By Isaac Hamlet
For the past decade or so, zombies have been just about everywhere. Among the piles of movies, books, and video games dedicated to spreading stories of postapocalyptic infection, one could come to the conclusion that every possible iteration of the zombie narrative has been explored.
Author (and Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum) Bennett Sims would argue otherwise.
Sims, also a Workshop visiting professor, will read from his short story “House-Sitting,” originally published in Tin House (2012) at 8 p.m. today. The reading will take place in the Dey House.
Since he wrote “House-Sitting,” Sims has published A Questionable Shape, a novel aptly deemed by The American Reader as “a zombie novel without zombies.”
The project started while Sims was a senior in college, where he wrote a thesis on zombies.
“It was a Toufician essay that tracked certain tropes of undeath across a variety of discourses,” he wrote in an email. “Not only zombie films but also philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology. I was interested in the different ways that zombies were represented.”
In “Toufician,” Sims refers to Jalal Toufic, an artist and filmmaker who wrote (Vampires): An Essay on the Undead in Film, which examines the depiction of vampires across culture.
“(Vampires) [is] a work of film theory that explores undeath as it appears in vampire movies, avant-garde cinema, psychoanalysis, literature,” Sims wrote. “My novel takes a similarly free-associative approach to analyzing zombies, and Toufic was a huge touchstone.”
After graduating and finishing his thesis, Sims began to dramatize the paper he’d written, and A Questionable Shape began to take form.
At that time, while deciding what, exactly, the zombies would be like in his novel, Sims drew from all of these disparate discourses. Included was everything from traits from legendary horror filmmaker George Romero’s undead to the zombies of philosophical thought experiments
As such, those looking for nothing more substantive than a barrage of brains and bloodied baseball bats might be a shade let down.
“Before the book even begins, the zombies have all been safely quarantined, so they pose no threat to the characters and rarely appear in scenes,” Sims wrote. “This frees up the characters to do things like sit in public parks and contemplate undeath.”
Contemplation and memory would later evolve into important themes in the story.
The first description a reader would get of the zombies depicted here is that they return to the realm of the familiar, no longer relegated to the margins of existence. Once undead, the reanimated begin to wander to places that evoke nostalgia or contain some deep significance to them while they were alive.
Appropriately, what Sims would most love for a reader to leave his work with is a powerful memory of how he describes this seemingly foreign but eerily familiar world.
“I most want a reader to take away is a durable memory of one of my description,” he wrote. “If I can describe a pedestrian signal or treetop surprisingly enough that, years later, someone is reminded of the sentence when they see one — if the memory makes them smile and think, ‘Oh, right, like in that novel’ — that seems like a good and valuable thing.”