Faith and the Zombie: Critical Essays on the End of the World and Beyond ed. by Simon Bacon (review)

Reviewed by: Faith and the Zombie: Critical Essays on the End of the World and Beyonded. by Simon Bacon Paul Scott Deadly Belief. Simon Bacon, ed. Faith and the Zombie: Critical Essays on the End of the World and Beyond. McFarland, 2023. x+ 280 pp. 49. 95 pbk. An eclectic range of essays can represent the strength or the weakness of a collected volume. This engaging gamut of chapters squarely falls into the former category, with 17 contributions encompassing literature, media, and philosophy, united by their treatment of zombies from the late twentieth century onward. Given that zombies raise metaphysical questions about life after death and personhood and agency, it is surprising that there is relatively little scholarship devoted to the religious aspects of these creatures. In his thoughtful introduction, Bacon points out that not only Christianity in the West but also other faiths "equally spark the supernatural End Page 309fire that enlivens the bodies of the risen dead" (5). In other words, the idea of the zombie may ultimately stem from concepts taught by different world religions. The volume is divided into five parts and clearly some thought has gone into grouping complementary chapters together. The first section, "Survival and Loss at the End of the World, " includes essays focusing on the impact of the returned on the living and their belief systems. Stella Marie Gaynor opens this section and the volume with an original and tightly argued piece on the path-breaking French television show The Returned. This series, which ran for two seasons (2012-2015), was the first television show to feature rational zombies. Gaynor notes that, while the conventional walking dead provokes horror, the return of loved ones tends to inspire "disbelief and fear" (29). The paranormal nature of these returned is coupled with a strong religious presence both in the local Catholic priest and in a secretive doomsday cult. Gaynor argues that the show's zombies drive people away from Christianity either into the cult or into a substitute creed where a newborn baby, Nathan, the result of the union between a living woman and her returned former fiancé, becomes "a perverted representation of the Virgin Birth" (38). Mark Richard Adams turns his attention to Lucio Fulci's Gates of Helltrilogy (40-54). These three Italian movies (1979-1981) are characterized by "both their recurring nihilistic themes and their use of the living dead as antagonistic forces" (41). Adams concludes that, while there are strong religious motifs in the films, they are primarily a symbolic backdrop and Catholicism does not equip characters to fend off zombies, a somewhat surprising economy given that the director was a devout Catholic. George J. Sieg and Scout Tafoya provide philosophical overviews of zombie depictions, the former themed on conversion as zombification and the latter probing the concept of zombie optimism. This segues neatly into the volume's second section, "Undead Capitalism, Undead Planet. " Erin Giannini is interested in the role of capitalist theology in iZombie. The five-season show (2015-2018) is one of the few recent undead series not to have been canceled before a concluding season. Giannini suggests that the cruelty manifested in some theological systems is more monstrous in two of the show's characters than the fact that they are brain-eating zombies. Jacopo Della Quercia delves into the undead army in Game of Thrones, while Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns is fascinated by the countercultural theological and ecological subtexts of the 1974 Spanish zombie movie No Profanar el Sueño de los MuertosLet Sleeping Corpses Lie. The book's third part is themed on "The Christian/Judaic Apocalypse and the Zombie, " opening with John W. Morehead's study of Hershel Greene's religious faith in The Walking Dead, contrasting this character's religious convictions with Rick Grimes's decidedly "pragmatic expression of hope" (153). In one of the jewels of the volume, James T. McCrea reflects on the peculiarly Christian aspects of representations of the undead in the West. McCrea identifies and explores three significant factors: "the combative relationships between God and neighboring divinity, the restless End Page 310dead in Christian texts, and … the Christian burial plot" (166). Sarah Cleary. . .