Some of my favorite things about zombie movies are the details of the changed world. The dead grass, broken windows, toppled telephone poles, abandoned cars with missing wheels and trunks left open, boarded-up buildings, spent ammo shells, and other signs of struggle and desperation serve to create a fascinatingly creepy environment.
And that’s why I like Dead Inside: Do Not Enter so much. The book consists entirely of letters, hand-written warnings, and pages torn from journal entries that were written during the zombie pandemic. The notes are on matchbooks, napkins, photographs, advertisements, shopping lists, road maps, scraps of cardboard, and gum wrappers. Some of the notes are written with pen and pencil, others are written with lipstick, burnt wood, crayons, and blood.
The messages of the notes themselves tell the tale of the rise of the zombie pandemic, from tentative, joking questions about a “really bad flu,” escalating to confused panic, and later to grim acceptance of the new reality that the survivors now must live in.
In the introduction to Dead Inside, we learn that these notes had been found in a Dora the Explorer backpack. The first note presented in the book was written by the man who killed the owner of the backpack, a girl who was about 10 years old and had been bitten by a zombie (but had not yet turned into one). The man wrote “I opened her backpack and found all these notes and letters. This stuff is poisonous. No one in their right mind should read it. Reading this is like looking into the sun.”
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