Tag Archive: dissecting the walking dead

An interview with yours truly on The Walking Dead, from 94.3 The Point

I recently had an opportunity to sit down with Nicole Murray from 94.3 The Point, a radio station here in New Jersey. I was in to talk about The Walking Dead (’cause a few years back I independently published a book on the show, natch). If you want to take a look — and you should, because my shirt is a wonderful shade of blue — then you know what to do.

Zombies, Mythology, and the Origins of the Zombie Genre

The following is an excerpt from Dissecting The Walking Dead: Slicing Into The Guts of Television’s Hottest Show, available in paperback and for Kindle. Shambling corpses with ragged clothing still clinging to their grey, rotting bodies. An unsteady, drunken walk. Long, pitiful moans and an aching hunger for human flesh. The image is by now so familiar even people with no interest in the genre know it inside and out. These are zombies. But zombies weren’t always depicted this way. Once upon a time, the zombie was something much different, a creature linked with black magic and Voodoo and having nothing to do with eating flesh. It seems as if they’ve been around forever, but our modern view of zombies is actually a relatively new creation. The first recorded use of the term “zombie”…
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TELEVISION: The Walking Dead was overrated

I’m an unashamed geek and make no bones about it. I love geek stuff. Hell, I took part in co-writing a really great geek book. Proud to have my name attached to all things geek. But this needs to be said: AMC’s smash-hit television show The Walking Dead, while quite entertaining, was also highly, highly overrated by my geek brothers and sisters. Sorry, my geek brethren, but it’s true. We were so caught up in the thrill of getting something delightfully geeky that we elevated the show to a lofty status it has not yet earned. Now I’m not saying the show was bad. Far from it. I thought the casting was phenomenal, the writing was generally pretty good (though certainly not always), the acting…
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