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Summary
Summary
Ideal for fans of iZombie, Colin Morgan, The Walking Dead, iZombie comics, Resident Evil anthology, Evil Dead anthology, and the Joe Hill graphic novel collection A compilation of the best zombie literature of the past 30 years Highlights works by today's most well-known and respected authors of speculative fiction, horror, and fantasy
Zombies have invaded popular culture, from White Zombie to Dawn of the Dead and from Resident Evil to World War Z. They have become the monsters that best express the anxieties and fears of the modern west. This collection gathers together zombie works by Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, George R. R. Martin, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Poppy Z. Brite, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Joe R. Lansdale. These brilliant minds, and The Living Dead , cover the many types of zombie fiction.
Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
Author Notes
John Joseph Adams is the editor of the anthologies By Blood We Live, Federations, The Living Dead, Seeds of Change, and Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse. Forthcoming work includes the anthologies Brave New Worlds, The Living Dead 2, The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination, and The Way of the Wizard. He is also the assistant editor at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
He is a columnist for Tor.com and has written reviews for Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show. His non-fiction has also appeared in: Amazing Stories, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, Locus Magazine, Novel & Short Story Writers Market, Science Fiction Weekly, SCI FI Wire, Shimmer, Strange Horizons, Subterranean Magazine, and Writer's Digest.
He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Central Florida in December 2000. He currently lives in New Jersey. For more information, visit his website at www.johnjosephadams.com.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Recently prolific anthologist Adams (Seeds of Change) delivers a superb reprint anthology that runs the gamut of zombie stories. There's plenty of gore, highlighted by Stephen King's "Home Delivery" and David Schow's classic "Blossom." Less traditional but equally satisfying are Lisa Morton's "Sparks Fly Upward," which analyzes abortion politics in a zombified world, and Douglas Winter's literary pastiche "Less than Zombie." Also outstanding, Kelly Link's "Some Zombie Contingency Plans" and Hannah Wolf Bowen's "Everything Is Better with Zombies" take similar themes in wildly different directions. Neil Gaiman's impeccably crafted "Bitter Grounds" offers a change of pace with traditional Caribbean zombies. The sole original contribution, John Langan's "How the Day Runs Down," is a darkly amusing twist on Thornton Wilder's Our Town. There's some great storytelling for zombie fans as well as newcomers. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Die-hard zombiephiles may be disappointed to find only one new story here (the Clive Barker and Stephen King entries are 20 years old), but they'll have to concede that it's full of good stuff. The real standouts tend to depart from the apocalyptic formula standard to the genre. A bully in Darrel Schweitzer's The Dead Kid torments an undead kid in a box that he keeps in the woods. David Barr Kirtley's The Skull-Faced Boy features two teens who discover they're animated corpses after being killed in an accident. In Joe Lansdale's Deadman's Road, a gunslinging reverend hunts down a zombie who was a killer when normally alive. It's Dan Simmon's brilliant, award-winning This Year's Class Picture, however, that makes the collection worth the price of admission; in it, a teacher clings to her daily routine, teaching her students long after the Tribulations. Though it reprints so many oft-collected stories, this volume remains an excellent overview of the zombie genre.--Orellana, Carlos Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Zombies, traditionally, do not move with great speed or agility. As the sheriff in George A. Romero's classic 1968 movie, "Night of the Living Dead," astutely observes, "They're dead, they're all messed up." But they're also mighty persistent, and, apparently through sheer doggedness, the reanimated deceased have managed to occupy increasingly large areas of the popular imagination in the past few years. They don't, of course, reproduce in the usual way. The Romero-type zombie, very much the dominant form these days, multiplies by contagion, like a virus: it feeds on flesh, and its bite is lethal, so even those semi-fortunate humans who aren't wholly devoured, but merely gnawed upon, die and come back as shuffling, hollow-eyed flesh-eaters themselves. It was not always thus. Time was, the mere idea that a corpse could come back to life and walk the earth (however slowly) seemed sufficiently creepy. The monster in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" did have some anger-management issues, but until "Night of the Living Dead" most resurrected cadavers had been pretty placid. The title creature of Jacques Tourneur's weirdly lyrical 1943 movie, "I Walked With a Zombie," doesn't eat flesh and is entirely unthreatening to the living beings around her; all that's horrifying is the unnatural, unassimilable fact of her existence. That's not enough anymore: nature isn't what it used to be, after all. And to be repelled by a woman just because she has returned from the dead could be considered a tad judgmental. The thing about these newly empowered 21st-century zombies is that they keep coming at you, relentlessly, wave upon wave of necrotic, mindlessly voracious semi-beings. According to the current convention, the individual reanimatee can be dispatched by shooting or stabbing it in the brain, but the strength of this inexorably advancing zombie population is in its numbers: the ambulatory dead are, you might say, a fast-growing demographic. This sort of creature is an extremely convenient monster for low-budget filmmakers like Romero, who had the wit to realize that with zombies he wouldn't have to break the bank on highly skilled professional actors. Anybody can shamble along looking vacant. In fiction, however, these alarming entities have fewer obvious attractions because, unlike vampires, werewolves, demons, witches, goblins and shape-shifters, zombies can't plausibly be endowed with rich, complex inner lives. They don't even have personalities. Christopher Golden, in the preface to his anthology of zombie Stories, THE NEW DEAD (St. Martin's Griffin, paper, $14.99), owns up to a degree of puzzlement about the current popularity of these creatures. "I have never had any trouble understanding the fascination with vampires," he writes. "But zombies? Not so much." Undeterred, Golden has put together a hefty collection of zombiana to take its place on the sagging shelf next to John Joseph Adams's anthologies THE LIVING DEAD and THE LIVING DEAD 2 (Night Shade, paper, $15.95 and $15.99); Max Brooks's WORLD WAR Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (Three Rivers, paper, $14.95); the freak best seller PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, "by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith" (Quirk, paper, $12.95); and THE WALKING DEAD: Compendium One (Image Comics, paper, $59.99), which compiles the first 48 issues of the comic, written by Robert Kirkman, that was turned into a popular cable series last fall. All these literary products are, in varying degrees, worth reading, or at least dipping into on one of those days when you're not feeling unambiguously alive yourself. But taken as a whole the recent onslaught of zombie fiction is wearying. There's a certain monotony built into the genre: in too many of these tales, the flesh-chompers advance, are repelled, advance again and are repelled again, more or less ad infinitum. Modern-day zombie stories often read like plague narratives, in which a panicky populace struggles to deal with a threat that's overwhelming, unceasing and apparently uncontrollable. (This spring the Centers for Disease Control, in a playful attempt to stimulate interest in the dull subject of emergency preparedness, issued an online "Zombie Apocalypse Survival Guide." It got so many hits, the Web site crashed.) And because the ravening dead are, by definition, not interesting and are way too numerous ever to be defeated - at least in plague chronicles there's hope for a cure - even the more inventive zombie stories tend to be static: grim annals of hard-won, provisional survival. But that may be the secret of their popularity. With every fashion in horror, it's worth asking, Why do we choose to fear this, and why now? The answers can be more unsettling than the stories themselves. In the case of zombie fiction, you have to wonder whether our 21st-century fascination with these hungry hordes has something to do with a general anxiety, particularly in the West, about the planet's dwindling resources: a sense that there are too many people out there, with too many urgent needs, and that eventually these encroaching masses, dimly understood but somehow ominous in their collective appetites, will simply consume us. At this awful, pinched moment of history we look into the future and see a tsunami of want bearing down on us, darkening the sky. The zombie is clearly the right monster for this glum mood, but it's a little disturbing to think that these nonhuman creatures, with their slack, gaping maws, might be serving as metaphors for actual people - undocumented immigrants, say, or the entire populations of developing nations - whose only offense, in most cases, is that their mouths and bellies demand to be filled. Fear is a primitive impulse, brainless as hunger, and because the aim of horror fiction is the production of the deepest kinds of fears, the genre tends to reinforce some remarkably uncivilized ideas about' self-protection. In the current crop of zombie stories, the prevailing value for the beleaguered survivors is a sort of siege mentality, a vigilance so constant and unremitting that it's indistinguishable from the purest paranoia. This is not a state of mind to bring out the best in our old, tired human nature. It's astonishing, then, to come across a zombie tale like Alden Bell's novel THE REAPERS ARE THE ANGELS (Holt, paper, $15), in which a world that "has gone to black damnation" becomes, somehow, the occasion of a young woman's spiritual redemption. The heroine, 15-year-old Temple, moves easily and violently through a Deep South landscape infested with the menacing dead, living by her wits - which are formidable - and retaining, heroically, a sense of wonder at God's creation, "all that beauty in the suffered world." The zombies are plenty scary (she calls them "meatskins" or "slugs"), and some of the hard-nosed human survivors are barely less threatening. But Temple is blessed with an unearthly composure, in part because she's a post-apocalypse child: this is the only world she's ever known. And, she says, "you gotta look at the world that is and try not to get bogged down by what it ain't." Bell (the pseudonym of a New York writer named Joshua Gaylord) isn't much interested in shocking his readers with visions of zombie inundation, in stoking their primordial fears of the unknown or in spinning lurid fantasies of brute survival. Like his tough heroine, he's too busy looking at the world that is, the one he's imagined into existence. His sentences roll and dawdle, as if moving to the rhythm of the stilled, eerie environment. "The Reapers Are the Angels" isn't in any sense a didactic novel, but there's a lesson in its leisurely manner: if you take the time to see and feel and think, the world, dire as it is, can lose some of its terrors.
Library Journal Review
The shambling animated corpses of George Romero's films have lurched into the bookstores in droves in recent months, headlined by high-profile titles like World War Z and Monster Island. In this anthology, editor Adams (Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse) does a remarkable job of collecting a sampling of variations on this theme. These stories range from the truly disgusting (Poppy Z. Brite's "Calcutta: Lord of Nerves") to the nearly wistful ("Followed" by Will McIntosh) and even one with no supernatural elements at all (Joe Hill's "Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead"). Included are pieces by big names in horror like Stephen King and Clive Barker but also contributions by less obvious suspects like Harlan Ellison, Sherman Alexie, and George R.R. Martin. The final treat is John Langan's "How the Day Runs Down," a nasty little play best described as Our Town with zombies. Highly recommended for all horror fiction collections. [For more zombie fiction, see Neal Wyatt's The Reader's Shelf column, p. 106.--Ed.]--Karl G. Siewert, MLIS, Tulsa City-Cty. Lib. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
