The Fall

I wouldn't want you to think I detested New York, but I have realised I'd be quite happy if almost everyone who lived there got mauled to death by flesh eating zombies. Not just any flesh eating zombies though, ones with literary merit. I hope that gives some succour to any Brooklynite, to know they're being torn limb from limb by a ravening beast that's been described with a minimum of cliche. Thus while there are lots of books about the zombiepocalypse I doubt I'll ever read, I keep returning to Colson Whitehead's Zone One.

Vampires, on the other hand, I hold no truck with. If I were to attempt amateur psychoanalysis, it would be obvious that I'm fascinated by death and scared of sex, hence my choice of monster. But I'm not, because that would be utter piffle. Vampires are lame because they're the Robert Pattison crowd, revenant Hugh Grants moodily haunting schoolgirls (or stalking reanimated transexual hookers on Rodeo Drive - have I stretched this metaphor to breaking point yet?)And so they just look too nice, too damn sparkly to be meaningful horrors.

Zone One

Last night I watched the last fifteen minutes of an episode of The Walking Dead, where an angry man punches a big bloke in the face a lot while some women scream. That wasn't very edifying, and there was hardly a zombie to be seen. I wasn't too bothered: I had a copy of Zone One to read, an utterly fantastic zombie story by Colson Whitehead.

The Dead

Today was one of those muggy days in Hong Kong where the city never really pauses to take breath, the humidity pressing down on you like a wet blanket, similes and metaphors mixing together in a mess of urban rage and mental confusion.

Or perhaps I was just worn out from staying up late reading zombie stories for adolescents to my fiancee.

Broken again

Through a combination of over-exuberance, sleep deprivation and arriving ahead of my competence, I did something horrible to my left big toe yesterday, gouging the nail and making the toe itself turn purple and swell up.

Resident Evil: Afterlife

Another lovely sunny day, another opportunity to go and watch some utter rubbish in 3D. Resident Evil: Afterlife is the fourth Resident Evil film - if you have trouble distinguishing them, the first one had Milla Jovovich and some actors, the second had Mila Jovovich and some cut-scenes copied from Resident Evil on the Nintendo 64 (and a man in a big rubber suit) and the third one at least tried to have a plot, even if it was ripped off from Dawn of the Dead. And by 'ripped off' I mean 'a photocopy of a facsimile of a crayon sketch based on a story overheard in a pub, told by a man whod once watched a pirate of a film that referenced George Romero'.

Surprises

Last night we went to a Chinese vegetarian restaurant in Causeway Bay. The closest most Chinese restaurants get to a vegetarian meal is pretending that chicken is a vegetable (well, it is close to the ground, I suppose) so you might have expected I'd get a delicious plate of nothing much at all.

Slight Return

I took the MTR home today, getting as far as the labyrinthine corridors beneath Causeway Bay before pummelling my way through the hordes and rising, blinking like a bipedal mole, up from the depths. As I travelled through the crowds, I caught sight of an advertisement for Rec 2, the sequel to Rec.