Please welcome today’s guest writer, Gabby Alspaugh. Gabby graduated in 2023 with a degree in history and data science.
My two biggest childhood fears were dogs and zombies. The fear of dogs has lessened to a mild aversion, but the fear of zombies has unfortunately not lessened—to the slight dismay of my husband, who would love it if I read World War Z by Max Brooks (I prefer Devolution). So it was a bit of a surprise last week when I picked up A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims—which is about three friends, Mazoch, Vermaelen, and Rachel, searching for loved ones in Baton Rouge during a zombie pandemic with a hurricane looming on the horizon—and decided to actually read it. Perhaps it was the promise of a more cerebral take on zombies, or perhaps a desire to get into the Halloween spirit, or maybe I just wanted to see the climate and zombies interplay with each other in a way that would make me root for climate change for once.
A Questionable Shape ended up being a profoundly terrifying experience for me, and the book will be haunting me for the entirety of fall. I’m sure that for any horror or zombie aficionados this book is mild, but for me, it reflected back two events that had a large impact on my high school and college years: helping take care of my grandmother and COVID-19.
The zombies in this novel are very much dead, but they act akin to the infected in Ling Ma’s Severance—going back to the most familiar places they frequented in life, the places that are the most comforting and hold the fondest memories. I couldn’t help but see my grandmother reflected in the zombies. My grandmother, who had lived with my family since I was in elementary school, spent the last few years of her life with slowly advancing Alzheimer’s, which caused her to lose her memory and focus on older memories of her childhood and early marriage life. She would try to shuffle out the front door in order to go back to her childhood home and church, reliving memories. One of the characters in the novel has a very sympathetic view towards the infected zombies due to her upbringing providing hospice care to her bedridden father. Rachel views the zombies as people who deserve life (or un-life) just as much as a regular person. This view is too extreme for me, but the overwhelming love present in the view is something I can admire and even relate to a bit with my experience with my grandmother.
A Questionable Shape was published in 2013, but it’s very much a COVID novel. The characters self-isolate, and Baton Rogue is only just starting to come back to life. In one of the chapters, Vermaelen worries about ordering food in a diner, thinking that any flakes of skin from an asymptomatic carrier would turn him into a zombie. This is almost an exact mirror of a fear I had a month before going back to Calvin for my sophomore year. I was convinced that one asymptomatic worker at Commons would pass on COVID to the student population, and we would all get sick and die. Seeing my one-time fear played out in a zombie book was chilling. In a weird way, it hit home that I lived through a global pandemic, an objectively terrifying event. Sometimes, we need the strange and the surreal to help us process things, even six years later.
The best element of the text was the footnotes that popped up and provided vignettes on how the fictional US reacted to the pandemic. Carmen Maria Machado writes in the introduction that the footnotes in the text act as gravestones that allow the reader to act as the undead, descending below the text and coming back up (pg. 5). Cleverly used, the footnotes felt to me more like they were zombies themselves instead of the reader. I could go several pages without seeing them, relegating them to the back of my mind, and then a small footnote would pop up at the bottom of the page and then the next page would be slowly devoured by a growing spate of footnotes. I may not appreciate the zombie genre, but I do appreciate an author who plays around with the textual format.
Sims gave me a lot of questions to chew on. Would I be able to defamiliarize myself enough to kill a loved one who turned into a zombie next to me? Probably not. Do I believe Americans would react in the way they did in the novel? No, I don’t think the American public would be cool with a zombie prison barge floating off the coast of Louisiana. Do I like zombies now? No, but maybe I won’t close my eyes the next time my husband plays Plants vs. Zombies.
Gabby Freshly Alspaugh graduated in 2023 with a degree in history and data science. She received her MLIS from Indiana University in 2025. She currently lives in Columbus, Ohio, where she works as an academic librarian. In her free time, Gabby can be found baking gluten-free bread, looking for butterflies, or reading weird and interesting books.
