Wrestlers, Soccer Moms, Blind Recipe Savants, and Zombies, Oh My: Stephen Graham Jones’ Zombie Bake Off

For a while, when I was reading for the now defunct http://www.HorrorReader.com and other sites, we were in the midst of a wave of renewed interest for zombies. Folks were really jazzed by Brian Keene’s debut, by the decent box office returns for 28 Days Later (2002), the cleverness of Shaun of the Dead (2004), the flashy remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004), and Romero’s return to the living dead with Land of the Dead (2005), various video game franchises, and even The Walking Dead both as comics as well as the then in-development weekly series.  We got a lot of books from Permuted Press and similar small press publishers, all targeting the end of the world (with the shambling dead thrown in). For every instance of Catherynne M. Valente’s “The Days of Flaming Motorcycles” or Chesya Burke’s “CUE: Change” there were a dozen or more tales that returned to the ideas that were original in 1968 and 1978. These days, a lot of these sorts of books now blur into one another, sad to say. I really wish Stephen Graham Jones’ eleventh book had been on my radar at that time. Unfortunately for me, it would not see publication until 2012, long after I was done with the review gig for Horror Reader (though not for the occasional outing in other paying magazines and sites.

This is a book that does more than apply a new coat of bloody crimson paint to old ideas, fashion them between covers, and then output them. No, this one has legs. This one has heart and soul and more than a little creative spirit purring along. Yes, it’s a zombie story. Yes, it’s cinematic as hell. Yes, it has a group of survivors caught in the midst of a zombie outbreak. However, it’s got some other things to say as well, and it has the mind and sense of humor to say them well.

The Lubbock Municipal Coliseum is a venue for different sorts of shows of local interests. It’s the kind of place that offers up a Gun Show for a full weekend (though that won’t be for weeks yet). On the Friday when the novel opens, there’s the Recipe Days event for grammas and soccer moms to show off their skills, trade tips, and maybe, just maybe identify and therefore assimilate some tasty secret ingredients and techniques for their own dishes. Recipe Days was a daytime show. The evening is reserved for a wrestling gig, with all sort of colorful, ripped characters to show up, including a head-to-head event between the gothic Xombie and the gleefully childish Tiny Giant. Others have equally enjoyable names, such as Jerry the Pharoah, Trucker Joe, Tennessee Stud, or Jonah the Whale. Unfortunately, the wrestlers arrive way too early and gum up the works. Also, they start trash talking and fighting in the middle of the Recipe Days event, really freaking out the ladies working and playing there.

Coordinator and administrator Terry manages to coordinate them into some private access sections of the Coliseum by negotiating a terrible deal with manager (and all-around douche canoe) and giving him access to that lucrative Gun Show weekend for a return trip. While the wrestlers are doing their thing in the private area, they come across some donuts laid out by a local baker, intended for the evening’s security detail. Of course, most of the wrestlers eat them.

What they don’t know is that these pastries have been corrupted by proximity to a strange accident when some high out of their minds teens rammed a pedestrian with Dad’s donut delivery vehicle. Instead of copping to the issue, they dumped dud in the back with tomorrow’s delivery. He leaked something horrible into those glazed rings, and now that something horrible is leaking into the wrestlers themselves. Soon enough, they start to transform into undead, eating, and killing machines. The soccer moms don’t have a chance.

Because of the requirements of cheap shot showmanship, a lousy publicity stunt leaves the doors chained shut, the power unreliable, and the telecommunications inaccessible. So, a wave of wrestling zombies makes its messy way back into the Coliseum proper and samples the raw and baked goods there. Soon enough, Terry, her security guard brother Chapman, the manager Johnny T, the two wrestling titans Xombie and Tiny Giant, the blind recipe savant Madame Beatrice, local news reporter Kent, and a handful of others are doing their damnedest to survive the mounting horror. Things get really twisted when they discover different generations to the living dead … Will they figure out a way to stave off the ravenous hungers long enough to escape? Stephen Graham Jones throws absurdity, gut munching horror, satiric jabs, and some real heart into a blender and hits puree in the novel Zombie Bake-Off.

Here we get a peek at yet another side of Jones’ fiction. This is not the meditative horror of The Only Good Indians or the moody explorations of serial killers on the road like Interstate Love Song. Zombie Bake-Off is closer in spirit to Flushboy or My Heart is a Chainsaw, novels that are not afraid to either embrace the absurd or turn familiar cinematic genre tropes on their heads on a surface level, but which are beautifully crafted examinations of voices under that. This is not an intimate first-person account. It’s a third person book that sometimes sticks for one character in a chapter or occasionally jumps from head to head to head in another. However, here we get a sense of Jones’ ear for the ways people talk. It might not be the street poetry of Elmore Leonard, but I’ve heard people like this nevertheless, and if I haven’t had direct experience, then the dialogue does not seem egregiously fabricated. Not a one of the characters in this book would rank high on the book smarts level (maybe Xombie, but he masks his education to meet his public’s expectations) but few of the characters are out and out, mind numbingly stupid. Some of the wrasslers are played for laughs, a couple of them have dumb moments, but we get the sense these folks are not necessarily the kind of horror movie central casting dipshit characters who should not have survived their childhood years. However, smart or savvy or sensible as they might be, everyone in the book makes decisions that seem to be the right ones at the time, and those decisions backfire as often as they succeed. Jones is having great fun with these characters, and his readers get to share in the fun.

Considering this moment from the anarchic sequence when the zombies first explode onto the Coliseum’s main floor:

Enter a serious grandmother. She’s panting, but the look in her eyes—it’s like there’s nothing here she hasn’t seen before. More like she’s just tired of it more than really scared.

She hears the cupcake cook, pushes aside enough board to get t her.

The cupcake cook smiles, reaches her hand up to be saved.

Instead, the grandmother angles the cupcake cook’s head over, to see the bites taken out of her, then shakes her own head, takes the revolutionary mixer from the folds of her skirt and zings the blade around for a second or two, to show what’s coming.

“Close your eyes,” she tells the cupcake cook.

When the cupcake cook won’t, the grandmother shrugs, raises the mixer anyway.

“W-Why?” It’s the last thing the cupcake cook’s going to say.

“Mercy,” the grandmother says, and drives the beaters into the cupcake cook’s mouth, all the way through to the back of her head, so that brains are whipping everywhere.

The grandmother rises, scans around with her angel of death eyes for the next woman in need of her particular brand of mercy.

But now she has frothy brains all over her shawls. In her hair. On her reading glasses.

She becomes aware of it, stops, shrugs out of the shawl.

It’s already too late, though. Facing her, just watching in wonder, his nostrils tasting every last morsel of her, is Jonah the Whale.

The grandmother laughs. Mostly at herself.

“So you think this is how it is?” she says to him, the mixer at her side like a pistol she can fastdraw. “You think I lived seventy-six years just to be dinner to your kind?”

Jonah cocks his head to her, and she lets her shawl slide down, fishes a locket up from the depths of her blouse.

Her grandkids, smiling.

She kisses the boy, then the girl, then pulls the locket hard, snapping the chain.

“Eat this,” she says to Jonah, and opens her mouth, crams the mixer as deep in as she can, then pushes deeper.

The first thing to fly out is her dentures, and then her tongue, and then the pink cottage cheese that holds all her memories.

By the time Jonah gets to her, there’s not enough left to eat.

He stands, holding her by the back of the neck, and howls in rage, her locket chain still trailing from her fingers.

Zombie Bake-Off, 124-125

We are programmed to expect that soccer moms and grandmotherly sorts are going to react to day one of the zombie apocalypse with surprise, alarm, and a complete lack of belief or understanding. As though our culture has not been inundated with visual representations of the things since a group of Pittsburgh filmmakers unleashed a nightmarish milestone in independent film way back in 1968. Not every grandmothers of 2012 would have seen the thing first hand, but many likely have and the quite a few of the rest probably know the premise.

Leave it to Stephen Graham Jones to write a clever scene like this. It seems like it should have been done to death by now (we went through the cynical self-aware 1990s, after all!) but still reads as fresh in 2021.

And the book overflows with this kind of wit and savvy. It’s not an Important novel, but it has no pretensions to being one. This is an entertainment that takes its understanding of the genre seriously and then presents a fun and often chuckle worthy horror story.

Zombie Bake-Off is a fun read, with some clever inversions of familiar tropes, some considered studies of different characters, a whole hell of a lot of dark as hell humor. It’s an “early” novel in Jones’ career, and the prose is perhaps not quite as polished in more recent efforts, but the book is a marvel of tight sentences and quotable dialogue. Instead, of yet another riff on George A. Romero, I kind of wish this book were in the pipeline for adaptation into a film. It would be like nothing else out there. At least we have the book and the bizarre images it pushes into our heads, and that is good enough. For now.

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Zombie Bake-Off is available in eBook, paperback, and audiobook.

“Wrestlers, Soccer Moms, Blind Recipe Savants, and Zombies, Oh My: Stephen Graham Jones’ Zombie Bake-Off” is copyright 2021 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Cover image and quotes taken from the Lazy Fascist Press paperback edition, released in 2012.

WORKS CITED

Jones, Stephen Graham. Zombie Bake-Off. Lazy Fascist Press: 2012.

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