The Living Dead

If you like the zombie genre in books and movies, you will HATE this book. Don't be fooled by the glowing reviews of wanna-be authors, this book is boring, boring, boring. Some stories you will have to skip entirely. Others you will get halfway through and wish you had skipped them entirely.

The vast majority of these stories have NOTHING to do with surviving in a world of the undead. They are flights of whimsy by otherwise reputable authors that happen to weave a dead person into the narrative.

These stories are pretentious, self-serving and banal. If these are the best short stories the editor could come up with, the zombie genre is dead, and it's not rising any time soon.

A big heaping helping of zombies, as the editor explains :

"In the process of assembling this anthology, I read more zombie stories than you could possibly imagine, and I found more good ones than could possibly fit in one volume, even a mammoth tome like this one. So, in order to help narrow down my selections, I created a few loose guidelines for myself. First, I wanted to avoid taking too many stories from any one source. Second, I wanted to avoid taking too many stories from other zombie anthologies. I discovered a lot of great zombie fiction elsewhere and thought that this book would be more valuable to zombie fans if it were to collect that material."

That is, he wanted to mostly avoid stories you could already get in other zombie anthologies. So there's a variety here, science fiction zombies, non-horror zombies, the origins of Anita Blake, vampire slayer and necromancer and the odd story with no zombies at all that will likely annoy some - and are usually among the weakest stuff, too.

So there's an intro, an introduction to each story, but no zombie bibliography or other reading or viewing lists like in Wastelands. So I suppose this is 'another zombie anthology' as opposed to a retrospective study approach.

Still rather good though, I'd call it a 4.25 rounded up.

I bought this hoping for a haloween scare but so far no scares. I'll admit I'm not done with the book but while the stories inside are good It doesn't really make me feel I've been visited by the living dead. I'll put it down and read some more another time.

There are a bunch of good compendiums of short stories that have to do with horror topics, and even a few dedicated to zombies (the editor of The Living Dead even goes out of his way to list a few). But The Living Dead is probably one of the best rounded 'theme' anthologies I've ever come across. Each of the stories are solid and contribute to a rich tapestry of diverse zombie stories. No two are really alike and each one is well-chosen to really get to the reading audience. No matter what your taste, you will find something in this book that you'll like, I think, even if you're not a zombie fan. The author also takes the time to recognize that zombie stories are a wonderful way to address issues of a particularly sensitive nature and chose stories that have solid messages without being preachy, and are well-written in the process. There is no way to describe how much I enjoyed this book and I recommended it to many of my friends. Check it out, even if you're not much of a short story writer, each separate story is another chance to find something you might enjoy.

For lovers of Stephen King and Clive Barker, two of the best horror minds of our generation, and for those who appreciate a good zombie book, definitely he way to go!