Zombie Bolaño: Revolution and the Undead in “El hijo del coronel”

This article interrogates two curious claims made by Roberto Bolaño in “El hijo del coronel,” an understudied and posthumously published short story about a zombie movie. The first claim is that the zombie feature upon which the story is based serves as a “biography or autobiography” of the writer’s life, and thus that Bolaño, too, is a zombie; secondly, Bolaño insists that the movie and zombies are about revolution. I argue here that one should take Bolaño seriously on both accounts: meaning that he is some kind of zombie and that zombies signify the potential for some kind of revolution. In the course of my discussion, I engage with scholarship on and mass obsession with Bolaño—and join in current debates within the emerging field of zombie studies. I further mobilize related concepts of posthumousness, the autoimmunological, and the interregnum, ultimately arguing in favor of the reanimated revolutionary promise of both zombies and an undead Bolaño in an all too dead world.