HSU IT Department

I just found out about this really unusual post-apoc book and wondered if anyone else has heard about it. (NB: No, I have no connection with the book or the author, so this isn't a veiled sales pitch!) It's called Ora et Labora et Zombies.

Dr. Thomas Schutten's wife, Ava, is out of town when the zombie apocalypse strikes, so the doctor and his young son flee to a nearby Benedictine abbey -- his and his wife's agreed-on meeting place in case of catastrophe. (Bonus points for planning ahead, Dr. Tom!). While waiting for Ava, hoping against hope that she'll make it, Tom writes her letters. The book consists of these letters.

So you're thinking, "Meh, it's an epistolary novel, big deal," right? But here's the kicker: you actually get the letters in the mail, as in via the US Postal Service. You get one letter a week; each one is 4-6 pages and there will be 72 of them overall. The author/publisher says this about it:

Ora et Labora et Zombies is comprised of seventy-two handwritten Letters of between 4-6 pages, reproduced on specially watermarked stationery with a hand-printed serigraph cover sheet. Each Letter will be published individually, as a weekly serial, and distributed to readers through the mail. This idiosyncratic method of publication aims to celebrate and prolong the disappearing experience of receiving letters in the mailbox, and also to create in the reader a sense of anticipation, of waiting as the dramatis personae must wait to discover what is happening.

Is this not a really original and fascinating combination of book art/art book/letterpress skill/zombie apocalypse/serial novel?? And these are a few of my favorite things, so I'm utterly intrigued. I've subscribed to the first two bundles and cannot wait to get the first ones!!

A professor from the University of Ottawa who specializes in mathematical modeling of biological events (flu, plagues, etc) has written a paper analyzing the spread pattern and potential deadliness of a zombie event. It's actually hugely amusing in its seriousness about a completely loony subject (kind of like Ben Bernanke talking about the federal deficit). Herewith some comments on same (or you can read the full paper in all its math-geek-cum-Hammer-films glory):

According to Smith, a major factor restraining normal plagues from utterly devastating humanity is that they tend to kill their victims, after which the sufferers can no longer move about and infect others. This is one reason the frightful Ebola virus has never spread, for instance: it knocks people down and then kills them so fast that they have only a limited chance to pass it on.

Not so with zombification. Once someone has died of Z-plague, they remain a mobile carrier. The factors which have prevented humanity being rendered extinct by the Black Death, smallpox, cholera etc don't apply. Smith?'s models assume traditional dull-witted shuffler zombies rather than the nimbler types popular in some recent film offerings, but nonetheless the dynamics of undead contagion remain implacable.

In sum? "Since all eigenvalues of the doomsday equilibrium are negative, it is asymptotically stable. It follows that, in a short outbreak, zombies will likely infect everyone...The disease-free equilibrium is always unstable."

Basically we're all DOOOOOOOMED.

Yikes. Also wow. Zombies, zombies everywhere!! In the end of course the book's not about them -- explaining them or fighting them or curing them -- it's very much about life. And yet there's a doomed quality about the characters; you sense that theirs will not be a happy ending. Even -- perhaps most clearly -- on the bright sunny days at the beginning, darkness hovers around the edges of the scene, waiting to close in. Post-(zombie) apocalypse, clearly; the clipping from the New York Times makes that clear. But lots of unanswered questions: who are the Sisterhood, how much do/did they know, how did they gain power, why did they do what they did to Gabrielle, why are the other villages different, why is there no travel/communication between villages, who built the fences, etc. Want more!! Sadly, I doubt there will be a sequel. Then again, the main character's still alive so perhaps...