Curing Zombies in "The Bone Temple"

"For instance, take Dracula. This monster came to fame with Bram Stoker's famous 1897 novel. In the book, the Count is an Eastern European ghoul, whose ambition is to storm England, enslave its women, and "pollute" its blood with vampirism. As historians recognize, the context of Stoker's book is of a time of anxious imperialism. The British Empire was extending deeply into distant lands, and "race" theory was telling the English that their "blood," while superior to other races,"

"Seabrook was a tortured soul, an alcoholic writer deeply traumatized by his experiences in the blood-soaked fields of World War I. For Seabrook, the zombie was a creature tailor-made to his experiences. He described them as "soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life." They perhaps reminded him of the ghastly walking wounded of the Great War."

Monsters shift to reflect the dominant fears and hopes of their eras. Dracula, popularized in 1897, appears as an Eastern European ghoul seeking to invade England, enslave its women, and "pollute" English blood, embodying late-19th-century imperial and racial anxieties and mirroring fears about foreign encroachment and inverted conquest. Contemporary zombie narratives, such as The Bone Temple, channel modern concerns about mental health and the idea of chemical cures. The zombie entered American mass culture through William Seabrook's 1929 account of Haiti, shaped by wartime trauma and described as "soulless human corpse...endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life," echoing Great War walking wounded.

Read at Psychology Today