Poisoned by Gods Flesh: A Peter Romero Mystery (Peter Romero Mysteries Book 2)

Their solution may change the course of history. Peter fears it may be too late. Set in the beautiful and dangerous Southwest, this novel combines mystical traditions with modern police work in a fast-paced, whirlwind thriller that any mystery novel fan will love. Knop is a lifelong student of the American Southwest and its people. All three books are available at Amazon. We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! About Us Subscribe Archives. Official Coronado toy … Updated: December 15 Comments 0. Not only is it too extreme to fit their schemes, it managed to make them interact one another and mutate.

We face no intimistic and sublime danger, no limited horror, but the total annihilation of the human race. Yet, this totalising danger is not the consequence of an invasion from outer space — like in War of the Worlds or Invasion of the Body-Snatchers — or of a natural i. A permanent reminder to mankind. Total destruction would surely put things in order again, as the living dead would be the only ones to "survive" as the most adapted species. At the end of the film, zombies take control of the mall again.

The little experiment of human restoration has failed, and entropy, the forces of chaos, rule again — at least from a human, i. The blind violence of the zombies suggests, at first glance, their radical not-humanity, it symbolises the blind forces of nature.

Poisoned by God's Flesh (Peter Romero #2)

The evolution of man was driven by its ability to face those blind forces as something other than him. Those who fail to recognise the moment of truth in this self-alienation from nature — the nihilist bikers, for instance — are condemned to regression. Peter is right arguing that the living dead are "part of us. Negative anthropology and inner zombification. It is Romero's ability to talk about the "human" always in connection with the "not-human" that shapes his negative anthropology — to be understood as a critical definition of human nature, rather than as anthropological pessimism Machiavelli, Hobbes, Schopenhauer, Rorty.

The anthropological background of the Trilogy is cunningly revealed from Dawn of the Dead on. The living dead are "pure instinct," their cerebral functions reduced to a minimum. Being "part of us" and not something totally extraneous, the relation between man and the living dead is dynamic.

The danger they represent to mankind seems to polarize the characteristics of the two species. In Dawn of the Dead , the only chance left to mankind is to make use of reason and cold instrumental intellect, and to suppress emotions. Emotions and feelings such as fear the troubled reactions of Steve at the beginning of the film , blind love the woman who got bitten by his former lover and euphoria Roger are destructive. They beg comparison to Peter's coldness and pragmatism — Peter even "calculates" if it's worth trying to save Steve from the zombies that are attacking him in the elevator and, almost wisely, decides not to risk.

As a counterforce, Romero displays the practical, manual intelligence of Ben and Peter, as the only resource left for survival. Night of the Living Dead and Day of the Dead both show in detail the construction of physical barriers against the ghouls. The Night of the Living Dead sequence is particularly touching.

A pathetic soundtrack accompanies Barbara's staring eyes as she watches Ben build the wall that will protect the house. After having been reduced to autism, Ben's efforts to immure Barbara alive seal her psychical breakdown with physical enclosure. The dialectics of collectivism. It's necessary to emphasize, how the centrality of the social and collective dimension in Romero's films is shown with purely cinematographic means: Romero puts for the first time "the Mass" itself as main character on stage.

Lacking the chic populism of Les Miserables , Romero offers us something more than a noble representation of "people in arms": Romero's zombies are indeed a deranged version of the people: This critique of Hollywood populism reveals what Ben Hur 's figurants already were, once capture by the empty-eye of the mechanical camera that steals their souls: Romero revived the Zombies as a gruesome image, looking back at us from the mirror of our times.

Here, Marco Maurizi analyses this image from an Adornian perspective. Night of the Living Dead Meeting necessities. Far from being a b-movies assembler, Romero lived and lives on the dream of being a fine director Gagne, He was notoriously driven to direct Night of the Living Dead by economic necessity, after the commercial failure of a pretentious picture entitled Whine of the Fawn. This subjective necessity to "sell out" reached its goal thanks to an objective necessity, i.

The very existence of this market witnesses the persistence of a collective desire to experience monstrosity. Such a desire has a double, schizophrenic meaning: Horror has always played this eccentric role inside the culture industry: For those who cannot avoid the culture industry's prefab pleasures and don't want to suffer the self-flagellation of the avant-garde, this need for truth manifests itself sensually as self-punition, the masochistic pleasure of seeing oneself tormented by fear and gore.

However, rather than endless repetitions of an infantile shock regression , such masochistic thrills look for an access into the real beyond capitalist deception. Horror movies try to dissipate the opium populi dialectically, i. A progressive element is involved: Romero's idea of filming Dawn Of the Dead in a shopping mall was not a product of his schizophrenic imagination: The whole environment of contemporary society is, in fact, designed to exorcise "horror" — a by-product of its own cultural, political and economic logic — but since horror can't be annihilated, its traces are perceptible almost everywhere.

Subsequent anguish — the vague and yet frightening intuition that something "out there" could make our usual world fall apart — is a concrete historic-sociological condition rather than an existential category. No less important than "what" the film showed, was the way it did it, i. Turning a lack of means into a possibility for creative solutions, Night of the Living Dead resulted in an Aufhebung of the form-content opposition.

Budget restrictions and "artistic integrity" forced Romero and his talented collaborators to avoid the cheap renditions of s "rubbers monsters," opting for a more realistic approach to gore Gagne, The stylization of gore that resulted reveals its specific social essence post festum. Whereas traditional scary movies used to mask reality in order to make it horrible, Romero strips the flesh off of it, revealing its grim and sick bones. Simplification, a brutal and obsessive reductionism, gives Romero's nightmare its astonishing formal power. Still from Night of the Living Dead Horror as historical concreteness.

Romero's gore is also miles above the unpolitical correctness of s splatter, something that only those who recognize the historical determination of the zombie aesthetic will admit. The living dead had their place in the Hollywood imaginary long before Romero kidnapped them and gave them new life.

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It is true that Romero also added to it his radical politics, but he also made sure that their politics worked at a visual, aesthetic niveau. At the same time, such politics proves to be deeper and stronger than any "message" poured on the movie-goers from a patronizing, ideological level. The hammering shock of the hyperrealist violence, the impressive masses moving on the screen, the constant sense of claustrophobia and catastrophe: But, it is the fact that it welcomes the political consequences what distinguishes Romero's grand guignol from other horror trips, both coeval and subsequent.

His realism is hyperrealist not because it is "ironic," but because it rips through the impermeable nature of conventional cinema: The consistency of the Trilogy is determined by the political precision of Romero's imagination. Auschwitz is the logical paradigm of annihilation and the aesthetic model of the living dead. Romero's zombies recognize their provenance, not in the quaint pages of fiction, but in the historical actuality of Auschwitz.

Tom Savini, who did the special effects for Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead , explains his ability to make gore seem "real" as a consequence of his experiences in Vietnam. So I've seen a lot of gore, the way it really looks. Anybody can chop up a foam latex head and put blood around it to make it look like it's been blasted by a shotgun. But, there's something that gives you a queasy feeling deep down below your stomach when it's a real person who was once alive. And it's not just the physical damage — it's the expression sometimes, you know?

The position of the body. The stuff you could never plan or stage. I hope I've put that into what you see in my effects. He simply puts it back in its place, at the heart of the empire, where it is systematically deleted. This explains the accumulating, massive effect of his films, their ability to adhere to reality and haunt our perception.

Romero turns the narcotising and disciplinary function of cinema into an attack of social criticism. One only has to go to the supermarket after having watched Dawn of the Dead to experience its estranging effect; one is abnormally over-sensitive to the crowd and to the blow out of commodities. The simplest thing — a boy greedily eating his pizza on the escalator — suddenly shows a disquieting side. Still from Night of the Living Dead Mortuary objectivity. But, whereas Neocleosus talks of dead in terms of "remembrance of past generations" — giving the term a subjective-nostalgic twist — Marx focused on the physical, actual, brutal meaning of the word: He was also aware, like Romero, that the dead and the living are not just opposite sides of a static relation.

According to him, capitalism is the economic process that turns the living into dead and sets the dead against the living. Under capitalism and in the form of this mortuary objectivity, dead labour is the precondition of the productivity of the living one. Therefore, capital turns everybody into his own living dead, who "keep[s] coming back in a bloodthirsty lust for human flesh. Sure, it would be stupid to argue that, given the above , Romero's Trilogy is just a filmic rendition of Marx' Capital.

Such confusion between art and theory is a trademark of cultural studies' idealism, i. It is precisely because Romero was probably not inspired by Marx and that he doesn't preach us anything, that his vision is so real and his films can be Molotov cocktails of unregimented experience. Nevertheless, discussing "consumerism" without giving the phenomenon any sociological ground, i.

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Critical art like his exceeds the agenda of liberal discussion, as it is focused on objective processes rather than opinions. Given this focus, even an author's opinion is just one element among others, and not the definitive word on his work; as a result of a series of processes occurring in the material world, an art object gives us information about this very world. Dick showed, the description of "alternative realities" is a way of becoming conscious of the processes involved in the "real" world, as it questions the limits of our reified opinions of it.

A work of art is therefore dialectical rather than dialogical, because, though being an object, it incorporates such processes. That's the reason why Romero's "as if" experiment can't be discussed according to a fixed and undialectical scheme of categories. His films revolutionize the category "consumerism" by laying bare its horrific actuality.

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Still from Night of the Living Dead Decomposing the subject The same could be said for "violence. In Romero's films violence is the vectorial result of the zombies' impact on human society. It has no "redeeming value" in strictly moral terms and this is the reason why it does supply us with useful political insights.

Whereas moral judgement is restricted to the domain of individual action, politics is bound to the possibilities of collective interaction. By regarding violence in its brutal objectivity, Romero's approach is appropriate to an epoch of decaying subjectivity. Itself launched towards self-destruction, capitalism is depriving the Subject of any concrete meaning, eroding its own ideological foundations: Therefore, the destructive power displayed in the Trilogy carries the traces of self -destruction — to be intended as both social disaggregation and dissolution of the Self.

Yet, although tolling the bell, Romero is not keen to play a requiem. He does not moan on the grave of the bourgeois subject, but he doesn't replace it with cartoon super-heroes either, as Hollywood, no less than "socialist" realism, prescribes. A rotten version of Benjamin's Angel of history, the zombie witnesses of the highest stage of capitalism: Benjamin's use of Surrealism as Kulturkritik is appropriate for an epoch where the day-dream of the bourgeoisie had already become a nightmarish reality.

After World War I, mankind became aware that, for the first time, the world could actually fall into pieces. Formally, of course, all the means of production and most of the instruments of power, practically all the decisive instruments of power, are still in the hands of the dominant classes But, what our rulers will be able to achieve with the powers they possess, over and above frantic attempts to re-establish their system of spoliation through blood and slaughter, will be nothing more than chaos" Luxemburg, Although state intervention enabled capitalism to survive in spite of its contradictions, it could do nothing to solve them.

Social Democracy baptised the administration of catastrophe, procrastinating the end of capitalism ad libitum , in a permanent twilight of everyday barbarism. It is a world that is somehow already beyond the alternative "Socialism or Barbarism" as Buenaventura Durruti [ 12 ] and Theodor Adorno [ 13 ] did recognize. The living dead are the proper dwellers for such a decaying world. Not only do its goods decay with increasing speed, shortening the expiring dates and making death the general form of experience, [ 14 ] it also considers not metaphorical death and destruction as genuine productive factors.

Wars and tsunamis become systemic possibilities, a way of making the production work and the extraction of surplus value possible over and over again. Amadeo Bordiga described the economic base of catastrophical capitalism as follows: The wealth that disappeared was that of past, ages-old labour. To eliminate the effect of the catastrophe, a huge mass of present-day, living labour is required.

To exploit living labour, capital must destroy dead labour which is still useful. Loving to suck warm young blood, it kills corpses. Dawn of the Dead The zombie-human opposition. A new society is born from the ashes of the old one, but it is a society ruled by corrupted politicians, with the help of sadistic soldiers and mad scientists Gagne, Hardly a picture of a successful revolution.

Zombies are indeed turning our society upside-down, but what really interests Romero is the struggle that defines the zombie-human opposition. Romero's critique of subjectivity only works within this opposition. There is no "revolutionary proletariat" or "bourgeois decadence": Their attempt to survive in the shopping mall looks like something old-fashioned. Even when the four begin stealing things after they manage to get all the zombies out of the mall, these are Kindergarten manoeuvres compared to the destructive violence of the nomadic gang of motorcycle-riders in the finale.

When Roger dies, he is buried. But, the continuing need for order and stability inside the shopping mall is not mere middle-class nostalgia. It is rather a survival of humanity in a post-human world. In the end, no static opposition — good-bad, new-old, revolution-restoration — is absolutized by Romero; each demands to be understood within the zombie-man relation. He casts a black light on the whole process, without resorting to political consolation: The whole imaginary of death in Romero's films is parodistic but, again, it doesn't crawl on the social surface, it penetrates the core.

Although a commercial success, Romero's Dead Trilogy calls the death instinct by its name unlike most commercial product; it doesn't do deals with it. The golden principle according to which the culture industry builds the iterative rhythm of its music and the endless seduction-without-coitus of films and commercials is mercilessly revealed. Tanathos is served uncensored, and we're shown the sadomasochistic pleasure of anthropophagy. Criticising the triumph of death instinct in modern mass societies, Romero graphically — and painfully — describes the spoliation of the body and the narcosis of the conscience.

The most extreme visual element is actually the bite of the zombie. Also uneasy is audience identification with the "inner life" of characters who are no longer human. Psychological cretinism is the consequence of apocalypse, global catastrophe working as a process of natural selection in which only the "tough guys" survive. Day of the Dead is the aftermath of such inner dissolution, as displayed both in the stereotyped figures — the military and the crazy scientist — and the tragic character of Miguel: One tends to condemn his plausible, though nihilistic, "humanity" and stand for Sarah's improbable coldness and strength.

Although the paradox of selling the total destruction of the human race as "fun" has been exploited by the culture industry since Deluge by Felix Feist, and by the Bible since year dot, Romero's intent is to plot escape from the golden cage of amusement. If Hollywood decorates reality with sweet emotions, Romero's dark pessimism introduces the contagion of reality. Those who wish to sale to a realm of fantasy are confronted instead with the banality and sordid reality of their own miserable existence.

Still from Dawn of the Dead A critique of religious transcendence. In Counter-clock World Saint Paul's promise of fleshly resurrection comes true like a grotesque joke. Similarly, Dawn of the Dead 's famous motto — "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth" — sounds bitterly sarcastic, as if the only Jenseits reserved for mankind was hell. Mankind, that has "put all things in subjection under his feet" 1 Corinthians, Death offers instant immortality, although not very attractive.

Romero's hordes of soulless bodies could be described as a materialist resurrection, were it not so pathetically absurd. The very destiny of the living dead — worse than that of their human victims — is tragic and pointless: Religious thinkers and Idealist philosophers assure us that the first historical traces of human "self-consciousness" should be dated back to the "discovery" of death. If the most ancient exercises in stone-tool making — Omo valley, Africa, 2.

In , deriving the word humanitas from the Latin verb humando to inhume , Giambattista Vico As a forerunner of Hegel, Vico provides us with a mix of ideological sophisms and concrete historical analyses which continuously challenge his theological perspective.

By stressing the practical side of prehistoric burials — the very organization of social space presupposes the care of the dead — Vico Burial is an act by which life is given a metaphysical meaning. Once hidden from view, death makes life autonomous and absolute. Only once putrefaction is hidden away, death becomes a shock for the living eyes, testifying the limit itself of life — like Barbara becoming insane after she's seen the corpse on the stairs in Night of the Living Dead.

Death becomes a phenomenon seen through the eyes of something Life that defines itself as something else, other. This means that the Life-Death relation is not a static but a dramatic opposition, i. Thus, it's not so much that zombies and other assorted monsters symbolize "the ultimate other," they rather unmask "Otherness" as a consequence of our ancestral terror.

Once recognized that "Otherness" is just the ontological hypostazation of such fear, the subtleties of most contemporary philosophers reveal their affinity with the basic instincts of the Neanderthal. Religious transcendence is the spirit hiding behind the post-modernist totem par excellence. Still from Dawn of the Dead Death and the self. In Totem and Taboo , Freud tried to explain why primitive cultures perceive the dead as bad daemons. Foreshadowing Romero's nightmare, Freud wrote: The dead kill; the skeleton, according to which we imagine Death today, tells us, that death itself is only an assassin" Freud, Once someone dies, his soul comes back to haunt his relatives and the village.

But, this does not explain why the souls of the dead are perceived like enemies, disgust for decomposition is certainly not the cause of the taboo Freud, Starting from his psychoanalytic praxis, Freud knew that an ambivalent emotion is always involved in the death of our friends and relatives, caused by unconscious wishes of death. Talking about an "agreement between the mental lives of savages and neurotics," Freud suggested that primitive peoples produce a reaction against the hostility latent in their unconscious similar to that expressed as obsessive self-reproach in the case of neurotics.

This hostility, anyway, works in a slightly different way amongst savages. The defence against it takes the form of displacing it on to the object of the hostility, on to the dead themselves. A procedure known as projection. Caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of libidinal anarchism and repressive sublimation, Freud refused the scandalous implications of Self ambivalence, opting for conservative pessimism about human nature.

Fortunately, Adorno's thoughts on death in the Dialectics of Enlightenment , Minima Moralia , Jargon of Authenticity and the Negative Dialectics [ 22 ] start with Freud, but end with opposite political conclusions. This explains why it is so easy to translate Romero's vision into the theoretical language of the Frankfurter School. It is the historical Urform of negative, critical thought, in as much as it negates the status quo and anticipates another state of things.

Adorno sees the Self not as a monad as such. Its monadic nature is part of its fraud, of the general Unwesen. Such stories are often squarely focused on the way their characters react to such an extreme catastrophe, and how their personalities are changed by the stress, often acting on more primal motivations fear, self-preservation than they would display in normal life.

There has been a growth in the number of zombie manga in the last decade, and in a list of "10 Great Zombie Manga", Anime News Network 's Jason Thompson placed I Am a Hero at number 1, considering it "probably the greatest zombie manga ever". In second place was Living Corpse and in third, Biomega , which he called "the greatest science-fiction virus zombie manga ever". Artist Jillian McDonald has made several works of video art involving zombies, and exhibited them in her show, "Horror Make-Up," which debuted on 8 September at Art Moving Projects, a gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Artist Karim Charredib has dedicated his work to the zombie figure. In , he made a video installation at villa Savoye called "Them!!! Zombies are a popular theme for video games, particularly of, but not limited to, the stealth , survival horror , first-person shooter and role-playing game genres. PopCap Games ' Plants vs. Zombies , a humorous tower defense game, was an indie hit in , featuring in several best-of lists at the end of that year.

The massively multiplayer online role-playing game Urban Dead , a free grid-based browser game where zombies and survivors fight for control of a ruined city, is one of the most popular games of its type. DayZ , a zombie-based survival horror mod for ArmA 2 , was responsible for over , unit sales of its parent game within two months of its release.

Romero would later opine that he believes that much of the 21st century obsessions with Zombies can be traced more towards video games than films, Noting that it was not until the film Zombieland that a Zombie film was able to grose more the million. Outside of video games, zombies frequently appear in trading card games , such as Magic: The Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh! The game Humans vs. Zombies is a zombie-themed live-action game played on college campuses. Writing for Scientific American , Kyle Hill praised the game The Last of Us for the game's plausibility, which based its zombie enemies on a fictional strain of the Cordyceps fungus, which has real-world parasitic properties.

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Zombie Apocalypse providing tips to survive a zombie invasion as a "fun new way of teaching the importance of emergency preparedness". It uses these to underscore the value of laying in water, food, medical supplies, and other necessities in preparation for any and all potential disasters , be they hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, or hordes of zombies. Do they run faster in warmer temperatures? Do they freeze if it gets too cold? Michael Jackson 's music video Thriller , in which he dances with a troop of zombies, has been preserved as a cultural treasure by the Library of Congress' National Film Registry.

The Brooklyn hip hop trio Flatbush Zombies incorporate many tropes from zombie fiction and play on the theme of a zombie apocalypse in their music. They portray themselves as "living dead", describing their use of psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin mushrooms as having caused them to experience ego death and rebirth. In the s, zombie fiction emerged as a distinct literary subgenre, with the publication of Book of the Dead and its follow-up Still Dead: Featuring Romero-inspired stories from the likes of Stephen King , the Book of the Dead compilations are regarded as influential in the horror genre and perhaps the first true "zombie literature".

Horror novelist Stephen King has written about zombies including his short story " Home Delivery " and his novel Cell concerning a struggling young artist on a trek from Boston to Maine in hopes of saving his family from a possible worldwide outbreak of zombie-like maniacs. Zombies are slate wipers.

Martin's Press stated "In the world of traditional horror, nothing is more popular right now than zombies The living dead are here to stay. The zombie also appears as a metaphor in protest songs, symbolizing mindless adherence to authority, particularly in law enforcement and the armed forces. Organized zombie walks have been staged, either as performance art or as part of protests that parody political extremism or apathy.

A variation of the zombie walk is the zombie run. Here participants do a 5k run wearing a belt with several flag "lives".

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If the chasing zombies capture all of the flags the runner becomes "infected". If he or she reaches the finish line—which may involve wide detours—ahead of the zombies the participant is a "survivor". In either case an appropriate participation medal is awarded. Researchers have used theoretical zombie infections to test epidemiology modeling. One study found that all humans end up turned or dead. This is because the main epidemiological risk of zombies, besides the difficulties of neutralizing them, is that their population just keeps increasing; generations of humans merely "surviving" still have a tendency to feed zombie populations, resulting in gross outnumbering.

The researchers explain that their methods of modelling may be applicable to the spread of political views or diseases with dormant infection. Their work has been featured in Forbes , New York Magazine , and other publications. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Zombie disambiguation. List of zombie video games and Survival horror. List of zombie novels. Zombie walk and Zombie Squad. Legacy of the Living Dead". The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human. The quotation cited is: Check date values in: Retrieved 2 October Romero Dawn of the Dead Working draft Horrorlair. The Visual Art of Magic in Haiti.

The New York Times. Retrieved 31 October Retrieved 2 February Of Cannibals and Kings: Primal Anthropology in the Americas. Retrieved 12 March Dust Tracks on a Road. University of Illinois Press, , p. Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Cultural Power, Resistance, and Pluralism: University of California Press. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Discourse, Accusations and Subjective Reality". The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Retrieved 9 March BoD — Books on Demand.

Retrieved 28 March World Cultural Psychiatry Research Review. Archived from the original PDF on 6 February Encyclopedia of the Zombie: Retrieved 10 May Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. Archived from the original on 20 June Retrieved 5 November Lovecraft in the Comics". Archived from the original on 12 September George Romero's Dawn of the Dead". Reappraising an Undead Classic. Icons of Horror and the Supernatural.

An Anatomy of Modern Horror. Archived from the original on 14 July Guardian News and Media Limited. Retrieved 12 May George Romero's "Dead" Films". Retrieved 4 December Retrieved 19 May Gospel of the Living Dead: