Zombies: A Cultural History - Hardcover

"Luckhurst is characteristically acute on many of these recent iterations, reading modern zombiedom with his usual swashbuckling confidence. . . . Never does he allow the familiarity of the more modern material to overshadow the beginnings of the phenomenon. No matter how it is diluted, parodied, or misunderstood, the rage of the zombie's origin, of these 'ambulatory dead, ' endures still, as a kind of haunting." --Times Literary Supplement "As we discover in Roger Luckhurst's always entertaining history of the walking dead, this evolution in the zombie's homicidal efficacy has been mirrored by a rapid evolution in their cultural significance. . . . Such irreverence and range is characteristic of Luckhurst, who mixes pop cultural connoisseurship with scholarly rigour to great effect. . . . His style is engaging, his commentary lucid, and his message clear: they're coming to get you, however fast you run." --Daily Telegraph "Luckhurst's breadth is immense and he has managed to corral a huge subject into a very helpful primer for anyone interested in the latest monster on the block."--Los Angeles Review of Books "Gory and highly informative. . . . an entertaining history of those who continue to walk among us, even after death."--PopMatters "A short review cannot do full justice to this book. I urge you to read it and, for those who have never read Roger Luckhurst before, seek out many of his other writings. What he does brilliantly is weave culture, politics, and history into a singular tapestry that leaves scope for thought and discussion. The history of zombies is, in his hands, demonstrably worthy of our attention and time."--Hong Kong Review of Books "Luckhurst tells the sinuous tale of the life of the zombie with evident glee in a book that is academically valid but fun to read." --Independent "From their emergence in the 1920s Western imagination to their position today as the go-to trope for a generation 'flatlined by the alienating tedium of modern life, ' zombies have proved remarkably flexible metaphors. They have come to embody the Other, the economic zeitgeist, and even ourselves. This entertaining study begins in Haiti, with 19th-century America's fears about vodou." --Sunday Telegraph "As Roger Luckhurst declares in his alternately solemn and zany book. . . . the zombie's history is a delayed but gruesomely satisfactory revenge, another version of the archetypal Freudian plot that narrates the return of the repressed." --Observer "Such irreverence and range is characteristic of Luckhurst, who mixes pop cultural connoisseurship with scholarly rigour to great effect . . . his style is engaging, his commentary lucid, and his message clear: they're coming to get you, however fast you run." --Daily Telegraph "Straddling the gap between popular and scholarly writing, Roger Luckhurst's masterly study sets out a rich and fascinating chronological account of the zombie's history." --Review 31 "Luckhurst offers a mindful exploration of mindless violence. He is thoroughly well informed, and his writing proves lively and critically astute. It's hard to imagine a significantly better book on the zombie phenomenon." --London Review of Books

The zombie has shuffled with dead-eyed, remorseless menace from its beginnings in obscure folklore and primitive superstition to become the dominant image of the undead today. In contemporary visions of global apocalypse, such as the films 28 Days Later, I Am Legend and World War Z and the phenomenally successful TV series The Walking Dead, the zombie has reached its apotheosis. Zombies have infected the cinema of nearly every nation, from France to Australia, Argentina and Brazil to China and Japan. This absorbing history tracks zombies from their emergence in nineteenth-century writings about the Caribbean, through their slow transmission and mutation into the popular pulp fictions of America in the 1920s and '30s, to the arrival of the cinematic zombie, and reveals how after 1945 the walking dead swarmed into comics, pulp novels, B-movie cinema, horror fiction and video games. Roger Luckhurst sifts materials from anthropology, folklore, travel writing, colonial histories, long-forgotten pulp literature, B-movies, medical history and cultural theory to give a definitive short introduction to the zombie, exploring the manifold meanings of this compelling, slow-moving yet relentless monster.