“I think because they scared me,” zine publisher Davida Gypsy Breier says, explaining an interest in zombies that turned into her collaborative zombie zine Rigor Mortis two years back. “They’re still scary and it was good to be scared by something that wasn’t real. There’s almost something cathartic to let all of that anxiety out in something that—hey, cut-rate therapy, whatever you want to call it—but it was something that was very scary but it wasn’t actually dealing with the real-life stuff.”

Vampires may have sunk their teeth into popular culture, but in the quotidian world of politics, zombie references are rife. Reanimation of the dead is an easy metaphor for dealing with a reality that sometimes feels like it’s at the edge of apocalypse. In an Oct. 15 blog post at foreignpolicy.com, Australian economist John Quiggin, author of the recently published Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us, noted that the financial institutions behind the 2007 economic collapse “bailed out on such a massive scale by governments (and ultimately the citizens who must pay higher taxes for reduced services) have returned, in zombie form,” and that “[t]he same reanimation process has taken place in the realm of ideas.” In the July/August issue of Foreign Policy magazine, Tufts University international politics professor Daniel W. Drezner suggested an international relations theory for zombies, noting the zombie presence in a global entertainment culture: “If it is true that ‘popular culture makes world politics what it currently is,’ as a recent article in Politics argued, then the international relations community needs to think about armies of the undead in a more urgent manner” (italics his).

In 2007, Breier collided with a concentrated series of urgent matters. Her then partner—and now husband—was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Their son was about 1 year old. And the company she worked at was sold. Nothing like being a mother perhaps losing her job with a partner facing a life-threatening illness to make you want to seek an alternate reality.

Like, well, zombies. “It wasn’t actually dealing with the real-life stuff, the ‘Oh my god, what would happen if he doesn’t make it through treatment?’” Breier says, sitting at a Charles Village coffee shop. The petite brunette recounts all of this with an impressive calm and unguarded candor. “There was a lot of panic and anxiety—someone who goes through chemo for six months, it got almost more dangerous toward the end, when cancer was no longer a threat but the threat of infection, the threat of . . . just slogging through all that.”

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