Monster Island

Zombies.

Probably considered to be the monster of my generation. I've met very few people who don't enjoy a good zombie story.

But why do modern youth's seem to love zombie's so much? Is it that us against them mentality, the few against the many? Do we see prior generations as that mindless shambling hoarde, waiting to eat us whole?

This weeks text, Monster Island, is a great starting point for thinking about these questions. Even just it's format as a blog novel speaks volumes about how young people today think. For us books don't have to be bound in a paper form, they can be digital, never tanglibly existing, only ever displayed as points on a computer screen, and yet they carry just as much weight and viability as the heavier tomes of the past.

Now I'm pretty old fashioned, I much prefer print books to digital ones, but I can see the practicality of them.

I'm getting terribly off track from the discussion of zombies aren't I?

You'd think so, but not really. Our generation doesn't have any sort of a great real conflict with which to focus themselves so we create them in fiction. We've taken our perception of previous generations and exagerrated them into the archetype of the wave of zombies coming to eat our brains. The focus on brains as a food source is also indicative of the idea of the paranoia the youth has about becoming their parents, having their inidviduality, their brains, consumed by the daily grind of average life. Our greatest fear is sitting in a cubicle day to day, just getting by. The zombies are adult society and the youth are that rag-tag group of gritty survivors from all walks of life. And when the next generations come, they'll create their own parallel for that great fear of growing up.