While Paraplegic Zombie Slayer has been extremely challenging to edit for personal reasons, this short novella, more than any other Lost DMB File, has convinced me of Brown’s journalistic integrity. Twice now I have survived events I can only describe using the terminology Brown coins within these pages. After experiencing twitchers so intimately, I can without a doubt confirm that David Mark Brown has experienced them equally or more so.
Twitchers are frighteningly human and non-human at the same instant. It is exactly these qualities of Paraplegic Zombie Slayer that render the story with such disturbing force. But it is not my job to review Brown’s writings. Rather it is my job to edit them, and in so doing make them most accessible to you, dear reader.
In this sense, my editorial job has been its easiest with Zombie Slayer. Written during the latter third of Brown’s career, the story was apparently never published. Exactly because of the story’s unpublished status, I found almost nothing within its pages altered to preserve anonymity or conceal volatile truths. After a simple polishing I arrived at what you have before you.
The unpublished status might have been due to external pressures exerted on Brown, but it seems most likely that the grisly reality portrayed within Paraplegic Zombie Slayer was simply too fresh for the story to be enjoyable.
Unlike most lost files, this story deals with a larger event its readers would have known to be real—namely the Ogallala Outbreak of 1922. Simply put, readers would have known Zombie Slayer not to be fiction. It must also be considered that for Brown to publish such a story would have cast a re-interpretive eye upon the rest of his works as well. Something he had tirelessly endeavored to avoid.
At the same time, Brown does speak of specific characters and events that would have otherwise gone unknown to history. Once again, I’m left to speculate (one of my favorite pastimes, you’ve no doubt inferred). But Brown’s compulsion to write such an intimate account, atypical of his usual fare, suggests he had personal connection to both the characters and the setting described within.
Perhaps, compelled to experience the dust zone, Brown spent a spell sheltered by the Founder men. Perhaps, as is the case with nearly all Brown’s writings, we will discover further significance behind the events described within Paraplegic Zombie Slayer. Either way, the following story preserves the most hauntingly realistic description of an Oil Zone infected with the twitch ever recorded. Read it and have your eyes opened.
Professor Jim “Buck” Buckner
Department of Geology, University of Texicas, Austin
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Lost DMB Files
Action“The most startling discovery to never be made.” Some conspiracies remain theories. Others become obsessions. Exhumed 100 years after their penning, the Lost DMB Files will reinterpret the way you see the world, or the way it sees you. Product Des...
