Monster Island by David Wellington: Helping to Overcome Horror Tropes

For many, the term Zombie didn't get coined until after George R. Romero's cult classic the Night of the Living Dead. Even inside the script and dialogue of the movie they didn't say Zombie but, "Ghoul". It wasn't until the original Dawn of The Living Dead that George R. Romero added that word spoken into the script in 1978. However, the root of the Zombie can be stemmed all the way back to Haitian Folklore where magic or "Voodoo" was involved. This folklore stems all the way back as early as the 17th century where rituals were used to invoke the body of the undead to move again by mystical means. The first closest representation we have of the word Zombie came from the word "Zombi" in 1819 in Brazil by a poet by the name of Robert Southey.

Now, these devilous creatures come in all shapes and sizes and mobility. You have the slow walkers like we see in the Walking Dead or the fast ones like in the revamped 2004 Dawn of the Dead. There is even an influx of alive types like we seen in 28 Days Later that are visciously fast running on aggressive predatory instinct in overdrive. In some cases of fiction and movies a single scratch can spell disaster for an unsuspecting victim. In others it is transferred by bite and the worst seen so far is the case of infection by air which seems like regardless of your take it is game over no matter what you do if it is airborne. But, airborne doesn't strike fear in a primal sense like that of biting. A viscious undead chomping down with rotten teeth and a sickening peeled back sneer of dried lips and skin seems to take the cake. Or does it?

Recently, I had the joy of reading, "Monster Island", by David Wellington. The first book in a trilogy. A masterpiece of modern horror and take on Zombie fiction. I, also, found out that he started the series as a online book for free and received such positive feedback that he pushed to make his work reality and complete. After reading the first few chapters, I was hooked.

Why? You might ask. The usual premise of the fast or slow zombie can blur together and after so many nights of pondering the situation of the "What would you do in a zombie apocalypse?" of where I envision myself in some form or another as a crack shot marksman with a rifle and a door-breaking bad-ass with a shotgun left little room for the scares to remain in the big bad "Z".

That all changed, the moment I started to see the world in which David Wellington crafted up. A world where there were slow zombies, fast zombies....and zombies that could control others with intelligence. That was downright frightening. Can you imagine my stark terror as my brain wrapped around a world of zombies where a few retained their intelligence and could control the other undead? No longer just a single-task oriented herd mentality to contend with but a world in which traps and other vises could be setup to deal the killing blow to the last unsuspecting survivors of this plague-ridden world. And quite frankly, after flirting with that vision in my head, I came to the conclusion of let us leave them as the unthinking monstrosity we have come accustomed to. A world where they could think....would be a world without us.