I Was a Teenaged Zombie

11/01/2005

by June Pulliam

Sleator, William. The Boy Who Couldn’t Die.  Harry M. Abrams, 2005. 184 p.

When we hear the word “zombie,” images of the shuffling and scabby living-impaired on a monomaniacal quest for brains come to mind, since zombies were introduced to the modern imagination by George Romero’s seminal film Night of the Living Dead.  The past five years, however, has seen attempts to redefine the zombie–as fast, in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead ; and capable of learning in Romero’s recent Land of the Dead. William Sleator’s The Boy Who Couldn’t Die similarly redefines the zombie.

One can understand why 16 year old Ken Pritchard believes himself to be invulnerable. After all, he is a white male from a wealthy New York family that can give him such things as a private school education and spring break vacations in exotic countries. And his youth and privileged position mean that he has had very little opportunity to see misery, let alone death, first hand. All of that changes when Ken’s best friend Roger is killed in a plane crash, his body so badly mangled that the family cannot have an open casket funeral. Ken, still at that age where he cannot imagine old people as ever having been young, also has difficulty accepting that a member of his cohort is mortal. Ken’s existential crisis causes him to examine late night infomercials and strange ads in the backs of magazines, as well as newspapers that make vague promises about penetrating the great beyond. He finally settles on an ad promising to hide his soul and make him safe from death. 

This leads Ken to Cheri Beaumont, a sagging and wrinkled middle aged woman whose Queens apartment reeks of cigarette smoke and isn’t decorated with beads and crystal balls, but rather with tacky ballerina ornaments. For $50, the price of a concert ticket, Cheri promises she can hide Ken’s soul and make him safe from mortality. But there is a catch. There’s always a catch. Nothing can be gained without sacrifice, and to live eternally, Ken must be willing to die a little first. Also, Cheri informs Ken that once his soul is hidden, it won’t be easy, let alone cheap, to get it back. Ken consents, and Cheri rubs an unidentifiable black powder on his chest, which causes him to feel completely paralyzed. Soon, he’s awakened when Cherri puts a bittersweet substance in his mouth.

Ken leaves Cheri’s apartment wondering if anything has really happened, aside from his being cozened of $50, when he’s nearly hit by a car. The vehicle could have killed him instantly; instead, nothing happens, and Ken really begins to believe that Cheri has delivered what she promised. Anxious to test his new invulnerability, Ken quickly asks out the girlfriend of the school bully. Inevitably, the bully comes to give Ken an ass whoopin,’ only to discover that his powerful fists have no effect whatsoever on Ken, who is half his size. Ken believes this last situation is a fairly good assessment of his immortality, but wants still more proof. Thus, he convinces his parents that the family spring break should be spent in St. Calao, a tiny Caribbean island where tourists go to scuba dive. The sharks which have recently killed a diver off the island are the main attraction for Ken. He learns how to scuba dive on St. Calao and quickly makes his way out to shark infested waters, in defiance of his teenage scuba instructor Sabine. Sabine comes after Ken, only to witness a shark taking his entire leg in its mouth, but unable to do anything to harm him.

In the states, people have been reacting strangely to Ken since he has become immortal. Word that the school bully couldn’t beat him up spreads, and classmates treat Ken with a combination of awe and uncomfortable silence. After all, Ken did not turn around and thrash the bully. Instead, he merely absorbed the blows without any noticeable effect to his body, so no one knows quite what to make of him. Sabine, however, understands immediately Ken’s condition. Voodoo is practiced among the population of St. Calao, and for this reason, Sabine understands what Ken himself doesn’t know, that he is a zombie.

Sabine explains that there are two types of zombies. There are the ones that most Americans are familiar with through both popular culture and anthropology, those humans who are put into a drug induced coma and appear to rise from the dead. As they have no will of their own, they are easily enslaved by their zombie master. Then there are astral zombies, ones who seem to be normal, living human beings, invulnerable but with their free will intact, but whose spirits are commanded by the zombie master to do evil things. Sabine asks Ken to recall if his sleep has been disturbed as of late by bad dreams. And Ken does remember a recent vivid nightmare, where he was lurking in the fog outside of Cheri Beaumont’s apartment and knifed a stranger. Upon awaking, Ken found himself in the family kitchen, clutching a butcher knife from which phantom blood disappeared. Ken promises to keep in touch with Sabine after leaving St. Calao, and upon returning, is horrified to discover that on the night of his dream, a man was found stabbed to death in Cheri Beaumont’s neighborhood.

To keep Cheri from further controlling him, Ken must get his soul back, which won’t be easy since she has hidden it in a location unknown to him, and is willing to cooperate for no less than $50,000, an amount of money his wealthy parents are unlikely to just hand to him.

If this sounds like a lot of fun, it is. Sleator’s novel has reinvented the zombie in three important ways. First, he has contributed the idea of the astral zombie. Second, his zombie narrative is character driven, something lacking in so many of the zombie films that have been influential in shaping our idea of this particular monster. Third, he has written about the zombie in novel form, rather than presenting it in a visual medium such as film or the graphic novel. A quick internet search revealed to me what I had suspected, that the zombie is rarely the subject of novels. My search pulled up two other young adult titles and a few graphic novels. Certainly, it is no accident that the zombie has been neglected by the literary world. Those zombies that George Romero “invented” for us in 1968 were about as interesting and articulate as Boris Karloff's 1931 portrayal of the golem in James Whale's film version of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein.  It is very difficult to make the focus of a written narrative a character who is inarticulate and lacking any sort of intelligence. The zombie’s power to terrify up to this point has resided in its dreadful appearance and the knowledge that it, as the very personification of death, will come to us all eventually.

The Boy Who Couldn’t Die is able to focus on the character of the zombie by emphasizing the horror of having one’s will appropriated. It is no accident that the zombie in this novel is an adolescent rather than someone older, as here, the figure of the zombie seems to represent the horrors of growing up and having one’s will so effectively subordinated  to a more powerful being—that one stops noticing it after a while. This is one of the central themes of Shaun of the Dead , by the way. The opening scene of Shaun indicates that the zombies’ arrival in London is redundant, if the thirty year old hero’s own life is any measure of human existence, as he spends his nights, drunken and slack jawed in the local pub, and his days selling electronics alongside snotty teenagers whose work ethic is inferior to his own because they haven’t yet been successfully hypnotized into becoming “zombies.”  Ken’s attempt to recapture his soul is an attempt to not become another Shaun. Indeed, Ken quickly discovers that one of the nasty side effects of immortality is that food is no longer appetizing—and even kissing the most attractive girl in school after “winning” her from her bully boyfriend is uninteresting! 

Talk about horrifying if you’re a young adult.