Ten Little Zombies: A Love Story
The cover of Ten Little Zombies: A Love Story.
There lurk some stranger, darker corners here within the Butterflies & Aliens Library of Literary Eccentricities & Rarities. Our resident Butterfly-in-Chief and I have on more than one occasion been described as sitting on the weird end of the human spectrum. Case in point, one of my earliest memories of adventuring with said Butterfly-in-Chief was a road trip from Edmonton to Calgary, wherein we found ourselves in a used bookstore with me busting a gut laughing over a book titled Unpleasant Ways to Die, the catalyst for my “Funny Books About Death” collection… but that’s a story for another post.
But it is against that backdrop, in honour of the annual celebration of love and flower shops that we call Valentine’s Day, that I share one of my favourite books of the love poetry genre, Ten Little Zombies: A Love Story by Andy Rash.
One could be excused for, at first blush, dismissing this little volume as just a silly, if rather morbid, bit of humour. It was published a year after the release of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and has a similar mashup literature vibe. And as a riff on the popular children’s poem Ten Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed, and illustrated as it is with cartoons, this book easily gets swept into our society’s continuing tendency to dismiss certain books as less “literary” or less artistic.
Close up of the title page and end papers for Ten Little Zombies: A Love Story.
But upon closer inspection, and more with each groan- and giggle-filled re-read, Ten Little Zombies stands out to me for having a rare level of artistic integrity and unity as a book. This consistency of artistic vision, I suspect, comes in large part from the artist/creator, Andy Rash, not only being the poet, but also the illustrator and designer for this book. Also no surprise to see that it was published by Chronicle Books, the same publisher who released Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine ennealogy, a series that demonstrates a similar unity of vision and of which I am such a huge fan.
The choice of every word, the design and placement of every image, every splash of red ink (and the one literally and figuratively brilliant hit of acid yellow), rises out of the singular vision of the one artist. The cover too is on point, with its eerie grey-on-black imagery, then wrapped in a gorgeous red dust jacket printed with strategic hits of gloss (an effect unfortunately lost in the accompanying photo).
Even the choice of fonts for the typography – Badhouse Bold and Corrosion – add to the overall effect, both in their name and actual look.
To pick up on the metaphor of book as performance (introduced in this earlier post), Ten Little Zombies isn’t the ‘ensemble performance’ typical of most modern publishing. Instead, it is more a one-person singer-songwriter-comedian show, produced by a single artist down to the costumes and set design. And in being such a well-delivered ‘solo’ performance, it sits deservedly in my mind with the likes of the aforementioned Griffin and Sabine series, or the books by Virginia Woolf that she hand-printed herself at the Hogarth Press.
The end result is a book whose dark humour – and its weirdly heartwarming message of ultimate love and sacrifice – gets delivered and reinforced with every detail. As Rash says in the jacket blurb, “Nothing can stop love. Wait… not love… Zombies. Nothing can stop zombies.”
And so with that thought, I wish you a most Happy Valentine’s Day!
– Winston
