arcana. He was, after all, the editor of a magazine for undertakers, Casket and Sunnyside. His decision to make his female zombies nearly indistinguishable from ordinary human beings is less forgivable (although understandable from a commercial viewpoint): Quinn learned early in his career that the stories that earned Weird Tales covers invariably had female nudity in them, so he felt compelled to make his zombies sexually alluring.

Quinn’s story climaxes with a piece of conventional zombie lore that reveals yet another shortcoming of the zombie theme. In de Grandin’s words,

If [the zombie] taste salt or meat, though but the tiniest bit of either be concealed in a great quantity of food, he comes to a realization of his own deadness and goes back to his grave, nor can all the magic of his owner stay him from returning for one little second.

Although Jules de Grandin’s stories were little more than armchair detective tales tricked out with supernatural trimmings, the neutralization of the zombies by sneaking a little table salt into their nightly broth was a low-point of de Grandian lethargy. So it was that any author who attempted a traditional representation of the zombie was stuck with an easily dispatched monster.

Clark Ashton Smith

Fortunately, Clark Ashton Smith was one of the least traditional of all Weird Tales writers. Two of his stories qualify as the most original zombie tales ever written, in part because they make no mention of the word “zombie” or any of the voodoo ephemera that had become cliché in such stories by the 1930s. Both “The Empire of the Necromancers” (Weird Tales, September 1932) and “Necromancy in Naat” (Weird Tales, July 1936) are set in his decadent future society of Zothique. The first tells of two sorcerers, Mmatmuor and Sodosma, whose expulsion from the town of Tinarath makes them determined to establish a kingdom where they will reign without interference. In the desert of Cincor, they resurrect an entire city of ancient corpses to serve their every whim. The ever-imaginative Smith describes this perverse spectacle with understated glee:

Dead laborers made their palace-gardens to bloom with long-perished flowers; liches and skeletons toiled for them in the mines, or reared superb, fantastic towers to the dying sun. Chamberlains and princes of old time were their cupbearers and stringed instruments were plucked for their delight by the slim hands of empresses with golden hair that had come forth untarnished from the night of the tomb. Those that were fairest, whom, the plague and worm had not ravaged overmuch, they took for their lemans and made to serve their necrophilic lust.

The last line quoted above was Smith’s subtle way of reminding the reader of yet another problem with the zombie theme: fictional zombies were almost never as interesting as the twisted human beings who chose to resurrect them. Smith proved this in “Necromancy in Naat” by duplicating many of the elements in “Empire of the Necromancers” in a slightly different setting – an island served by the corpses of the resurrected drowned – and focusing his attention almost exclusively on the three sorcerers for whom this place is paradise.

Pigeons From Hell by Robert E. Howard

At least Smith, more than Whitehead or Quinn, understood the one characteristic of the zombie that sets it apart from other creatures of the supernatural canon: its corporeality. The zombie is a corpse, and thus an embodiment of all our fears about corruption of the flesh and the more loathsome the corruption, the more intense the fear. Robert E. Howard certainly understood this when he wrote “Pigeons from Hell,” published in the May 1938 Weird Tales. Although not technically a zombie story, it contains a scene of the reanimated dead so horrifying it puts most real zombie stories to shame. Two friends are sleeping on the ground floor of an abandoned southern mansion when one is lured to the landing above by a strange whistling noise. His friend watches him walk up the stairs, hears him scream once, and then after an interval listens to him proceed back down the stairs with a measured tread. In suspenseful prose, Howard relates the companion’s slow emergence from the shadows. The first thing the narrator sees in the shadowy moonlight is his friend’s hand holding a blood-dripping axe. The next is his friend’s face:

Branner’s face was bloodless, corpse-like; gouts of blood dripped darkly down it; his eyes were glassy and set, and blood oozed from the great gash which cleft the crown of his head.

Though there’s much talk later in Howard’s story of spiritual corruption, the gross physicality of this scene is what makes “Pigeons from Hell” so memorable.

In all probability the reason why the quintessential pulp zombie story was not written by one of Weird Tales‘ more distinguished writers is because it called for the sort of goriness that only the pulpiest writers could deliver. Thorp McCluskey was that kind of writer. Author of “Slaves of the Gray Mould” and other stories whose content lived up to the promise of that kind of title, McCluskey realized that the best way to liven up a zombie story was to ladle on the gruel. “While Zombies Walked” from the September 1939 Weird Tales (and later the basis for the 1943 film Revenge of the Zombies) is a southern Gothic about an “apostate minister” educated in the practice of voodoo, who usurps a plantation with the aid of his pet zombies and plans to force the plantation owner’s daughter to submit to his lust. Tony, the naïve narrator to whom the girl is affianced, shows up on the plantation unexpectedly and relates his dumbfounded observations about the farmhands he sees working there:

Above the man’s left temple, amid the grey-flecked hair, jagged splinters of bone gleamed through torn and discoloured flesh! And a grayish ribbon of brain-stuff hung down beside the man’s left ear!

…

[Many] were maimed. One walked, with a deep broken stoop, as though his chest had been crushed against his backbone. Another’s leg was off below the knee, and in place of an artificial limb he wore a stick tied against his leg with rope, a stick that reached from twelve inches beyond the stump to the hip. A third had only one arm; a fourth was skeleton-thin.

[C]oming down the road alone, walking with the same dragging lifelessness as did the others, was another of the grey toilers. And, as the man turned the wide sweep in the road that would lead him to the house and beyond Tony’s vision, Tony glimpsed in the last yellow rays of the setting sun, the horror that had once been his face!

Had once been his face! For, beneath the ridge of his nose downward, the man had no face! The vertebrae whiteness of his spine, naked save for ragged strings of desiccated flesh, extended his horrid starkness from the throat of his shirt to merge with the shattered base of his bony skull!

With such images of physical decay, who cared that McCluskey’s story was virtually without plot and his shocking “revelation” of the zombies patently obvious from the opening paragraphs?

The zombie was not the exclusive property of Weird Tales during the pulp era. Most of the weird fiction and fantasy magazines produced at least one zombie tale during their brief runs, but these were remarkable only for their unremarkableness. The sole contribution of G.W. Hutter (a pseudonym for White Zombie scriptwriter Garnett Weston) to Ghost Stories, is “Salt Is Not for Slaves” (August/September 1939), a relatively effective shocker about Haitian zombies who eat salt and realize that they are dead. The only problem was that Hutter had to take severe liberties with his zombies, endowing them with human consciousness and behavior so that their transformation back into corpses would seem all the more jarring.

In contrast, one has August Derleth and Mark Schorer’s “The House in the Magnolias,” the sole zombie tale to appear in Strange Tales (June 1932). In this story, an artist falls in love with the ward of a New Orleans plantation owner who is revolted by the fact that the fields are worked by zombie laborers. The hero feeds the zombies salted candy (a scene that appears to have been lifted from Seabrook) and they all plod back to the cemetery – about as by-the-book boring as you could get in a tale of supernatural horror. Derleth and Schorer also deserve a mention for writing the one story for Strange Stories that came closest to being a zombie tale. “The Eyes of the Serpent” (February 1939) contained no zombies whatsoever, but was blurbed on its opening pages as a story in which “A Voodoo Zombie Haunts a Modern City as Helpless Victims Cry for Vengeance” – proof, one supposes, that editors of the day thought you couldn’t consider yourself a respectable weird fiction magazine if you didn’t publish at least one zombie tale.

Unknown was the paragon of respectability as pulp fantasy magazines went, so it goes without saying that it too published a zombie story, Jane Rice’s “The Forbidden Trail” (April 1941). The only such tale to appear in the magazine’s 39 issues, it was a fine example of what pulp zombie fiction could be when writers exerted a little imagination. Editor John W. Campbell was wont to point out in his editorials that superstition and science were really opposite sides of the same coin, and the best stories in his magazine bore this out by seamlessly weaving together the supernatural and the rational. In Rice’s tale, the rational was represented by Tony and Meg Rutherford, a Nick and Nora Charles-type couple who are about as cynical and levelheaded as they come. On a safari in Liberia, they hear rumors of jungle natives fleeing from a zombie village and are immediately suspicious:

There’s no such thing as a zombie. It’s the prime native ghost story, that’s all. The choice cut, as it were. They tell of zombies as we tell of women in white, rattling chains, and wall tapping.

But Rice, who had a talent for moving effortlessly from comic to the horrific, orchestrates her story beautifully, introducing grim signs and portents – a deserted village, furtive movements in the undergrowth, and finally a near-complete absence of human and animal presence in the jungle – that strain the humor of the Rutherford’s banter as they penetrate deeper into the jungle. By the time they reach the forbidden trail, it’s impossible not to believe that something unnatural is on the loose. When they finally appear, Rice’s zombies are no worse looking than Thorp McCluskey’s, but her meticulous preparation for them makes them seem so much viler:

His face was a sickly yellow and sort of drifted to leeward, as if it had become unfastened from the bony structure underneath. That is the skin itself was pendulous, appearing to hang supported from the temples alone. He was clad in a tattered pair of trousers. No shirt. From the elbows down his arms were bone. Just bone. I’ll not put down what it was like above it’s the elbows. And what I could see of his legs below the faded pants were bone. Just bone. And those bones moved. They coordinated. They scratched against the boards of the floor and one white-jointed finger made a quieting motion. Two agonized eyes, very blue, looked straight up into mine.

Much of the power of “The Forbidden Trail” comes from Rice’s ambiguous approach to her zombies. By the end of the story, it’s impossible to know for sure whether they are really reanimated corpses or, as their overseer claims, miraculous surgical experiments that have begun to deteriorate in the tropical climate. However, few other writers followed Rice’s lead. If the percentages of pulp zombie stories indicate anything, it’s that readers and writers preferred their zombies either completely supernatural, or completely explicable. The former type dominated the weird fiction magazines. The latter could be found in various other pulp outlets, most notably the shudder pulps.

The shudder pulps were a handful of magazines that offered an unusual hybrid of mystery and weird fiction. The vast majority of stories they published set up bizarre scenarios in which a hero and heroine – or sometimes an entire town – are subjected to a series of atrocities seemingly perpetrated by a supernatural menace. At the climax, though there’s almost always an “unmasking” scene in which an evil mastermind – usually a close friend, or a respected citizen hitherto above suspicion – is found to have concocted the whole elaborate charade. These sinister villains almost always kept armies of zombified lackeys at their beck and call to help terrorize their victims.

The lead story in the very first issue of Horror Stories, Francis James’s “Music of the Damned” (January 1935) serves as a good illustration of the shudder pulp approach to the zombie. A Peruvian mining town is apparently imperiled by the Saschuamans, the seven-fingered ghosts of “tongueless and speechless slaves” from the ancient Inca gold mines, who sweep down nightly upon the town to steal its virgins for their fabled blood orgies. Eventually, it’s revealed that a professor of anthropology has revived the legends of the Saschuamans by drugging an entire army of kidnapped peasants, painting them the gold color of the legendary Saschuamans, and fitting each of their hands with two additional prosthetic fingers to drive villagers away from the cache of Inca gold he has discovered.

Zombie armies of this stripe were a dime-a-dozen in shudder pulp fiction, but several zombie stories actually were set in the familiar voodoo context. In two, voodoo was used as a front by con men to prey on families grieving for lost loved ones. In Ben Judson’s “The Devil’s Dowry” (Terror Tales, February 1935), a black “faith healer” makes his living by ingratiating himself with families, administering a slow-acting poison that creates simulated death for one family member, and then resurrecting the “dead” person by means of expensive black magic rituals. In George Vandergrift’s “White Mother of Shadows” (Terror Tales, January 1941), a Haitian bocor, agrees to raise the dead child of a grief-stricken woman, provided she will sacrifice her husband. In the nick of time, it’s discovered that the bocor is a fraud, a local who has long coveted the woman’s family’s lands and who has kidnapped her son and substituted a mutilated body in his place.

Although such stories were masterpieces of contrivance, a few shudder pulp tales dealt with genuine zombies, or at least left a lingering doubt about their supernatural character. For example, one keeps waiting for the usual hokey explanation for why the putative zombies of Loring Dowst’s “Satan Sends a Rat” (Horror Stories, April 1941) won’t drop when shot with bullets – that is, until the hero finds that loading his gun with salt pellets is lethally effective. And J.O. Quinliven, at the end of “Drums of Desire” (Terror Tales, February 1936), explains the zombie-like behavior of a Creole servant who appears to rise from the dead during his funeral as a consequence of his near-drowning and voracious appetite for alcohol, but fails to offer any reason why his skin should blister when sprinkled with salt. Alas, there were too few stories like these in which the zombies played a more integral role in the plot than mere menace of the moment. By and large, most shudder pulp zombies were interchangeable with molemen, pinheads, drugged aborigines, and other weird menaces of choice.

Argosy Weekly

There’s one final subgenre of pulp fiction where zombies were a formidable presence: the action and adventure pulps. On a weekly to monthly basis, magazines like Argosy, Adventure, and Top-Notch took readers on trips to a variety of exotic and adventurous foreign locales. Most of their stories were written by writers with a cache of well-thumbed tour books next to their typewriters, but a few, like those by E. Hoffmann Price, Hugh Cave, and Gordon MacCreagh, came from direct familiarity with other cultures.

The prolific Theodore Roscoe visited Haiti for a month or so in 1930 and distilled his research into two novel-length zombie stories originally intended for Weird Tales that ended up in Argosy: “A Grave Must Be Deep” (6-part serial, December 1, 1934-January 5, 1935) and “Z is for Zombie” (6-part serial, February 6-March 13, 1937). The former is a variation on the “and then there were none” mystery, in which a houseful of potential heirs to a plantation in Haiti begin dying under mysterious circumstances while a monsoon rages outside, and superstitious natives are incited to revolution by the apparent resurrection of a deceased man as zombie king. In the latter, graves begin opening up all over Haiti and disgorging corpses after an American tour ship docks on the island and lets off one passenger who apparently died 14 years before and was buried on the island. Both novels involve complex ruses in which wily lowlifes, trying to cover up their pursuit of ill-gotten gains, deliberately set up the entire island to believe that a voodoo cult is bringing the dead back to life. Each concludes with a chapter-long explanation to show how events were orchestrated to reinforce this belief.

In essence, Roscoe’s novels were shudder pulp tales on a grand scale. They differed only in that their zombie element was intended as just one element in a larger tableau filled with local color, exotic intrigue, memorable characters, romance, edge-of-the-seat suspense, and paragraph after paragraph of action. They were probably the best zombie fiction to emerge from the pulps, not only because they offered a little bit of something for every taste, but because they proved an axiom that every zombie enthusiast knows by heart: zombies are best when taken with a grain of salt.

- Stefan Dziemianowicz is a medical editor for a New York-based law book publisher. He authored the definitive study, The Annotated Guide to Unknown and Unknown Worlds (Starmont House, 1991) and is also the author of Bloody Mary and Other Tales for a Dark Night (Barnes and Noble, 2000). He has co-edited numerous horror and mystery anthologies – among them the Bram Stoker Award-winning Horrors! 365 Scary Stories (Barnes and Noble, 1998). Dziemianowicz also writes features on horror fiction for Publishers Weekly.

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Tagged as: horror, pulp fiction, zombies