frankenstein in the age of the scammer
on zombies, the soul, and cheating death. real spooky shit.
MalonEmail but make it spooky. And Substacky. Dunno what I’m doing here, so just go with it.
Entirely by accident—and certainly not for the purposes of a newsletter I only seem capable of sending 1-2 times a year—I recently found myself in the middle of three unrelated stories that were all trying to answer the question of resurrection. Australian TV series Glitch, V.E. Schwab’s Vicious, and Rachel Harrison’s forthcoming debut The Return, all ask, more specifically: if we could suddenly raise our loved ones—or ourselves—from the dead, what would be lost in the process?
Glitch, which premiered in 2015 and hit Netflix globally a year later, starts in a rural cemetery, raising a handful of people seemingly at random from different eras throughout a small town’s ugly 200-year history. Vicious—which I picked up on account of all of my smart, bookish girlfriends seemed to absolutely love the shit out of it—focuses on two genius college friends-turned-rivals (who look, according to their descriptions, suspiciously like Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, but I digress) who experiment on themselves by inducing death to gain superpowers, ultimately becoming alienated psychopaths in the process. And The Return, a read-in-one-sitting horror that comes out in March of next year and which I cannot recommend preordering enough, sees death and resurrection (or disappearance and return, to be exact) through the lens of female friendships and young adult group dynamics, after a young woman disappears while hiking and then suddenly turns up a year later—only she’s come back “wrong.”
In each story, someone has cheated death. (Two out of three do it with some spooky, weird-science nonsense.) This cosmic scam of the departed and their loved ones begins (as always) as a blessing, and ends (as always) as a monstrous curse. They all posit that our thinking makes the unholy phenomenon so: in Glitch, the people who return are those about whom living residents were thinking at the moment of an experiment’s execution; Vicious assigns the risen a superpower based on their last coherent thought (“I want the pain to stop” gives one character the ability to manipulate the nervous system); and The Return suggests that whatever [redacted] thing summoned the protagonist Elise’s best friend Julie back to the living had to do with Elise’s own refusal to believe Julie had died. We all rage against the machine of life! But what if, in waging that battle, we won? Well, friends, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that when you boil them down, each story also answers that big question in more or less the same way: what we lose, in defying the order of the universe and coming back from the dead, is our souls.
Obviously, this theme is painfully well-tread territory. Mary Shelley asked the same question in 1818 and it’s been zombies all the way down since the 1970s—and that’s to say nothing of vampires. But frankly (or frankensteinly), it begs the question. Why do we still automatically assume, as a culture, that the dead coming back would, without question, be inhuman abominations that must be made right—by returning to the grave whence they came?
Now, look. I’m not, like, advocating for the Victor Frankensteins of the world; as you may know from following my writing/me as a person, if I were to name a demographic as my mortal (or immortal) enemies, it would be “rich men with the will and the means to discover how to live forever.” I’ve also staked a good portion of my professional ~brand~ on my love of dystopian fiction, a genre founded on the principle of “just because science can, doesn’t mean science should.” Suffice it to say that, in general, I find neoliberal and libertarian views on science reprehensible.
But that’s what really got me thinking about all three of these stories: they’ve all come (into my life, at least) at a time when the concept of “cheating death” is being warped by all sorts of new context. We live in a time of plunder, a time when cheating is all but the order of the day. Do biohacking and gene therapy constitute violating the laws of nature? (Arguably we’ve already violated a lot of “laws of nature” with vaccines and fracking and, like, eyeglasses and stuff.) What about terraforming? In this awful Age of Scamming, when the worst people get away with *gestures vaguely at everything*, what does “cheating death” mean except to hold onto life to spite a broken world?
Last year, a good friend of mine, a former EMT, and I got into an argument about medicine and death. I love the woman dearly, in part because our worldviews were formed at absolute opposite ends of the experiential spectrum and yet we still have both come to care fiercely about the same things—and as a result, her ability to test and push my opinions around is truly unmatched. The argument initially started because she insisted that CPR is less successful, long term, than you’d think, that most ER doctors have a DNR, or Do Not Resuscitate order, on their medical files, and I was certain that she was wrong, or at least overestimating the statistics. She wasn’t, and the conversation ended up reframing my understanding of what a near-death experience (or NDE, as the characters of Vicious call them) would actually look like.
The argument came to mind during a scene in Glitch wherein a character repeats that old chestnut: “The meaning of life is death.” Sure. I agree. I relished all three of these stories (though Glitch ended up telling a little harder than it showed). Ironically, though, the horror story is probably closer to real life in 2019 than it is a good allegory: 9 times out of 10, surviving an NDE seems like a fate worse than death. So yeah, philosophically, life is given meaning by the fact that it ends. But when life seems to be ending for all the wrong people (and flourishing for all the worst people), it kinda makes a girl hungry for a new paradigm, one where the dead not only come back better—they’re the ones who actually deserve to.
Housekeeping and News
As you can see, we’re on Substack now. Do you hate it? Do I hate it? I don’t know! Life is a rich tapestry, so let’s just wait and see.
If you liked my Star Trek: Discovery recaps, and if my last MalonEmail got you hyped about what I might have to say about HBO’s His Dark Materials series, you’re in luck: I’m going to be recapping it for Vulture when it premieres on November 3 (or 4th? It’s confusing. I’m sure we’ll figure it out).
Anything recent that you’re interested in reading me write about? Succession? TikTok? Freelancing advice? I’m not pitching anything these days, so I’m definitely open to requests re: making this newsletter fun for y’all. (I’m kidding about Succession, of course. That’s where I draw the line.)
Unsolicited, nonsequitur plug: go follow @carazozula on Instagram. Her Halloween makeup photos and tutorials are my lifeblood and it’s absurd she doesn’t have more followers (both because she’s good at makeup and because she’s a good human generally).