My Atwood Projet, Part 14: The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home

The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home (2013), Atwood’s first publication after the conclusion of the MaddAddam series in 2013, is a quick fun read, a novella that I could only find on Wattpad, in the form of a blog. Is it by Naomi Alderman, author of The Power, and dedicated to Atwood, as the Wattpad blog states? Or was it coauthored by the two of them, as the book cover image suggests? Alderman is mentioned in the memoir as a mentee of Atwood’s, whom she chose because Alderman was not “in awe” of her.  

Happy Zombie alternates between two points of view, that of Okie, a young girl whose mother-turned-zombie has just eaten her father; and Clio, Okie’s grandmother, to whom Okie must now bring her zombie mother for safekeeping. Clio is a familiar Atwood trope: an older woman with a secret and a dim view of the young, like Iris in The Blind Assassin. One might assume that the younger Alderman wrote Okie’s sections, and Atwood wrote Clio’s. 

The plot takes a couple of twists and turns as Okie heads out on her quest to deliver her subdued mother, with the help of delivery driver and love interest Hughes. Clio waits for her granddaughter at home, reflecting on her husband’s experimental anti-Alzheimer’s energy drink, “Glowing Skull,” that launched the  Zombiepocalype.  

If you haven’t read Alderman’s novel The Power (2017), you should. She dedicates it to Atwood and her partner Graeme Gibson. The novel has been compared to The Handmaid’s Tale, and I see Atwood’s mentoring influence, especially in the frame story. The male author of the book, a historian, presents it as “the most plausible narrative” of the time when women gained physical power over men, in the form of electricity generated in organs called “skeins” near their collarbones. This physical power allowed women to control and even rape men, flipping the power dynamic and leading to the situation of female dominance in the frame story. The male author who has researched and written this history appeals to his female mentor for help publishing it; she proposes that he publish under a female name, since no one is likely to believe such an incredible claim coming from a mere man.

This conceit reminds me of the way both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments are presented within the frame narrative of an academic conference, which reassures us that Gilead did not last, but also casts some doubt on the narratives.