Zombie Stuff

If there is one thing we at Nerd Out Loud love unanimously (other than beer, of course), it’s zombies.  Seriously; how romantic is the idea that you’ll one day go from dealing with the mindless, vapid bullshit we all busy ourselves with on a daily basis to kicking zombie ass the next? Let the necrotic flesh fly, I say.

What better time to enjoy the undead than the month of All Hallows’ Eve and the celebration of all that is unholy?  Having recently enjoyed Zombieland as well as book one of Robert Kirkman’s excellent “The Walking Dead”, it’s safe to say my curiosity was piqued when I saw an ad for Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks.  One minute I was giddily gobbling up delicious sci-fi morsels from the sci-fi/fantasy candy store called io9, and the next I was furiously clicking on the flashing square of flash-animated zombie goodness in the right hand corner of my screen.  I never click on ads.  And by “never” I mean “rarely”.  But it was totally worth it.  Not only do they give you a taste of what’s sandwiched between the covers of what looks like a kick ass graphic novel in a nice “moving pictures” montage, but they also allow you to download the first 24 pages of the book in PDF form.  I read it.  You should too.  Here’s a taste:

The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks by Max Brooks from Crown Books on Vimeo.

Now to take this Zombie love-fest to the next level.  I stumbled across a Cracked.com article from 2007 giving “5 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse could Actually Happen”, which is a fun read and chock full of links to interesting stories (such as Mike the chicken who lived without a head for 18 months) and articles giving a more scientific basis to “zombie-ism”.  One article in particular, a 10 page article published in the October 1987 issue of ChemMatters (already got my subscription) tells the best recorded account of an actual zombie being created in Haiti.  It tells the tale of Clairvius Narcisse, a Haitian man who was admitted to hospital and died in 1962, only to return 18 years later.  It’s an exciting read, heavily science based (I mean come on; it’s from ChemMatters!  You can practically smell the nerd on this article), and features the following excerpts:

Narcisse returned with a scar on his cheek that he claimed was caused by a nail driven into his coffin.
Poison makers prepare the zombie powder. The cotton in their nostrils and their clothing is for protection against the poison.
Exhuming the corpse of a child whose bones were used in a preparation of the zombie powder.

What are you waiting for?  Check it out!

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