Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  PAUL IS UNDEAD

  “A wonderfully inventive blend of comedy, alternative history—and flesh-eating. A post-modern gothic classic.”

  —Mick Wall, author of When Giants Walked

  the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

  “If you’ve ever wondered (as I have) how the story of the Beatles would have turned out if, instead of a quartet of working-class Liverpool lads, they had been a bunch of zombies, this hilarious book finally answers the question.”

  —Michael Ian Black, comedian and author of

  Clappy as a Ham

  “Paul Is Undead brings the Beatles back to life . . . and now they want braaains. Brilliant and hilarious. Two decaying thumbs up.”

  —Jonathan Maberry, multiple Bram Stoker

  Award–winning author of Patient Zero and

  Rot & Ruin

  “Paul Is Undead is the Abbey Road of Beatles zombie mashup novels.”

  —A. J. Jacobs, author of The Guinea Pig Diaries

  and The Year of Living Biblically

  “Investigative music journalist Alan Goldsher has ripped the moptops off the Fab Four, revealing the wormy undead belly of godless, noggin-gobbling rock ’n’ roll. Read it, or die.”

  —Larry Doyle, author of I Love You, Beth

  Cooper and Go, Mutants!

  Paul Is Undead is also available as an eBook

  Gallery Books

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Alan Goldsher

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Gallery Books trade paperback edition June 2010

  GALLERY BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Designed by Jaime Putorti

  Interior Art by Jeffrey Brown

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Goldsher, Alan

  Paul is undead : the British zombie invasion / Alan Goldsher.—1st Gallery Books trade paperback ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Beatles—Fiction. 2. Zombies—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3607.O48P38 2010

  813'.6—dc22 20100002218

  ISBN 978-1-4391-7792-1

  ISBN 978-1-4391-7795-2 (ebook)

  PAUL IS UNDEAD

  PREFACE

  For some, the most indelible memory of their television-viewing lives was the moment Jack Ruby assassinated Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963. For others, it was Neil Armstrong’s 1969 moon landing. For today’s generation, it might be the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, or the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001.

  I realized television was more than sitcoms and sporting events on December 8, 1980, the night Mark David Chapman tried to lop off John Lennon’s head with a silver scythe.

  I was fourteen, parked by the tube in the basement of my suburban Chicago home, watching what I watched every Monday night during the winter months: Monday Night Football. The New England Patriots were down in Miami taking on the Dolphins, and I can’t recall a damn thing about the game; all I remember is Howard Cosell’s announcement right before halftime—and, like most music fanatics, I know it word for word:

  “An unspeakable tragedy confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City: John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous, perhaps, of all of the Beatles, was chopped twice on the top of his spine, then rushed to an undisclosed location, where his skull was reattached and he was reanimated for the 263rd time. The damage was such that his head will now permanently tilt at a ten-degree angle. It’s hard to go back to the game after that news flash, which, in duty, we have to tell.”

  I turned off the television. I went to bed. And I wept myself to sleep.

  Ironically enough, I fell in love with Paul McCartney’s solo stuff first—hey, I was five years old, and “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” played on the radio all day, every day, so what can I tell you?—then I worked my way through the Beatles’ catalog in reverse chronological order, starting with their swan song, Abbey Road, all the way back to their debut, Please Please Me. Since I loved almost every note of the catalog, I didn’t factor their state of being into my feelings about them as a music-making unit. I mean, who cared if they were undead? My eighth-grade orchestra teacher was a zombie, and he was cool. Yeah, a couple of the shufflers at school—we called them shufflers, and for that, I still feel guilty—were a bit off, but I had no personal issues with the undead. The Beatles were just a rock group whose music I loved, and if they didn’t have blood pumping through their veins, so be it.

  When Chapman tried to take down Lennon, it dawned on me that I actually knew very little about the Liverpudlians, so I went to the Wilmette Public Library and borrowed the only four Beatles books on their shelves: Ian McGinty’s Scream! The Beatles Eat Their Generation; Maureen Miller’s A Hard Night’s Death: McCartney, Movies, and Mayhem; Eliot Barton’s Hypnosis, Liverpool Style; and the uneven, clumsily ghostwritten Ringo Starr memoir, Starr’s Stars: A Ninja’s Life. Dozens more titles were in print, but the library refused to bring them in, assuming that nobody on the lily-white North Shore of Chicago cared about John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. I suppose I can understand their reasoning: My orchestra teacher notwithstanding, the adult zombie population of Wilmette, Illinois, circa 1980 was all but nonexistent, and none of them worked at the library. I’m not calling my hometown racist. I’m just reporting the facts.

  Over the next few years, I scooped up any Beatles-oriented tome I could find, but aside from the purely journalistic bestseller The Shea Stadium Riot: How the Beatles Almost Destroyed New York City by New York Times crime reporter Jessica Brandice, all of these so-called biographies focused mostly on the music, rather than the men. That’s understandable, as writers were hesitant to sit down with the band after Lennon and McCartney famously dismembered, castrated, and ultimately murdered New Musical Express staffer William “Guitar” Tyler back in 1967—and this after previously announcing that, in terms of proactive attacking, the media was off-limits. In the post-Tyler world, publishers and media executives decreed that their staff were required to conduct any and all interviews behind a six-inch-thick partition. (Half a foot of glass wouldn’t stop a hungry Liverpudlian zombie, but it would slow them down long enough for the interviewer to make a getaway.) That sort of impersonal setup didn’t lend itself to an intimate, revealing talk.

  Come 1995, the year I became a “real” writer (as opposed to the previous decade, when I was a “fake” scribe who, when he wasn’t trying to get work as a bassist, churned out a bunch of pretentious and clumsy crapola), the Beatles as individuals were all
but forgotten. John and his wife, Yoko Ono, as had been the case since that horrible Monday night fifteen years before, were holed up in their uptown New York fortress. Lennon rarely left the apartment, and when he did, he was accompanied by half a dozen highly trained USZGs (United States Zombie Guards), all six of whom were festooned with tommy guns and force fields. Paul was living on a farm in Scotland, surfacing every few years with a solo album that inevitably didn’t do the kind of numbers he’d hoped for. (Paul was, is, and always will be a bottom-line guy, be it about record sales or body count.) George was the most visible Beatle, giving lectures to religious types and horror aficionados at various conventions throughout the world and having fun with his telekinetic powers—most notably when he created a music video featuring dancing tchotchkes that was a real hit with the first wave of MTV fans. As for Ringo, nobody had a clue; there were sightings from the North Pole to the South Pole and everywhere in between. Pop-culture junkies had stopped caring about Lennon’s, McCartney’s, Harrison’s, and Starr’s whereabouts or activities, and the number of fans who showed up at their local neighborhood Beatlefests dwindled each year. The music was still relevant, but the men, not so much.

  But I cared. And I wanted the story. And I was a writer. And a tenacious one at that. So after a bunch of soul-searching, I amped up my health insurance plan and dived in.

  I didn’t have a book deal in place when I began work on this oral history in February 1996—an oral history in which I intended to focus solely on the men, rather than their songs—thus I had to finance it myself. In order to keep my bank account liquid while researching the Beatles all these years, I’ve ghostwritten thirty-one memoirs and twelve novels, none of which I can legally discuss. (Suffice it to say you’ve probably read at least three of them.)

  In between these writing projects, I was doing loads of research; I traveled to New York City, Liverpool, London, Edinburgh, Tibet, Los Angeles, Port-au-Prince, Nippon, Antarctica, Ibiza, and two locations I’m not at liberty to divulge. I spent a cold, wet night under a bamboo umbrella in the middle of a field deep in the bowels of Paraguay with Alexis “Magic Alex” Mardas, and a memorable, harrowing afternoon sitting next to Dr. Timothy Leary while he was on his deathbed. There were clandestine meetings in frightening locations, blindfolds, death threats, hallucinogenics, and in one memorable instance, I had to scale the side of a mountain in Osaka to speak with a Sixty-sixth Level Ninja Lord, with nary a copy of Lonely Planet’s Japan Travel Guide to be seen.

  Fifteen years later, I have the story … or, at least, I hope I do. I guess that’s for all of you—the Beatlemaniacs, the musicologists, the reviewers, the undead, and the hundreds of thousands of attack survivors—to decide.

  INTRODUCTION

  Lyman Cosgrove and Ellington Worthson are considered among the world’s foremost experts on Liverpudlian zombies. Their 1979 self-published book, Under the Canal: The Undead of Abyssinia Close and the Birth of the Liverpool Process, is the Bible of Liverpudlian zombie history, and if you can track down a copy, buy it, read it, and hold on to it for dear life, because there are only approximately two thousand of them in existence. Worthson died in 1990 at the age of ninety-three—the cause of death remains either a mystery or a well-shrouded secret—but Cosgrove is still undead and kicking, still living in a modest Liverpool flat, and, when I spoke with him in January 1999, still cheerfully waxing poetic about English monsters.

  LYMAN COSGROVE: Over the years, dozens of historians have floated dozens of theories about how the Liverpool infestation started, and I can understand why there is so much conflict. We suspect that it began in 1840, but back then, nobody was keeping proper records, you see, so most of our theories about the specifics are conjecture. But isn’t that the way it always was with the undead, pre–World War II? Hundreds of questions, and only dozens of answers.

  We know for certain that the boat the First—the original Liverpool nzambi—arrived in was called the SS Heartbeat. (My personal opinion is that the vessel’s owners used the whimsical name to mask the fact that it was a brutal, sadistic hell ship.) The slave trade was in full swing, and the captain, Arthur Smyth, was a greedy bastard of the highest order. He pulled slaves from the United States, from Haiti, and from Africa’s northernmost coast, and, believing that a broken slave is a valuable slave, he and his merciless crew beat the tar out of them.

  The ship could hold as many as two hundred, shall we say, passengers, but according to Smyth’s journals, on his first trip to the UK, he sold only 142 men into slavery. It’s fair to theorize that approximately fifty men were killed on the boat; their bodies were most likely thrown overboard. I’d venture to say that some of these men were still alive when they were launched from the Heartbeat. I have no clue as to whether any of them were undead.

  We don’t know, nor will we ever know, where exactly the First joined Captain Smyth’s floating party. I’ve always felt that Tunisia was the most likely locale, but it’s possible he was found in Haiti. My late partner, Ellington Worthson, floated the theory that the First came from the Louisiana bayou, but I feel the evidence he compiled didn’t completely back it up.

  The irony is that the First—and make certain you tell your readers that in this case, and in this case only, we spell it N-Z-A-M-B-I—was the least of the slaves’ worries. According to the single published report, the First appeared to be relatively docile—and back then the Tunisian undead were quite docile; thus my working theory of his origination—and there wasn’t a single nzambi sold into slavery. If the First launched an attack, and that’s a big if, it would have been a light one.

  Smyth was careless and sloppy, and more than once, he lost slaves, just literally lost them. It was documented that during an 1837 delivery, ten teenage slaves-to-be escaped soon after the Heartbeat docked. The following year, another eight, gone. My guess is that one of two things happened: either these eighteen slaves hid on the boat until everybody had disembarked, then sneaked out onto the dock and disappeared into the UK population; or they broke free from the chains that bound them together, chains that that fool Smyth acknowledged in his journals were less than satisfactory, and they ran. As for the First, I believe he hid, then escaped, the reasoning being that even if he managed to shed the chains, he couldn’t have moved fast enough to elude his captors, as this nzambi hadn’t yet developed the speed and strength that Liverpool zombies eventually became known for.

  Liverpool entered the modern age in 1825, when the first locomotives rolled into town from Manchester. Come 1840, there were three train yards, where the nzambi could not only hide undetected but also find unsuspecting living humans to feed on. (Another characteristic of the Tunisian zombie is its lack of hunger; therefore, the First could get by on just a handful of brains a year should it so choose, a factor that helped keep him out of the public eye. If he had been, for instance, a run-of-the-mill Norwegian zombie who couldn’t survive on less than one brain a day, the bobbies would have used all of their limited resources to track the First down. Not that they would have had the wherewithal to do anything to him once they found him, but still.) But the railroads boomed at the turn of the century, and it soon became more difficult for our nzambi to stay hidden, so when the Liverpool sewer system was completed in 1929, the First went underground, both literally and figuratively.

  Fearing detection if he left the sewers, the nzambi had to be extremely stealthy in order to acquire his nutritional fix: He would climb up through the sewage line, procure and eat the first brain in sight, zombify the victim, then maybe drag the undead body back into the sewers—or maybe not, depending on his mood. With few exceptions, his bounty, once turned, were nonviolent, content to stay put, bask in fecal matter that defined the Liverpudlian sewers, and rely on the First’s brain-hunting-and-gathering skills until they developed the ability to fend for themselves.

  On October 9, 1940, just before midnight, the First surfaced for his evening meal, slithering out of a loo on the ground floor of the Liverpool Maternity Hospital.
The hallway was quiet and empty. He wandered the floor until he came to a room housing one Julia Lennon, who had just endured a thirty-hour labor. She must have looked wasted and unappetizing, because the First walked right past her and snatched up her newborn boy.

  Julia Lennon died on July 15, 1958, and was reanimated by her son the following week. She still lives at 8 Head Street in Liverpool, the same place she’s lived since John came home from the hospital. When I met with her in May 2003, one thing was clear: if you look past the shiny scars and permanent stitches, it’s easy to glean that, once upon a time, this gal was a knockout.

  JULIA LENNON: Johnny’s delivery was rough. Now, this was seventy years ago, and me memory ain’t so good, but I still remember a lot about the birth … but I don’t think there’s nothin’ to tell, really. There was a lotta yellin’, I was downright manky, and there was a lotta blood. And that’s all I’m gonna say. It’s not something I care to go on about.

  Johnny was a beautiful boy, but he came out of me kickin’ and screamin’, and he kept it up for a good three hours. I tried to calm him—it was breakin’ me heart to hear me baby raisin’ such a fuss—but he wouldn’t settle down, no matter what I tried. Singin’ didn’t do shite, and rockin’ him didn’t help, but finally he wore out, and come midnight, he fell into a deep sleep. For a while, he was dead to the world.

  LYMAN COSGROVE: There’s no question that spending years huddled in heaps of fecal matter affected the First’s body chemistry, and living in gallons of human waste explains why the undead who were raised in the sewers of Liverpool have radically different qualities and powers than their brethren around the world. It goes without saying that these powers led to the development and evolution of the Liverpool Process.

  Now, most who are acquainted with the history of either zombies or the Beatles are at least casually aware of the ins and outs of the Liverpool Process, but I’ve always felt it important that when I discuss the Process in any venue—be it a one-on-one chat such as this, or a lecture in front of a few hundred Beatles fans—I offer as many details as possible, because the more you know, the better you understand.