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.

Vampires!

I was reading last month's Harpers today, because periodicals mailed in to Hong Kong go via some odd parallel dimension where two months' worth of some things gets queued up over the Pacific and then barfs itself into the magazine rack at the supermarket all at once, when I got to reading about a visit to the Balkans by Tea Obreht, and the legends of the vampires she encountered there.