I have been looking at the novels I've written or am writing, The Lion of Solkara, Summer's Blood, and the Kingdom of the Dead. And much to my amazement they all have zombies in one form or another. It doesn't really matter if they're the ghouls from tLoS or the lifeless from SB or the straight out zombies from KotD they are all zombies.
I can't believe I didn't see it before, I thought my Dawn of the Dead meets Lord of the Rings idea for KotD was totally different than my other novels. The only real difference is the role the zombies have in the novel. In tLoS they are a mad necromancer’s horde, in SB they are created when the Lord of the Underworld accidentally rips through the planes of existence into the world of the living, while the Winter Court and Summer Court are at war, in Chapter 22 of a 30 chapter novel.
Maybe KotD will get the zombies out of my system and I can write something a little different.
I just finished my Roar of the Crowd sub, it came out to be a 5,200 word monster of a short story, about twice as long as most of my short fiction, which worked out really well considering they have a 5,000 word minimum.
I have decided that tLos is just going to take too much time to edit, and have retired the novel. I will be concentrating on the other two, and my new idea.
How much of that is due to our modern impulse to classify though? Sometimes it's good to just let a monster be unique. I understand what you mean about having your antagonists share certain qualities, as most of mine tend to be dead as well, but I would hesitate to lump them all under the category of zombie. I like to think of monsters as often unique to the story.
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