Publishers Note: From White Zombie to Dawn of the Dead; from Resident Evil to World War Z, zombies have invaded popular culture, becoming the monsters that best express the fears and anxieties of the modern west. The ultimate consumers, zombies rise from the dead and feed upon the living, their teeming masses ever hungry, ever seeking to devour or convert, like mindless, faceless eating machines. Zombies have been depicted as mind-controlled minions, the shambling infected, the disintegrating dead, the ultimate lumpenproletariat, but in all cases, they reflect us, mere mortals afraid of death in a society on the verge of collapse.

Gathering together the best zombie literature of the last three decades from many of today’s most renowned authors of fantasy, speculative fiction, and horror, including Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, George R. R. Martin, Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Joe R. Lansdale, The Living Dead, covers the broad spectrum of zombie fiction. The zombies of The Living Dead range from Romero-style zombies to reanimated corpses to voodoo zombies and beyond.

Edited by John Joseph Adams (Wastelands), The Living Dead is 230,000 words of zombie fiction (34 stories!), collecting the best tales from Book of the Dead, Still Dead, and Mondo Zombie, along with the best zombie fiction from other sources.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction – John Joseph Adams
• This Year’s Class Picture – Dan Simmons
• Some Zombie Contingency Plans – Kelly Link
• Death and Suffrage – Dale Bailey
• Ghost Dance – Sherman Alexie
• Blossom – David J. Schow
• The Third Dead Body – Nina Kiriki Hoffman
• The Dead – Michael Swanwick
• The Dead Kid – Darrell Schweitzer
• Malthusian’s Zombie – Jeffrey Ford
• Beautiful Stuff – Susan Palwick
• Sex, Death and Starshine – Clive Barker
• Stockholm Syndrome – David Tallerman
• Bobby Conroy Comes Back From the Dead – Joe Hill
• Those Who Seek Forgiveness – Laurell K. Hamilton
• In Beauty, Like the Night – Norman Partridge
• Prairie – Brian Evenson
• Everything is Better With Zombies – Hannah Wolf Bowen
• Home Delivery – Stephen King
• Less Than Zombie – Douglas E. Winter
• Sparks Fly Upward – Lisa Morton
• Meathouse Man – George R. R. Martin
• Deadman’s Road – Joe Lansdale
• The Skull-Faced Boy – David Barr Kirtley
• The Age of Sorrow – Nancy Kilpatrick
• Bitter Grounds – Neil Gaiman
• She’s Taking Her Tits to the Grave – Catherine Cheek
• Dead Like Me – Adam-Troy Castro
• Zora and the Zombie – Andy Duncan
• Calcutta, Lord of Nerves – Poppy Z. Brite
• Followed – Will McIntosh
• The Song the Zombie Sang – Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg
• Passion Play – Nancy Holder
• Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man – Scott Edelman
• How the Day Runs Down – John Langan

Review: This was a fantastic read from beginning to end, and at 500 pages, and such a collection of stories, it was a long read.  I must admit that I skipped 2 stories that were completely off the plot; and to me this is an issue.  If you’re going to collect stories about the living dead, I don’t want to end up reading a short story with vague references to Zombies; I must admit that some of them were entertaining, but really far off the point.

Regardless of what I think, this was well received as a gift, and I’m ready to order his first collection “Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse”

Tags: books, nightshade, short stories, zombies