1 There’s Something Rotten in Denmark Ireland: Irish Zombie Media and the Irish “Other” Kristine Larsen Presented at the American Conference for Irish Studies New England Regional meeting, University of New Haven, New Haven, CT, November 21, 2015 One of the important themes of much zombie media is the depiction of the zombie as “ Other.” Such a designation allows for survivors to deny zombies their basic human rights without ethical quandary, from experimentation upon them to their wholesale destruction. Zombie media is therefore a useful lens through which to examine societal views of power relationships, both among and between cultural groups, especially in how an imbalance of power often goes hand-in-hand with culturally defined alterity (be it race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.). Ireland’s volatile political, religious, and class stratification over the past few centuries is, in a sense, a ‘perfect storm’ of alterity. Throw zombies into the mix, and one has the potential for a unique laboratory in which to examine both the shifting and uneasy definitions of self and other, and the cruelty that humanity is often wont to impose upon those who are deemed ‘subhuman.’ This paper will describe a preliminary examination of four zombie novels set in Ireland written by three Irish authors – Flu (2012) and Fever (2012) by Wayne Simmons, Semianimus (2015) by C.R.J. Smith, and Derek Gunn’s The Estuary (2009), as well as Irish writer Darren Shan’s Zom-B (2012) in which a zombie plague begins in Ireland but the action takes place in London. I will examine how both the setting and the author’s cultural background influence the definitions of self and other within the Irish zombie apocalypse. According to his website, 31-year-old C.R.J. (Chris) Smith is a life-long resident of County Meath in the Mid-East Region of Ireland. Born in the capitol, Navan, he discovered Bram Stoker’s Dracula at age 10, a work that remains highly influential in his life, along with the works of Charles Dickens and Stephen King. He left school at age 15 and never returned. He notes that “In the last fifteen years I have tried my hand at numerous jobs in both Ireland and England, but my restless mind and wandering thoughts, as much as, if not more so, than my lack of further education, have kept me transient.” He currently lives in the heritage town of Kells, an important monastic site known for the Book of Kells (which was most likely written on the island of Iona). A self-published work, Semianimus, is his first and thus-far only book, but he has published a short story, “Púca,” based on the legendary Irish creature of the same name, in the 2015 collection High Strange Horror, Weird Tales of Paranoia and the Damned. Seminanimus takes place in the small town of Ballytermon, where the annual street fair features both “homemade preserves, breads and cakes” and “spanakopita, baklava and borek, things that were very exotic in a small Irish town and were lapped up by people who immediately forgot about them again until the next year.” Much of the action centers on a group of twenty- and thirty- somethings, several of whom work at a local factory. Before the outbreak their lives revolve around the mundane – relationships, football, jobs, and the local pub. These ordinary people lack both weapons and specialized survival skills, relying on their wits and the occasional bit of luck to survive as