Horror, of all the genres, is the only one that can provoke an involuntary visceral reaction.
Stephen Graham JonesRead
Most zombie stories, the problems they solve are not the actual zombies. The problems they solve are the human interactions.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Zombie stories often reflect deeper human issues rather than just the presence of zombies themselves.
Stephen Graham Jones highlights that the essence of zombie stories is not merely about the undead, but rather about the complexities of human interactions and relationships that arise in extreme situations, such as a zombie apocalypse. This suggests that the true focus of such narratives is on how people cope with crises and each other, revealing deeper truths about human nature and society.
Themes
ZombiesHuman InteractionsRelationshipsCrisisNarratives
In practice
Example use cases
During a book discussion group focused on interpreting hidden themes in horror literature.
More from Stephen Graham Jones
All quotes →We watch a romantic comedy because we want to cry, say, or an action movie so we can participate in heroics. Horror's different. It can hit you with a moment of revulsion so hard you might want to erase the last five minutes of your life, please.
Stephen Graham JonesRead
I figure anytime you put an adjective before 'writer,' it's a way of dismissing the writer.
Stephen Graham JonesRead
The way humor's usually used in horror, it's as a pressure-release valve; without it, the drama would escalate out of all control almost immediately.
Stephen Graham JonesRead
Every time I lock my people in a spacecraft or land them on an asteroid, the blood wells up again, and I'm writing horror. Horror's my default setting. It's also where I prefer to write.
Stephen Graham JonesRead
Making people laugh is so much more difficult than making them sad. Too much fiction defaults to the somber, the tragic. This is because sad endings are easy in comparison - happy endings aren't at all simple to earn, especially when writing to an audience jaded by them.
Stephen Graham JonesRead
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Some writers may toy with the fancy of a ‘Christ-myth,’ but they do not do so on the ground of historical evidence. The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar. It is not historians who propagate the ‘Christ-myth’ theories.
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