Malcolm Devlin’s stories have appeared in Black Static, Interzone, The Shadow Booth and Shadows and Tall Trees. His first collection, You Will Grow Into Them, was published by Unsung Stories in 2017 and shortlisted for the British Fantasy and Saboteur Awards.
Devlin's new novella is And Then I Woke Up.
At Electric Lit he shared "eight stories which largely aren’t zombie stories at all and I will now try and prove they are all zombie stories at heart and thus restore balance to the world." One title on the list:
The Road by Cormac McCarthyRead about the other entries on the list.
To me, many zombie stories feel like the third act of something larger. I’ve always felt that their natural shape is lines converging to a remorseless point and this is why I think they work best in the shorter form. Zombies—traditionally at least—are slow moving and, when encountered in low numbers, easy enough to avoid even at a brisk walk, but zombie stories aren’t really about surviving, they’re about sinking to any level to avoid the inevitability of death. The zombies are not only a threat, they serve as a shuffling momento mori. The inevitability of deathhas been superseded by the inevitability of undeath. While you might do your best to keep them out, you will make a mistake, your defences will be flawed, and when they fail they will be there, waiting.
Cormac McCarthy has been accused of nihilism before, so in a sense, The Road feels like a natural progression of his work. Here, the world has already ended and what remains is the lingering long tail before the lights are extinguished for good. There are no zombies here, so there’s nothing else to blame. There are no monsters to exacerbate matters except those that were here already. At risk of belittling the novel with such a lumpenly crass observation, this doesn’t mean the rest of McCarthy’s slim, devastating novel doesn’t tick almost every other checkbox on the zombie apocalypse list. Blasted landscape? Feral gangs? Cannibalism? All here, along with desperate survivors trying their best to cling to the map. That there’s beauty here too—in the spare, unsentimental prose and the desperate love between the father and son—that feels like the last magical dance of the pilot light before it goes out.
The Road appears on Michael Christie's list of ten novels to reconfigure our conception of nature for the better, Emily Temple's list of the ten books that defined the 2000s, Ceridwen Christensen's list of ten novels that end their apocalypses on a beach, Steph Post's top ten list of classic (and perhaps not so classic) road trip books, a list of five of the best climate change novels, Claire Fuller's top five list of extreme survival stories, Justin Cronin's top ten list of world-ending novels, Rose Tremain's six best books list, Ian McGuire's ten top list of adventure novels, Alastair Bruce's top ten list of books about forgetting, Jeff Somers's lists of five science fiction novels that really should be considered literary classics and eight good, bad, and weird dad/child pairs in science fiction and fantasy, Amelia Gray's ten best dark books list, Weston Williams's top fifteen list of books with memorable dads, ShortList's roundup of the twenty greatest dystopian novels, Mary Miller's top ten list of the best road books, Joel Cunningham's list of eleven "literary" novels that include elements of science fiction, fantasy or horror, Claire Cameron's list of five favorite stories about unlikely survivors, Isabel Allende's six favorite books list, the Telegraph's list of the 15 most depressing books, Joseph D’Lacey's top ten list of horror books, the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five unforgettable fathers from fiction, Ken Jennings's list of eight top books about parents and kids, Anthony Horowitz's top ten list of apocalypse books, Karen Thompson Walker's list of five notable "What If?" books, John Mullan's list of ten of the top long walks in literature, Tony Bradman's top ten list of father and son stories, Ramin Karimloo's six favorite books list, Jon Krakauer's five best list of books about mortality and existential angst, William Skidelsky's list of the top ten most vivid accounts of being marooned in literature, Liz Jensen's top 10 list of environmental disaster stories, the Guardian's list of books to change the climate, David Nicholls' top ten list of literary tear jerkers, and the Times (of London) list of the 100 best books of the decade. In 2009 Sam Anderson of New York magazine claimed "that we'll still be talking about [The Road] in ten years."
--Marshal Zeringue