Korinth: A Tale of Zombies

One problem in running Google searches on “Corinth” is the unwieldy number of hits returned.  The reason for the numerous false positives is that the USA has a good number of cities and churches named “Corinth”.  On the first two pages of a Google search, one encounters sites related to Corinth Mississippi, Corinth Vermont, the Battle of Corinth (American Civil War), Corinth Texas, Corinth New York.  Nothing wrong with these places, of course, but someone looking for ancient Corinth, Greece, may not be interested in the American stops along the way.

Filters help.  In my Google Alert subscription on “Corinth,” the following filter eliminates a lot of the background noise: “-tx -Texas -Mississippi -miss* -ny -ms -york -ave -avenue -download -lovis -boots -maine -vermont -killzone”.  (If you didn’t know, Killzone is a videogame; Lovis Corinth was a German painter; and UGG Australia produces a brand of women’s “Corinth boots”).  But the filter is still not precise enough to keep out irrelevant material.  I have found in my inbox stories about murders and deaths  in the various Corinths of the United States; the Coca-Cola race in Corinth, Mississippi; and interracial dating in Corinth, Kentucky.  This morning’s alerts turn up pages on spinal surgery, astrology, and the Battle of Corinth in 1862.

But the most interesting notice to turn up in my feed last week was a piece on a new work of fiction called “Korinth: A Tale of Zombies in the Old West”.   The description of the work from Amazon:

An unpublished 1890 manuscript by Elihu Baxter was discovered in the retirement community of Sun City Center, Florida in May 2010. In it, Boston blueblood Baxter describes how he and his best friend, Robert Fontaine, were guided by the Spirit of Adventure, a drunken prospector and the lust for gold, to the small California mining town of Korinth in 1872. For nearly two years the residents of Korinth got rich digging the treasure from the Earth. The future looked as bright and shiny as a gold nugget until Edna McCauley, a woman with a singing voice so dreadful it was rumored that President Lincoln had wanted to unleash her on the Confederacy if Robert E. Lee refused to surrender, is murdered at a church social. Her killer was Evangeline O’Meara.

Murder was a hanging offense in the Old West. The trouble was, Evangeline O’Meara had already been hanged the week before for the murder of her husband, George.

Interestingly, there appears to be no actual settlement in California known by the name “Korinth.”  Why, then, did the author choose this name as the fitting scene for a story of horror and the undead?