By Steve Hockensmith
Keeping the undead at bay has never been easier. Thanks to such visionaries as George Romero and the National Rifle Association, we all stand ready for any onslaught of flesh-craving ghouls. My basement bunker is packed wall to wall with automatic weapons, ammo, and grenades, and I’m sure yours is, too.
Bring it on, coffin jockeys! America’s got your brains right here!
Once upon a time, however, fighting off zombies wasn’t so simple. Today, with our common household Glocks, Uzis, and AK-47s, it’s easy to forget the challenges our ancestors faced when fending off their slavering, shambling, brains-craving neighbors. Not only were such miracles of modern science as the tommy gun and the Claymore mine still but wistful dreams, the manners and morays of the day often made zombie-killing even more difficult than it had to be.
I recently found myself with reason to dig into the undead-dispatching ways of our forefathers when I was asked to write Dawn of the Dreadfuls, a prequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. As my book would be a lightly fictionalized account of the trials and tribulations of the Bennet family, a real-life clan of English zombie slayers active during the Regency era, I had to acquaint myself with the zombie-killing methodology of the early 19th century. What I found were two very different approaches. On the one hand was the pragmatic if hard-to-master discipline known as “the Deadly Arts” — the Eastern-influenced fighting skills the young ladies of the Bennet family would be forced to learn in the course of my book. On the other hand was the traditional, proper, English approach to dealing with the undead. A few simple comparisons will demonstrate why SPOILER ALERT!!! the Bennets are still alive at the end of Dawn of the Dreadfuls and so many of their acquaintances are not.
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