It’s Halloween, and I’m a geek, which means BRRAAAAIIIINNNNSSSS …

Pardon me [stifles a belch]. I of course meant zombies. I like all kinds of monsters (with maybe the exception of vampires, which never really appealed to me, sparkly or otherwise), but there’s just something about zombies that make them truly creepy.

Their popularity is on the rise, too, and with this resurgence of shambling brain-eating walking dead comes the annoyance I get every time I start a new zombie book or movie: Are these guys going to be supernatural or scientific?

Don’t get me wrong: Even as a dyed-in-the-lab-coat skeptical scientist, I’m willing to suspend my disbelief long enough to enjoy a good tale or two. But the problem is, too many zombie stories are inconsistent, wrenching me away from the fantasy and back into our sadly zombie-deficient real world.

When it comes to zombies, you really have only two choices: the dead walk the earth due to some mystical power that we cannot fathom, or through some ultimately scientifically testable manner such as a virus, cranial computer chip or radiation. But each has implications, and these routinely get ignored.

Now let me back up a sec here and ask a funny question: What exactly is a zombie, anyway?

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