A questionable Shape
'A Questionable Shape' by Bennet Simms
Sims plays with our collective knowledge of the undead, interweaving his zombies’ penchant for the familiar with our own familiarity with the subject and his narrator’s internal struggle with those he is most familiar with, so that the novel becomes, among other things, an exploration of the very concept of familiarity.
Defamiliarization: a process by which you try to remove certain associations with the faces of the people you love. FIGHT THE BITE: The illustration featured a blank-faced man and a blank-faced woman seated in profile, staring into each other’s eyes, as if competing in a blinking contest. Between their pupils a single horizontal line extends, and crawling across this wire is a series of wriggles, such as a cartoonist might use to depict heat rising off of a road. But what each wriggle really resembles — in this context — is a graveyard worm, inching from one eye to the other. As the caption explains, the participants are projecting these wriggles to "estrange" each other’s faces.
“What we know about the undead so far is this: they return to the familiar,” the narrator begins. “…They will climb into their own cars and sit dumbly at the wheel, staring out the windshield into nothing. A man bitten, infected, and reanimated fifty miles from home will find his way back, staggering over diverse terrain — which, probably, he wouldn’t have recognized or been able to navigate in his mortal life — in order to stand vacantly on a familiar lawn.”
“wander to nostalgically charged sites from their former lives,”
Thomas Hardy (“My spirit will not haunt the mound/ Above my breast/ But travel, memory-possessed/ To where my tremulous being found/ Life largest, best.”)
He observes Rachel closely as to try to understand her multiple times. she lies on a red blanket on the grass, intent on protecting her white sweater from grass stains, when “a rogue dead leaf” becomes enmeshed in the fine fuzz of the
Sims plays with our collective knowledge of the undead, interweaving his zombies’ penchant for the familiar with our own familiarity with the subject and his narrator’s internal struggle with those he is most familiar with, so that the novel becomes, among other things, an exploration of the very concept of familiarity.
Defamiliarization: a process by which you try to remove certain associations with the faces of the people you love. FIGHT THE BITE: The illustration featured a blank-faced man and a blank-faced woman seated in profile, staring into each other’s eyes, as if competing in a blinking contest. Between their pupils a single horizontal line extends, and crawling across this wire is a series of wriggles, such as a cartoonist might use to depict heat rising off of a road. But what each wriggle really resembles — in this context — is a graveyard worm, inching from one eye to the other. As the caption explains, the participants are projecting these wriggles to "estrange" each other’s faces.
“What we know about the undead so far is this: they return to the familiar,” the narrator begins. “…They will climb into their own cars and sit dumbly at the wheel, staring out the windshield into nothing. A man bitten, infected, and reanimated fifty miles from home will find his way back, staggering over diverse terrain — which, probably, he wouldn’t have recognized or been able to navigate in his mortal life — in order to stand vacantly on a familiar lawn.”
“wander to nostalgically charged sites from their former lives,”
Thomas Hardy (“My spirit will not haunt the mound/ Above my breast/ But travel, memory-possessed/ To where my tremulous being found/ Life largest, best.”)
He observes Rachel closely as to try to understand her multiple times. she lies on a red blanket on the grass, intent on protecting her white sweater from grass stains, when “a rogue dead leaf” becomes enmeshed in the fine fuzz of the