The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks from the Apocalypse Steven C. Schlozman, MD
Illustrated by Andrea Sparacio
Grand Central Publishing, March 2011
ISBN: 978-0446564663
As the walking dead rise up throughout the world, a few brave doctors attempt to find a cure by applying forensic techniques to captured zombies.
A zombie plague known as ANSD (Ataxic Neurodegenerative Satiety Deficiency Syndrome) has been set loose upon the earth, which has effectively turned the majority of civilization into semi-mindless, flesh eating zombies. This leads to medical researchers on a remote island dissecting and experimenting on captured zombies seeking a cure with the belief that NGH types are classified as monstrous beasts who live to feed endlessly on human flesh.
Meanwhile on the coral Bassas between Madagascar and Africa, a research center has been established to find a cure. Led by renowned zombie expert Dr. Stanley Blum and Dr. Blanca Gutierrez, volunteers have come to help. They conclude that the disease works similar to catching the flu with prions playing a key role. They believe they are closing in on a vaccination, but abruptly they seem to have vanished. However, Dr. Blum’s The Zombie Autopsies’ journals have been found and are under review by the World Health Organization.
There are classified and disclosure messages throughout the book. Unlike the usual and unbelievable fake looking ‘classified’ type stamps, you will find real looking and sounding notes by ‘the government’. Even more impressive is the fact that each page looks to have been a scan of the notes actually written by Dr Blum. The background is not plain white paper as in a novel; it is crumpled looking paper with a font that really does look like handwriting. Then, every few pages there are the hand-drawn images that Dr Blum’s assistant is described to have drawn throughout the autopsies – all of them are fairly realistic and very gruesome.
Imagine that qualified doctors had been sent into a lab with a number of zombies to dissect and told to record exactly what they find. Each page flows through the few weeks that Dr Blum is at the facility, his dissection of the 4 zombies that lay in a containment chamber and his scientific findings. The fact that we only have the cryptic notes of a main character who is slowly loosing his humanity is wonderful. It leaves so much to the imagination, which has the same effect as the scariest action of a horror film taking place just off screen and just out of sight. What is alluded to, what is hinted at, what is taking place just off the page is much more frightening than what is detailed and laid out for you.
DR. STEVEN SCHLOZMAN of Harvard Medical School is an assistant professor of psychiatry and avid observer of the living dead. thezombieautopsies.com
