Bear in mind I never read The Forest of Hands and Teeth

[james_davis_nicoll]

Zombie books seem to have a set of conventions almost as rigid as return to the Moon stories.

This may be because "the zombie uprising failed when it turned out most the dead couldn't get out of their coffins and the unburied dead were outnumbered 5000 to 1 and generally found in locked rooms" is a funny once short story.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Does sort of fail to really grasp the issue that zombie bites are indeed how they reproduce: it's really not like having to attack a lion every time you want to have a sandwich or sex, since you merely need to live long enough to inflict one bite to achieve a stable zombie population. A zombie craves human flesh, but it doesn't need to eat. The zombie craving for human flesh is essentially the function equivalent of a human sex drive: and while humans and other animals need pregnancy, child care, etc., all sort of investments of time and resources to reproduce, a zombie really only needs to bite somebody _once_.

Once that has occured, the score is automatically tied 1-1, humans to zombies: for even if the zombie is immediately killed, the person bitten must be killed or they will be become a zombie. So, for human losses to be less than zombie losses, we need bites per zombie <1, and if we're in the annoying everyone who dies by _natural causes_ becomes a zombie, there's always going to be fresh outbreaks... (how much _larger_ than 1 the bites/per zombie factor must be to become a runaway outbreak depends on various factors, including the willingness of the local population to deal with their sick and elderly with Inuit stereotype severity).

Now, the decomposition thing is more of a problem, and if it's quick enough, it will be easier to keep bites/zombie fairly low...

Bruce

[brett-dunbar.livejournal.com]

The UK has a cremation rate of about 75% so about three quarters of the dead definitely aren't going to be rising even of those buried only fairly recent corpses can rise due to decomposition. Obviously once
you know what is happening then quick cremation becomes compulsory.

I never thought that the situation in Night of the Living Dead was even remotely compatible with Dawn of the Dead or Day of the Dead. The group in night of the living dead had the extremely bad luck to be isolated in a rather flimsy building right next to several cemeteries, so were under exceptionally heavy attack with exceptionally poor defences. Nearly everyone else would be in a far better situation to survive the initial outbreak and the zombies themselves were slow mindless not that numerous (limited to fresh non-cremated corpses) and effectively defenceless against any kind of organised attack. The existing living dead would be eliminated in a few days and cremation would become compulsory. For Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead to work most of humanity would have had to die first, maybe due to a plague, only later rising as zombies and attacking the tiny immune minority after organised society had collapsed due to a plague.