ZomBcon Halloween Weekend

This Halloween weekend, and unprecented event will take place in Seattle.  The first ever large scale all-zombie convention is being held in the Seattle center, and I’m lucky enough to be an invited guest.

As not just a contributor, but a lifelong fan of the undead genre, I’m thrilled to be meeting some of the premier writers, filmmakers, and artists who’ve made the zombie genre what it is today.  The event that I am most looking forward to, however, is my session with Max Brooks, author of The Zombie Survival Guide.  I’ve said before that it was Brooks’ work that inspired me to write the Zombie Combat Manual, and to share the stage with him in a session on zombie survival will be an honor.

I’ll also be around the entire ZomBcon weekend participating in other events.  if you happen to be in the area and you’re a zombie fan, you have no excuse not to come.  Here’s my schedule for those of you who want to stop and say hi:

• Friday, October 29th, 3PM, “Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse”
• Friday, October 29th, 9PM, “Prom Night of the Living Dead”
• Sunday, October 31st, 1PM, ZomBcon Showcase - Zombie Combat Manual
• Sunday, October 31st, 2PM, Barnes and Noble Author Showcase Signing

I’ll be sharing a post-event wrap-up and photos after the weekend, so check back next week.

I also wrote an article for Wired.com’s GeekDad blog on the convention, the living dead, and how my father scarred me for life with zombies, and how I’m forever grateful.  Check out the article here.

Book Review: The Art of Zombie Warfare

I rarely (in fact, never) conduct book reviews on this blog.  Not because I don’t find many worth reviewing.  In fact, exactly the opposite, I would hate to turn down an author of a book I enjoy simply because I don’t have the time to write an adequate review.  For Scott Kenemore’s newest work, The Art of Zombie Warfare, I’m happily making an exception.

This is the third in Kenemore’s “Undead Philosophy” series, preceded by The Zen of Zombie and Z.E.O, and my favorite of the three.  Not to say that his style has changed for this work, but the natural association of the zombie as antagonist lends itself efficiently to a discussion of combat, so much so that I must admit, when I heard about this book, I was more than a little concerned that he and I would be covering similar ground.  My fears were unnecessary, however, as The Art of Zombie Warfare focuses much more on associating the living dead with broader combat philosophies while clearly keeping its tongue firmly set in undead cheek.

Kenemore smartly breaks the discussion into two primary sections.  The first section, How to Fight Like a Zombie, acts as a grunt’s how-to manual, humorously associating the valuable traits every soldier knows to keep himself living (patience, toughness, fortitude) with an appropriate trait of the living dead.  I found it tremendously entertaining that, even by removing zombies from the association, most of the recommendations still made sense.

The second section, How to Lead Like a Zombie, is where the relationship to Sun Tzu’s classical text on warfare is more obvious, and the section I enjoyed most.   For fun, I pulled out my dog-eared copy of The Art of War just to compare the strategies with Kenemore’s undead version, and most of what is covered in the Chinese text is adapted in TAZW, with Kenemore creating a much more complete and entertaining picture.  One of the most enjoyable portions of TAZW were the discussions of actual military commanders, their famous battles, and how they were, in fact, influenced by the walking dead.

As far as criticisms go, I have a nitpicky few.  One relates to what I just mentioned as the sections I found most entertaining.  While Kenemore discusses a couple of commanders and battles, I found myself wanting much more.   Thermopylae, Wounded Knee, The Hundred Years War – all of these could have used Kenemore’s zombie treatment.    My other comment is not about the writing, but the accompanying illustrations.  While I found most of them both funny and ghoulish, some of the creatures look less like walking dead and more like demons or vampires, and I like my zombies, well, zombified.

Overall, I highly enjoyed The Art of Zombie Warfare as a work of humor that, if you take the time to scrape away the undead surface, can also provide some very fundamental combat theory and history.