Today Karin’s Book Nook is proud to present Carrie Ryan, the author of THE FOREST OF HANDS AND TEETH, THE DEAD-TOSSED WAVES, and the forthcoming, THE DARK AND HOLLOW PLACES. She was good enough to provide a guest post on her thoughts about zombies. I’m thrilled to have her here today. Carrie Ryan is one of my all-time favorite authors.  On top of being talented, she is super nice.

At the end of Carrie’s post, you’ll find my review of Carrie’s short story that is included in the anthology, ZOMBIE VS. UNICORNS.

As far as monsters go, zombies are one of the most laughable.  They’re slow, shambly, stupid and uncoordinated.  All they can really do is walk (sometimes run) and consume.  They should be easy to escape from — after all, we can think, we can use weapons, we can move faster and we can find someplace to hole up and hide.

But that’s where the real terror of the zombies come in: They Do Not Stop.  Hide in a house and eventually they’ll break the walls down by sheer numbers pressing against them.  Escape to a platform and eventually they’ll pile on top of each other underneath until they reach you.  Try to run or even walk away and they’ll always catch up because you have to stop and rest, sleep, eat and they don’t.

To me, that’s one of the most brutal aspects of zombies: the inexorable decay of hope; the idea that you can escape followed by the slow dawning realization that escape might not be possible after all.  This is why I think creating a happy ending in a zombie story is so complicated because there’s sort of a “yay I lived!” moment that’s almost immediately followed by the realization that you’ve survived just that one task but the world hasn’t changed and is still overwhelmingly dangerous.

For example, the first movie I ever watched with zombies in it was the remake of Dawn of the Dead (caution, movie spoilers ahead).  In the movie, there’s an outbreak of fast zombies and a handful of survivors barricade themselves in a mall.  At first survival in the mall is easy: there’s food, supplies, games, room to play.  Of course, then the zombies pile up outside, supplies run low, and the survivors must escape.  The entire thrust of the movie is the question: will these people live?

They go through incredible lengths to rig trucks that will take them to a marina where only a tiny percentage of the original survivors make it onto a boat (that has no provisions).  This is, purportedly, the end of the movie.  Yay, the people we’ve been rooting for have lived!

Or maybe not.  During the credits they show what happens to those survivors: they make it to an island, they start exploring and it appears that they (stupidly) stumble into another mob of fast zombies.  Do they survive this encounter?  We never really get to know but what we can surmise is that if they do, it’s only to face another encounter followed by another encounter followed by another because the one truth about a world overrun with zombies is that there’s ultimately no place that is safe.

This is why we have to rethink what makes a happy ending when it comes to zombie stories: survival will always be in question so there must be something else that our characters strive for.  For me this can be that characters learn to live a full life without fear or learn who they really are and what they want or just learn to enjoy each day even in the face of impending and inevitable death.

Thanks for your insight, Carrie.

Be sure to pick up copies of Carrie’s books wherever you can! You can check out Suzanne Selfor’s Guest Post over at Lisa’s blog by clicking this link.

BOUGAINVILLEA by Carrie Ryan (short story included in ZOMBIES VS. UNICORNS.

This story takes place shortly after the Return (the time when the dead started to rise and roam the world, infecting others and quickly destroying the world as we know it). Iza lives with her father on the island of Curacao. As soon as the rumors about the infestation started to surface, Iza’s father made preparations to flee their life in Miami. Her father chose the island of Curacao thinking it would be relatively easy to defend and the fact it had a good fuel supply. Here they could survive the Return until the world got back to normal.

Iza struggles with the strict rules her father forces her to obey. His ruthlessness is the hardest for her to understand, but when her island home is breached by the Mudo, Iza is forced to face the consequences of her compassion.

Carrie Ryan provides us with a look at the world she created for THE FOREST OF HANDS AND TEETH and THE DEAD-TOSSED WAVES, but much closer to the time of the Return than we are used to.  Iza remembers life before the Return.  She remembers going to aquariums, watching television, and eating foods Mary from TFHT would have never heard of.

Bougainvillea (a type of flower) contains action and adventure, pirates, and a strong female character.