But this story? Folks, this story hit all my buttons in a way that has become increasingly rare.
And yes, part of the magic here is the ghoulishly simple premise. In this world, the dead rise twenty years on the first anniversary of their demise. Departed loved ones regularly wake up in their coffins, crawl from their graves, and walk among the living for a quarter of an hour or so before descending back into the void. Apparently, this phenomenon is now a fact of life, to the degree that there are even YouTube videos of kids reuniting with the desiccated remains of their Memaw and Pepop. How’s that for grisly?
Well, where the public declares a need, a business crops up to fill it. Enter the Family Directors, a guild of post-mortem morticians who are called upon to “assist” the dead during their rising and then insert them back into their graves once Old Grim takes them a second time. This is apparently a very lucrative practice, such that graveyards are often littered with these folks. If you want to make money, do the job nobody else wants. Zombie councilors would probably be right up there for me when it comes to the worst thing I can think of.
Here we find our protagonist, David, a stubborn old man who has come with his girlfriend Helen to oversee the resurrection of his father. David’s dad left them when he was very young and died shortly thereafter, preventing him from ever really getting to know his old man. He’s got questions, and this resurrection might be his last chance to get some straight answers. Helen is against the whole idea, but David is determined to meet his dad as he rises from the grave. Not only does he feel a (highly relatable) sense of honor about tending to his father’s undead needs, but he is driven by a burning curiosity about what the old man was like in life. His mother is suspiciously quiet about her late husband, and David wants answers.
While holding vigil over the site of daddy’s interment, the two meet a Family Director named Billy, who is on call for a rising due at the next grave over. David distrusts all Family Directors, who he sees as scam artists and parasites, but Billy seems a likeable chap. He gives them some advice, and tries to dissuade David from dealing with the rising of his father. His sense of duty is naïve: the rising of the dead is NOT a sight for amateur eyes, and Billy is extremely cynical about David getting the closure that he seeks by conferring with his father’s shambling corpse. David, like all good horror protagonists, is undeterred. And so the evening wears on.
What I’ve described here is roughly the first half of the story: the other half I will leave for the reader to discover. This story has some of the best build-up I’ve ever seen, and once I started it, I was loath to put it down. We the reader know what is coming. And as more and more is revealed about the nature of the resurrected dead, we know it’s going to be bad. A sense of impending horror pervades the whole story, leading up to a final confrontation that the reader will best experience going in cold. After about fifty pages of mounting dread, those final moments drop with the weight of a bowling ball out of the sky, and the story comes full circle into an ending that wraps it all up in a delicious, gory package. Rarely have I seen suspense handled so well, and rarely around a concept we all take for granted: the walking dead.
I think it is the universal appeal of the premise that really lends the story its “punch”. We’ve all had someone pass away, and later considered the Faustinian bargain of getting some last moment with them, regardless of their realities of their demise. In our minds, we build rose-colored scenes of reuniting with our dead loved ones that are quite apart from the stark facts of death and decay. Herein we have a world where the fantasy of reunion abuts with he reality of worm-eaten flesh, to create a scenario filled with moral ambiguities and philosophical quandaries about the nature of those who have passed on. We will all face death, folks, our own if not that of those we love. But to stare into death so blatantly, and to realize not only what it does to those we care about but also what it will eventually do to us: now that’s some horror worth reading!
I will say that David is a fairly unlikeable protagonist, at least at first. He absolutely refuses to take any advice and stubbornly presses forward despite how glaringly obvious it is that he’s ill-prepared to deal with the situation he’s placed himself in. While the Ignorant Jerk Who Won’t Listen is a bit of a horror trope, I think works well here to make David a more relatable character given his circumstances. After all, who WOULDN’T want to look after their loved ones in death? Who wouldn’t feel a sense of duty to those who have passed on? Who wouldn’t want those last few minutes with a parent or a lover before their final Oblivion? I think most readers will see themselves in David, not only regarding his intentions but also in his ineptitude. Many are the sons and daughters who, out of love, have taken on the responsibilities of caring for loved ones with dementia or Alzheimer’s…only to find themselves overwhelmed. David’s dreams of a happy reunion with his father are constantly challenged, until he begins to slowly doubt his own ability to cope with seeing his father resurrected in all daddy’s maggoty glory. A lot of the story deals with his mental state and his attempts to keep himself together knowing what he’s about to face. No spoilers, but I can tell you already, it ends about as well as you can imagine. Good intentions aren’t enough: even the most noble of us have to recognize our limitations.
Full disclosure, I have a grandmother with dementia and another grandparent who recently passed away. I know firsthand what it’s like to watch people you care about slowly succumb to the entropy of the universe. It is not, by any means, a pleasant process, and it’s easy to fantasize that you can do more for the people you love than is realistically possible. You want to believe that your attachment to someone will tip the scales of the universe in your favor and that you can overcome impossible odds in the name of love and kinship. But Mother Nature is a cruel mistress, and none of us are exempt from the ravages of time. More often than not, people who take on more than they can handle in the name of an injured or decrepit relative only find themselves buried in responsibilities that they can’t handle.
All that to say: this isn’t your typical zombie horror story. It has a lot of the old tropes, but at its heart is something that, at least to me, feels a lot more real. And, because of its relatability, it’s a lot more unsettling than your usual story of an undead menace. While there is a good bit of gore and necrotic splendor here, it’s spaced out between scenes dominated mostly by conversation and narrative tension, so those looking for a blood-soaked splatterfest will have to look elsewhere. There’s more introspection than viscera coating the pages of this little tale of grief and the horrors of the shambling undead.
I think the only real hiccup that I noticed was, in fact, the ending itself. The climax of the story is executed well, so well in fact that I really want the reader to experience it without any spoilers. It’s the falling action where I felt there was a lapse. After David’s inevitable encounter with his father, everything just…stops. Crash to credits. In a story that spends so much time building suspense, it just feels a bit cheap to rush the resolution. It’s like the director’s budget got cut, and it feels a tad on the lazy side. But, to be fair, it doesn’t ruin the story, and readers willing to engage with an existential story that’s a little more cerebral than most will easily get what they came for.