ABSTRACT
What is an end? It is this very question that drives the speculative horror of zombie fiction, for ostensibly disabused of romantic idealism and the conceit of anthropocentric dominion, the figure of the zombie advances a denuded speculation on the end of planetary life as it is for humans. Immanent throughout its allegorical transformations to “the unsettled ecology in which it dwells,” the zombie has become a contemporary harbinger of eco-catastrophe and the accelerated collapse of the Anthropocene (Cohen 2012). 1 Decomposing the homeostatic, equilibrated, and “bounded” image of the human, the zombie emerges counterpart to a hostile ecology in which the human organism faces its immanent obsolescence (Colebrook 2011). In perverse nuptials to viral contagion (Plague of the Zombies, 28 Days Later, Ponypool), radioactive contamination (Night of the Living Dead), toxic poisons (Dawn of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead), and bio-engineered disease (28 Weeks Later), zombie-life speculates on life by other means, or, rather, on an unthought alter-ecology out of step with the anthropocentric conceit that the world is as it is for us (Thacker 2011). McKibben (2011) points to this virulent dark ecology in his assertion that we are already living on a “strange new Earth.” Non-resemblant with the certain and stable image of the planet’s Earthrise, photographed by William Anders of Apollo 8, the “strange new Earth” articulated by McKib-ben describes an inhospitable and alien environment dominated by violent storms, mega-fires, acidic oceans, and accelerated glacial erosion (McKibben 2011; Adam 2008; Harris 2009). 2 It is too late to go back. The world as it is for us is at an end.
