I’ve now written enough books and comics to know there’s two things I seem to have a knack for writing about – Sex and Violence. There’s also two themes that seem to fascinate me – Religion and Politics. As you can imagine, my books don’t get discussed at many polite dinner parties.

So next time you find yourself in the Royal Box at Ascot, or propping up the bar at the Debutante’s Ball, don’t expect anyone to lean over and ask: “have you read Way of the Barefoot Zombie yet?”. That’s my new novel from Abaddon. It’s out this month and it’s why Gentleman Joe Gordon has let me take over the blog for this one guest spot.

There’s a lot of hot topics in Way of the Barefoot Zombie, there’s a lot of gore and naturally there’s a lot of zombies. For once though the zombies aren’t the villains, and not all of the blood is on their hands. You see the book takes place on a private island in the Caribbean where bankers, hedge-funders  and aspiring billionaires go to learn how to become richer and more powerful than anyone has ever been.

This island contains the world’s only captive colony of zombies. The visitors live alongside the zombies in order to learn to be like them. They dress like the zombies, eat what they eat and kill what they kill in order to release their own inner zombies. When they’ve managed to harness the zombie’s single minded lust for blood nothing will stop them making a killing on the markets.

I first pitched this idea to Abaddon at the beginning of 2007 at the same time as I pitched my previous novel Dawn Over Doomsday. My editor Jonathan Oliver (who also edits Rebellions great range of 2000 AD graphic novels – Joe) obviously decided to go with Dawn first and in doing so showed some of the uncanny prescience and ability to read the zeitgeist that make him one of the best genre editors around. Two and a half years, and an economic crisis later, zombies have never been hotter and the book couldn’t be more topical.

Zombies have always done great box office in times of economic hardship. It was in 1929 at the height of the great depression that the word ‘zombie’ first appeared in the west, in the pages of a book called The Magic Island by W G Seabrook. Then in 1932, with the breadlines stretching around the block, Bela Lugosi starred in the White Zombie. The walking dead made their big screen debut and a horror icon was born.

The zombie is the monster we turn to when times are hard. Blood-sucking, elitist Vampires remind us too much of the stock brokers and politicians who put us in this current mess, while feral, head-banging werewolves are too busy howling at the moon to worry about money. Zombies have always made the best posterboys when it comes to recession.

It’s not hard to see why either. The zombie is a massively flexible icon. They can easily stand for the huge mass of the unemployed. Those of us with jobs can feel as insecure as a survivor in a zombie movie. At any moment in a recession we too might fall prey to economic forces and find ourselves as redundant members of society, shambling around like purposeless zombies ourselves.

Zombies don’t just represent our fears about unemployment. They are the ultimate faceless horde that threatens to overwhelm us. In the 1930s America was just ending a two decade occupation of Haiti, so the zombies in those early films were often Haitian natives. These zombies were in thrall to a white master, but at any moment they threatened to turn on their colonial oppressors, heroes and villains alike.

Over the years zombies have continued to adapt so that they mirror current fears. Whether it’s a fear of communism, terrorism or sixties radicalism, the zombie has always played on our contemporary terrors at a time when things look bad. At the heart of these fears has always been the struggle between the individual and the masses. The fight against a soulless and unfeeling enemy with whom there is no common ground and no chance of identifying. It doesn’t matter that they look human, you can’t reason with them, they have no mercy and they just want to kill you.

Of course it doesn’t stop with killing you; they also want to infect you. All they have to do is bite you or even bleed on you and before you know it you’ll be coming back as one of them. Every great economic downturn throws up fears of contagion. In the 20s it was Spanish Influenza, in the 80s it was AIDS and in the 00s it’s Swine Flu. Zombies it seems always come in the form of a plague, sweeping across the globe in a matter of weeks and leaving a post apocalyptic landscape in their wake.

(Bubba, one of the great poster boys for the zombie apocalypse, from George Romero’s Day of the Dead)

It’s this same apocalypse that points to what I think is the deepest fear that the zombie embodies. Time and again in zombie fiction, the living protagonists look at the walking dead and mutter: “they are us”. I think this is because the zombie can be seen as a secret reflection of our society, mindlessly consuming material goods and natural resources just as a zombie consumes human flesh. Like a zombie in search of prey we overwhelm other cultures and convert them into consumer societies to expand our market. All the while we fear that this endless expansion will inevitably bring about the sort of societal break down that most modern zombie films depict.

Great monsters don’t only command fear though. They also make you respect, admire and want to be them. In hard times we need some of the zombie’s defiant and unrelenting spirit. Zombies take everything you can throw at them (short of a head-shot) and they still keep coming. They’ve given death the middle finger and refuse to lie down just because they’re no longer alive. Talk about ‘never say die’ – if that’s not the zombie’s central message I don’t know what is. They’re living-dead proof that no matter how apocalyptically bad things get all you have to do is pick yourself up and keep on coming and you’ll win in the end. Cos zombies always, always win. It’s in their contract.

So if you’ve read this far I’m guessing that, like me, you too will want to be on the winning team come the big apocalypse. But you might be wondering just how you’re going to get in touch with your ‘inner zombie’. The answer my friend is simple, head on over to your local branch of FP as soon as you’ve read this and buy a copy of Way of the Barefoot Zombie. Don’t delay, do it now! You owe it to yourself.

It will change your life. No really. C’mon, would I lie to you?

Way of the Barefoot Zombie is out now; Jasper has a shiny, brand-new website where you can follow him here.