Hungry Business – a review

Hungry Business is a short story by Maria DeBlassie that manages to be a surprisingly large number of things very effectively all at the same time. It’s a creepy zombie story – with a neat premise about how being a zombie works and what you have to do to avoid it. At the same time, it’s a clever piece of social commentary where the being-a-zombie works as a metaphor for certain kinds of modern experiences. It is somehow both a sinister horror story and very funny, often both at the same time. It’s also a romance, and a story about the nature of romance and the importance of romance stories.  

Author Maria DeBlassie has all of these things going on, but none of them get in the way of it being a charming and entertaining read. Impressive! Do check it out.

Zombie Catharsis

At the weekend we played zombie football. You might think that an odd topic for a Druid blog, but for me it is a good way of celebrating the dark part of the year. The decay. The way death is ever present in our lives.

Preparing for zombie football means making yourself look as undead as possible. That’s fun in its own, gruesome way, and it also a safe way of staring your own death in the face as you try to make yourself corpse-like. And then you get to meet up with your friends and see what they are doing to look horrible and deceased.

We favour the shambling, stupid zombie model. This means that the football is slow. Lack of coordination isn’t an issue. Being unable to pass the ball well isn’t an issue. Scoring and saving goals – well, we shamble the right way and see what happens. It’s about being a good zombie. What results is an hour or so where a bunch of people shuffle outside together. The bar for being able to join in, is very low. It really isn’t about the winning. And anyway, football always wins, and the zombies lose.

In normal circumstances, participating in a sport requires you to be fit and healthy. Disabilities involving clumsiness, poor energy, lack of co-ordination, lack of speed, strength, stamina are many. Physical sports you can play with a bunch of people with more and less normal bodies are not numerous. Zombie football is a fantastic and very silly answer to all of this.