Izzy Von’s Novella 'Died' Injects Fresh Perspectives Into The Zombie Genre

Death is life’s ultimate mystery. What fate—if any—lies beyond this mortal coil has been the subject of more speculation than any other since humankind’s beginnings. The core conceit of every religious movement great and small, and of countless works of art, literature, poetry, film, and song, have been devoted to understanding, and coping with, our inevitable demise.

The horror genre, in all its various permutations, is perhaps the storytelling form best-suited for examining death and its aftermath (and various theoretical afterlives). The zombie, in particular, is a figure honed by decades of narrative natural selection to serve as post-modern metaphor for death itself. Originating in the rites and rituals of Haitian voodoo, the shambling, shuffling, cannibalistic gut-munchers audiences are most acquainted with were actually created by writer-director George A. Romero for his seminal 1968 black-and-white flick Night of the Living Dead. Owing more to the ghoul of Arabian folklore than to their Caribbean counterparts, Romero’s idea of a worldwide apocalypse involving the ravenous returning dead quickly spread beyond the silver screen to permeate every aspect of popular culture, from comics to video games to television.

In the literary realm, too, zombies continue to fascinate readers, and one of the more exciting practitioners of the subgenre is Texas-based indie author Izzy Von, whose latest novella, Died (arriving April 28 on Amazon), is a bold, imaginative, and thoroughly dark examination of the undead.

Lottie is a young deaf woman living in Texas, coping with the demons of an abusive childhood by self-medicating with heroin. When Lottie attends the day-after Thanksgiving party at a lakeside house, a mysterious event causes most of the attendees to simultaneously drop dead. The victims don’t stay that way, though, and after Lottie endures an initial assault from the cannibal corpses, she learns via social media that what’s happened at the lake isn’t an isolated incident, but a worldwide phenomena referred to by survivors as ‘Black Friday’. In despair, Lottie shoots up with what she hopes is a fatal dose of heroin; awakening soon thereafter, Lottie believes she’s failed in her life-ending ambition, only to discover to her horror that she’s instead revived as a rare type of zombie known as a Grey Eye, a walking corpse that’s retained its intelligence and that can regenerate any injury with whatever nearby material is at hand.

To her dismay, Lottie discovers that her newly acquired undead constitution prevents drugs and alcohol from having any effect, and those hurtful childhood memories soon manifest as literal hauntings. Her situation only worsens once Lottie is held captive and repeatedly killed by both a maniacal neighbor and an obsessed online stalker of hers from the pre-apocalypse days. After these harrowing experiences, Lottie finally escapes and ventures into the wider world outside the lake house, where she discovers that Romero-style shufflers aren’t the only kind of creatures people turned into on Black Friday. There are underwater zombies called Bubblers, and Leviathans, massive tentacled monstrosities that command swarms of the undead in their wake. There’s also the enigmatic Land of Red and Black, an ever-expanding patch of scorched earth that that Lottie feels inexplicably drawn to. Most dangerous of all, however, are The Templars, fire-and-brimstone pseudo-religious survivalists intent on exterminating anyone who doesn’t adhere to their narrow-minded extremist ideology.

While set in the same world as Von’s previous novels, A Dandy Among the Dead and its sequel X-Mas of the Dead, Died trades the comedy and witty repartee of those books for grim nihilism. While first-person undead narratives have been published before, few—if any—have portrayed the zombie with quite as much raw, unflinching honesty as this. Von holds absolutely nothing back in regards to Lottie’s suicidal mental state, her addiction, or in the relentless depiction of ever-escalating violence. Indeed, Died wallows in hyper-detailed splattery set pieces more potent than the grossest of hack ‘n slash gorefests, and once the bloodshed begins, the audience experiences each inflicted wound as if it were happening to them. Every orifice that can squirt, ooze, dribble or drip is explored, stretched, strained and rearranged with a relish rarely seen on the written page, and the sheer descriptive power of Von’s imagination is simultaneously exciting and disturbing, even if, at times, the ugly viciousness threatens to unglue the novella’s narrative cohesion.

Despite the savagery, however, Lottie’s journey is also a deeply introspective one, with powerful ruminations about life, love, death, healing, and the nature of existence. Von’s use of a deaf protagonist is refreshing, and the flashbacks detailing the mistreatment Lottie suffered at the hands of her unsympathetic mother are heartbreaking, showing the audience not only where Lottie’s self-destructive mindset began, but where her reservoirs of inner strength lie.

If the litmus test for any creative work is how much it impacts an audience, then Died has already packed the proverbial wallop, scoring serious pre-release raves from the likes of mainstream horror writers Laurel Hightower (Crossroads, The Day of the Door) and New York Times Bestselling author Brian Keene (The Rising series, Ghoul, Dead Sea, the Clickers series). It’s praise wholly deserved, too. In the twenty-first century, there are some who say zombies and their related apocalyptic tales have become so embedded in the cultural zeitgeist that their ability to terrify has been diluted by familiarity. Yet authors like Von serve as reminders that new voices can offer fresh perspectives able to revitalize even the most overdone tropes, and it’s for those reasons that I’m compelled to grant Died the full 5 (Out of 5) on my Fang Scale. This is horror designed to do what horror should—shock, incite and stimulate thought, and I, for one, can’t wait to die all over again.