zombies as love interests, really?

Alright first of all I've got a bone to pick. I like being scared so badly my hair practically turns white so I am not real excited at the way things have gone for some of my favorite horror archetypes..
In the past several years romance writers have taken the horrific out of a variety of horrific and/or mythical figures (vampires, werewolves, demons etc) and turned them into fluffy harmless objects e.e.angels. This begs the questions as to why the angels had to tell the shepherds “be not afraid” if they are so cute and cuddly…
In some cases it's not all fluff, a little bit of the cruelty remains but then a tortured soul is added so that our heroine can “save” the love object or, if they are the being in question, be saved. Hollywood had a lot to do with the shift in image and writers followed suit and began to change the mythos to make these beings more palatable.
Some of the changes are kind of ooky. In a lot of these stories there is also an underlying wife beater element to them. He bit too hard or he crushed my ribs turning into a werewolf but he didn’t really mean it. Let's ignore this aspect for the time being as that could turn into a disseration for some enterprising English major. So way do these reformed archetypes appeal? As a general rule there is not only the tortured being angle but there are the good looks, charm and in many case wealth that goes along with these types. So if you are fifteen (or fifteen in spirit which many adult women seem to be)you develop a little crush.
However, zombies are well zombies. To start with they are dead and not just dead but rotting, meat falling off the bones dead. They generally have no other thought processes other than to eat you. They don’t have any higher brain function left. No time for romance when there is always a primordial hunger to eat flesh. Even with some of the conventions being bent in modern movie making – they are fast, they have basic reasoning skills etc it is still a huge stretch to understand how they can be made into love objects. I could actually read one of these books but…
I’m not sure I can take the plunge and have the whole zombie allure thing ruined for me. I like being scared silly and just don’t want the thrill of being scared to death ruined with thoughts of zombies sucking face not to eat someone but to lurve them, bleech! Puleeze people leave my zombies be!

I see dead people

Quite a few of my work associates, friends etc have dropped dead in the last couple of years. For some reason I've been dreaming about them alot lately. If it isn't my poor dead cat, it is my co-worker who died of complications from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. I know this sounds odd but I think I can lay at least part of the blame on oct-mom. See I used to have this friend at work and we'd eat stories up like octo-mom. We'd relentlessly pursue any news, dissect her life, state how we could do things so much better and so on. Since this woman is still in the news I get the urge frequently to send an e-mail to my friend so we can dish. Problem is she too died earlier this year and I still haven't processed it. She wasn't that much older than me so that is always freaky. After all we never think of ourselves as old do we? When we hit 30 we think that's not so old, then 40 hits and then...can't wait until I'm in my fifties and still think I'm a young thing. We'd lost touch over the past few years but the thing is I can hear in my head almost exactly what she would have said. I miss her and I wish I'd kept more in touch.