I've been thinking recently about that crew of cutthroat pirates who manned "The Java Queen" under Gerard Stiles (or whatever his name might have been, I think he had bee called "Ivan Miller" or somesuch at one point). I think the ship is first mentioned in the Summer of 1970 and when David waves the green flag from the tower room window of Collinsport, it's a signal for the pirate crew to rise out of their graves and begin marauding Collinsport at the end of 1995 as a prelude to 1840 (if I have my storylines straight)!
What I'm wondering is how the DS writers came up with this idea. I've never heard of any source story where that this might have been taken from.
This has gotten me to thinking further about Gothic fiction, which I'm surveying in my spare time. I can't find any examples of the dead rising from their graves in any old Gothic novels I've read about --the Gothic genre begins with "The Castle of Otranto," and then there's "Melmouth the Wanderer," "Vathek," the Ann Radcliffe novels, and so one. But unbelievably, I can't find any examples of the dead literally rising from their grave. Now, there are ghosts, there are vampires, and there are zombies. I suppose the DS pirate crew were closest to being zombies, but I'm not sure if they were exactly that.
Anyone have any ideas or thoughts about sources / origins / early gothic fiction that presents such a scenario? "Frankenstein" is quite different, since the creature is a creation, not a resurrected person. Stories of necromancy go back to the Old Testament, but that seems possibly another sort of thing since a sorcerer of some type is involved. And vampires have been transformed into a different undead creature of the night. Maybe something called "revenants"? Or maybe Gerard Stiles in this case could be deemed a "necromancer"?
