Song of the Living Dead

The zombies rose and walked, the country went mad, and then the zombies laid down again--all without committing a single act of violence. Traveling randomly across the east with a group of close friends, the restless dreamer Lionel Gathers witnesses first-hand the nightmarish confusion that the living dead bring upon the land in this tale that is both satire and elegy. It's a story of one man's despair over his country's inability to unite in crisis, a tale of sudden, random violence and illusions of America's greatness gone askew. When the zombies rise a second time and become anything but docile, the tale becomes darker, as Lionel struggles to understand the design of a universe lost in the realm of B-horror movies--and more vivid real-life tragedies. Adapted from the novel by Soren Narnia, originally published in 2003.

Music by Kevin MacLeod, incompetech.com

Om Podcasten

Works written and produced by Soren Narnia. The text of these stories is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA. Email: songofsadbirds@aol.com -- When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher asked me to sit next to a handicapped kid named Sean and help him along a little if I could. It wasn't easy, because he was quite slow, but I tried. When Sean got especially excited about something, or if he was told he had done something well, he would smile and shout out nonsense words. One of them I remember, which he used to shout many times over the few months I sat beside him, was "Sorinarneeya!" Again and again, it was a harmless word he used when he was happy, and seeing my puzzled expression would just make him say it once more, even more pleased than the first time: "Sorinarneeya!" For some reason that word stuck with me for years, until one day as an adult I realized how neatly and curiously it cut in half. And I thought that was so perfect, how this little gem of a thing had sprung from a bit of the absurd and a bit of the tragic. That seemed like all of life to me: momentary bits of perfection out of all the absurdity and tragedy. And amazingly, they just keep on coming. - SN