Everyone knows that zombies aren’t what they used to be. If anything, a decaying, shambolic corpse is probably the perfect metaphor for the genre as it exists right now: decrepit, feeble, and limping slowly towards nowhere in particular. There was a time, however, when zombie fiction was almost as popular as movie westerns were in their day, and that time, of course, was the early 2000s, inarguably the worst period of culture since the 1510s (your poetry sucks, Henry VIII). That’s not necessarily to say that zombie media was a reason for that decade’s irritating obsession with film grain and infuriating hatred for colors that are not gray, but it may go some way towards explaining why, as aesthetic tastes shifted, certain genres like comic book films or crime fiction survived the jump while zombies did not. Zombie stories, after all, are pretty g ...