“Once you’ve arrived
at the end of the world, it hardly matters which route you took.”
Isaac Marion's Warm Bodies has been a surprise recent hit. Though this zombie romance book (?) was originally written for an adult audience, the recent movie targets a YA crowd. If you are tempted to dismiss the story as yet another sign that we are
staggering toward cultural annihilation, you might want to reconsider. Warm
Bodies gives a sobering, concise and (I’m afraid) largely true warning about the trajectory of a humanity consumed by the worst parts of its own nature.
“What happened to the world was gradual… A smoldering dread that never really caught fire till there wasn’t much left to burn. Each sequential step surprised us…The abandoning of quests, the surrendering of desires, the settling in and settling down that is the inevitable fate of the Dead…
It didn’t take much to bring down the card house of civilization. Just a few gusts and it was done, the balance tipped, the spell broken. Good citizens realized the lines that had shaped their lives were imaginary and easily crossed. They had wants and needs and the power to satisfy them, so they did. The moments the lights went out, everyone stopped pretending…
I can no longer believe in any voodoo spell or laboratory virus. This is something deeper, darker. This comes from the cosmos, from the stars, from the unknown blackness behind them. The shadows in God’s boarded-up basement… I think we crushed ourselves down over the centuries. Buried ourselves under greed and hate and whatever other sins we could find until our souls finally hit rock bottom of the universe. And then they scraped a hole through it, into some… dark place.”
This is a zombie apocalypse in which no one is to blame but
the collective, growing decay of humanity. The zombies were just the inevitable product of a civilization full of people who were already dead.
The plague just removed the facade.
