“The introduction of the fast zombie into the genre did much more than amp up the dramatic action within the context of its various cinematic and literary incarnations; it destabilized the tripartite model of signification by shrinking the liminal space that exists between the living and the undead, thus fundamentally altering the phenomenological event that produces the zombie metaphor. The absence of the clearly demarcated symbolic liminal exacerbates the permanent status of urgency and threat to the stabilizing influences of civilization central to the zombie metaphor’s function as a sign, and begins to dismantle the familiar and comfortable terrain by which the living-self and undead-other remain fundamentally separate regardless of what metaphoric trope is being negotiated.

From The End of the Symbolic Liminal: Brian Keene and the Rise of the Fast Zombie to be presented by Andrew P. Williams (North Carolina Central University), February 23 at the American Literature Symposium in Savannah, Georgia