“Here’s the thing. For most of us, the Bible – or what we think is in the Bible – is familiar, even trite. They’ve entered our cultural sphere as vague injunctions to do good or half-remembered Sunday School tales. And the same goes for zombies. Once shocking, in the last few years they’ve become the most overused and tedious of monsters.
“The Zombie Bible blows through these familiarities, and makes something new, horrific, moving, and epic out of stories we thought we knew. On the Biblical side, it’s a profound de-familiarization of the texts, forcing us to look at the stories as what they were: new and radical takes on power, on suffering, on being human. (Litore achieves this not just through the zombies, but by going back to Hebrew or Greek names for characters we know in more familiar English or Latin forms.) We’ve forgotten what it meant to praise the good Samaritan, or to eat with a tax collector, or to propose a jubilee for the land. Like the best monsters, the zombies here are metaphors for societal sins; the ignoring of history, the fear of the outsider, the treatment of the poor. The message – the weapons against them – is the same as the zombie-less Bible: healing, justice, reconciliation.
“And like the bible, the zombies here feel unfamiliar. Not to the characters, who live in a consistent world that has always known the threat of the walking dead. But they’re new because they’re raw, close, pressing in a way that we haven’t felt in zombie fiction for years. There’s few refuges here, and Litore’s sense of terror and tension is superb. So is his sense, especially in the Old Testament based stories, of the epic; of the tales of prophets and warriors…”
– A review of The Zombie Bible digital box set:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0161W6LTO
This review touched me, and I wanted to share it with you. I hope I continue to make old things new in future volumes of the series!
Get your copy of The Zombie Bible here — all five volumes for just $9.99!
