The zombie keeps the score

I often get asked what the heck The Splits is about and I can never really answer that question. 

Yes, it’s about zombies, but that doesn’t really explain anything. As Horror Fiction Review says, The Splits is ‘unlike any other zombie novel’

This is a terrible position to be in if you want people to read your book. 

Recently I was reading The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk and I realised I might finally have found a way of explaining it - to myself as much as anybody else.

In a nutshell, The Splits is about trauma and how it splits apart our minds and bodies. Such a split is most obvious in people with mental illness, but it exists more subtly in all of us when we are stressed by bad experiences in the present, or haunted by bad experiences from the past.

What now? I haven’t read The Splits.

In case you haven’t read the book, let me set the scene a little. First off, the world of the Splits is not post-apocalyptic.  It is exactly like our own, except that a mysterious zombie plague is endemic. After Covid that’s really not too difficult to explain.

Second, the zombie plague is a bit different from what people are used to. 

My starting point for the Splits disease was a question asked by my kid - where do zombies’ minds go?

I didn’t find it too hard to find the answer - ghosts. Ghosts are mental material, feelings that won’t go away - hate, anger, sadness, love. 

Remember that the original Haitian zombies were simply empty bodies. They weren’t visibly decomposing nor were they trying to eat people like Romero zombies. That wasn’t the point of the original zombies. The point was that they were puppets controlled by voodoo masters, ruthless plantation owners or both. They were mindless.

So in The Splits, humans who catch the zombie plague shatter into two - a mindless body and a disembodied mind - a zombie and a ghost. The two parts behave very differently - the zombies are gruesome and murderous and they gather to destroy whole parts of London. The ghosts are much less tangible. They stay on the margins, teasing at people’s sanity. They spread unease and transiently revive lost loves.

What has this got to do with The Body Keeps the Score?

In The Body Keeps the Score, Van der Kolk describes trauma as a situation where you are in great danger physically or mentally or both, but you cannot take any action to get yourself to safety. You are immobilized. In such situations, your only option is to shut down and stop feeling anything.

He describes a study which asked people to ‘think of nothing in particular’. It found that in people who hadn’t been through trauma, the ‘self-sensing’ part of their brain was activated. In other words, they thought about their bodies. Yet in the traumatized people, this part of the brain did not get activated. This was because it was shut down by trauma.

I am simplifying here, but essentially Van der Kolk says that the minds and bodies of traumatised people don’t communicate.

This means that traumatised people often don’t realise they are in danger, because they can’t read the signals from their bodies that are telling them they are in danger. Sadly, because of this they are more likely to find themselves in dangerous situations.

At the same time, they can’t read the signals from their bodies telling them that they are safe. So they can’t enjoy a perfectly safe and fun situation like a family dinner. They ruin it by being numb or getting triggered by something that isn’t really a threat.

Okay but what has THAT got to do with a novel about zombies?

The first link is this. The Body Keeps the Score describes minds and bodies that are seperated in some sense, that aren’t communicating. So does The Splits.

And look at these descriptions van der Kolk uses to describe traumatised people:

They simply went blank

Hollow-eyed men staring mutely into a void

Blank stares and absent minds

She just walked around with a vacant stare

Caving in, feeling hollow

Ute discovered that she could blank out her mind

The blanked out [kids] don’t bother anyone, and are left to lose their future bit by bit

I’m reminded of the original, pre-Romero zombies of Haiti, who are representations of one of the ultimate traumas, slavery.

Van der Kolk also describes how the behaviour of profoundly traumatised people lacks aspects of what makes us human (their behavior, not the people themselves):

Kittens, puppies, mice and gerbils constantly play around, and when they’re tired they huddle together, skin to skin, in a pile. In contrast, the snakes and lizards lie motionless in the corners of their cages, unresponsive to the environment. This sort of immobilization, generated by the reptilian brain, characterizes many chronically traumatized people.

I don’t know about you, but this description of unresponsive reptiles, oblivious to their surroundings, also reminds me of zombies.

One of the people Van der Kolk writes about, who was sexually abused by a preist as a child, describes literally ‘feeling like a zombie’ as he began to remember what had happened to him.

In another section, van der Kolk describes how the experience of being immobilized, which is at the root of most trauma:

Your heart slows down, your breathing becomes shallow, and, zombielike, you lose touch with yourself and your surroundings. You dissociate, faint and collapse [my italics].

So that’s the second reason why The Body Keeps the Score helps explain The Splits. One of the meanings carried in the trope of the zombie is that of trauma and how it shuts down our minds.

There’s more. In The Splits, scientists vie to find a biological explanation for the disease, and eventually settle on a molecule called a prion. But despite this apparent scientific triumph, I decided that there would be no definitive biological explanation for the Splits.

In the book, a journalist asks a maverick researcher about what causes the Splits. Here is their exchange:

Journalist: What is the cause? 

Researcher: Trauma. 

Journalist: Trauma? 

Researcher: Yes. Psychological injury in early childhood, or in adulthood, or both. Physical injury too, if it’s sufficiently frightening. Being attacked by an infected is enough of a trauma for most people to contract the disease, so it appears to be transmitted by biting. But actually the cause is psychological.

So that’s the third reason why The Body Keeps the Score helps explain what the Splits is about. Because The Splits was already about trauma, long before I came across Van der Kolk’s book.

I still don’t get it. Give me an example in terms of one of your characters.

The journalist in my book is called Anna. Anna is not obviously a zombie, nor is she obviously traumatised. But she was brought up by a very cruel mother. It is also part of her character that she is numb, unemotional, and what she does feel is quite strange.

Van der Kolk describes how attachment between caregiver and baby creates the communication between mind and body that trauma destroys. We only know what we feel as babies because our caregiver reflects it accurately. For example, if a baby is comforted when it cries it will know that it is sad, that this is normal, that it is okay to be sad, and that other people can help you be less sad. But if a baby gets hit when it cries it will learn it is dangerous to feel sad. If a baby gets ignored when it cries it will learn that its sadness is of no interest.

Anna has not had a healthy attachment to her mother. We know this from the first page of the book, when she says she would like to kill her mother, because she is giving a detailed description of stillbirth to Anna’s heavily pregnant sister. We also hear about the mother’s panicky, hysterical reaction to Anna’s first menstruation and to her daughters beginning to wear bras. It is as if Anna’s mother wants to attack her daughters’ creative and reproductive abilities at every turn.

When Anna has a baby of her own, a little boy called Danny, she  struggles to establish a healthy care-giving attachment.

One day I lifted [Danny] and he smiled at me, a goofy helpless smile, happiness in its purest form. A voluptuous feeling slid over me and through me, but it wasn’t joy. It pulsated and penetrated, it seemed to lift my stomach and hands and upper lip, it seemed to rifle through my hair, stroke between my legs. Little shit – having fun, was he? I put him down and placed my hands on my head.

She just can’t respond appropriately to how he feels, even when he’s being about as gorgeous as any baby can be. This isn’t her fault, and to give her some credit, on some level she realises what is going on and she battles down her worst impulses.

Anna’s husband disappears just after she gives birth (read the book to find out why) and a little later she is visited by her mother-in-law Maureen. Anna is surprised by Maureen’s warmth, the generous rhythm of her conversation.

“I’m not here to take over,” [Maureen] said. “I just want to help you find him. And to get to know Danny a little bit.” 

Then she stopped speaking, which surprised me. It was as if she was giving me a turn.

But Anna doesn’t have the Splits, you may say. Well, during the story it is discovered that the Splits is a spectrum disease. It is possible to have subtle symptoms that are invisible to anyone else and reveal themselves only in your behaviour and how you feel.

Parts of your mind are shut down, placed in a ghostly limbo, and your relationship with your body is simultaneously diminished. I think this is what Anna has, or is. We can see that the trauma that has caused her to have the splits is her terrible mother.

Interestingly, Ann spends the whole book terrified that she has the Splits and that she will ‘turn’ at any moment. I always thought she was wrong about this, but now I wonder if she doesn’t know herself better than the author.

Let’s look again at that summary of what The Splits is about in light of The Body Keeps the Score. Hopefully it makes sense now. The Splits is about trauma and how it splits apart our minds and bodies. Such a split is most obvious in people with mental illness, but it exists more subtly in all of us when we are stressed by bad experiences in the present, or haunted by bad experiences from the past.

I’d love to hear what you think in the comments below, or send me an email.

And if The Splits sounds like your kind of story, it’s available here.