Resurrecting the Narrative: Why Some Stories Won’t Die

In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère’s sly, genre-mutating novel, the narrator—an aging screenwriter with a history in French television and a grudge against his own irrelevance—ponders the cultural staying power of zombie stories. Zombies, after all, are the walking dead: viral, contagious, unsettlingly lifelike in their mindless hunger. While consulting on a TV show saturated with post-apocalyptic gore, Carrère’s narrator growls at younger writers, quits in a fog of midlife disdain, and watches from the sidelines as the series becomes a global phenomenon. Bitter and brooding, he studies the success with the sulky fascination of someone who just broke up with their ex and can’t stop checking their Instagram. “I stopped writing fiction long ago,” he mutters, “but I can recognize a powerful fictional device when I see it.”

Carrère then executes a narrative judo move, flipping from zombie melodrama to the Apostle Paul in 50 A.D., an itinerant zealot-turned-mutation vector. Paul, in Carrère’s retelling, doesn’t just preach the resurrection of a crucified prophet—he unleashes a viral narrative that spreads through Corinth like spiritual malware. Paul doesn’t need a production team or a streaming platform. He has a loom, a message, and an uncanny ability to hijack human consciousness. As Carrère writes, belief in the resurrection becomes “the portent of something enormous, a mutation of humanity, both radical and invisible.” Early Christians, in this telling, are infected—mutants hidden in plain sight, walking among neighbors with a secret that rewires their sense of reality.

Carrère’s language—mutation, contagion, infection—is no accident. He draws a direct line from Paul’s religious storytelling to the psychological mechanics behind marketing, ideology, and modern myth-making. Yuval Noah Harari makes a similar argument in Sapiens: civilization is held together not by laws or gods, but by collective fictions powerful enough to convince strangers to cooperate. Religion, like branding, spreads through the bloodstream of the culture until it feels like fact. Carrère takes this one step further: religion doesn’t just organize civilization—it haunts it, like a beautiful, persistent hallucination that refuses to die.

Consider Madison Avenue’s version of salvation. I recall a 1990s Mercedes-Benz commercial where a man, lost and panicked in a shadowy forest, emerges onto a mountaintop. Above him, the stars align into the Mercedes logo. Transcendence is achieved. No need for Damascus Road—just a lease and decent credit. The brand has become a kind of secular gospel. No one cares that Mercedes flunks reliability scores; the emblem still gleams like a divine seal. In this light, Carrère’s Paul isn’t just a religious visionary—he’s the original brand strategist. His resurrection story had better legs than the competition. It caught on. It mutated. It endured. And Carrère, the self-professed unbeliever, is too entranced—and too honest—to dismiss it. Carrere’s novel The Kingdom is the story of a narrator marveling at how the world got infected by a story so powerful, it continues to raise the dead.