Nightshade Books

Price: $15.95

ISBN: 9781597801430

Reviewed by Brian Keene

At first glance, The Living Dead has everything going for it. It’s edited by John Joseph Adams, whose previous anthology, Wastelands, is seminal, required post-apocalyptic reading and one of my favorite books in recent years. The Living Dead also features a stellar line-up–big names like King and Barker and Gaiman, and lesser-known but should-be-known names like Hannah Wolf Bowen and John Langan. Its biggest draw, however, is the fact that it’s an anthology of zombie stories.

Why is that a draw? Because zombies are a license to print money. Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock for the last five years, zombies currently occupy that place in our genre that used to be reserved for vampires. They are hugely popular right now, in prose, film, video games, comics, music and even fashion (one of Hot Topics’ best-sellers is their zombie-inspired clothing line). Given this resurgent popularity, it’s natural to assume that zombie literature fans will eagerly devour The Living Dead–and that is where the book’s main problem lies.

With the exception of one lone story, The Living Dead is comprised entirely of reprints. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it is a safe bet that your average zombie-prose fan already owns most of these stories from one of their previous appearances in various anthologies and author collections. Stephen King’s “Home Delivery”, Douglas Winter’s “Less Than Zombie”, Dan Simmons’ “This Year’s Class Picture”, and Poppy Z. Brite’s “Calcutta, Lord of Nerves” are classics and certainly deserve their continued praise, so many years after their initial publication–but they are also stories that zombie fans already know by heart, and already have in their personal libraries.

There are a few less-read stories included here that might not be as easy to find, but for the most part, they don’t add anything new to the sub-genre, and will most likely fall flat with the average zombie fan. Indeed, a few of them are glaringly out-of-place in such a collection, and offer tenuous (at best) links to anything even remotely resembling a reanimated corpse. Kelly Link’s “Some Zombie Contingency Plans”–while a beautifully written and mesmerizing tale–doesn’t actually have any zombies in it. And while Link’s strong prose perhaps makes up for her story’s lack of anything undead, the same cannot be said of Laurell K. Hamilton’s “Those Who Seek Forgiveness”, which seems particularly shoehorned into this anthology, and will no doubt have most readers skimming the first page and then skipping to the next tale. It reads more like an advertisement for the author’s latest Anita Blake novel than it does a self-contained story, let alone one focusing on the anthology’s theme.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of The Living Dead is its noticeable lack of contributions from any of today’s top zombie writers. It is reasonable to expect that such a themed endeavor would include stories by David Wellington, J.L. Bourne, Bryan Smith, or Max Brooks, among others. I was also disappointed when I didn’t see Phillip Nutman, John Skipp, or Craig Spector’s names in the table of contents. All three contributed important, ground-breaking work to the sub-genre back in the day, and their efforts shouldn’t be overlooked or forgotten.

Despite these shortcomings, The Living Dead is an enjoyable read, overall, and has some good things to offer even the most jaded zombie fan. In addition to the aforementioned classics, there are some overlooked gems that definitely deserve a place at the table, such as Joe Hill’s “Bobby Conroy Comes Back From the Dead” and Darrell Schweitzer’s “The Dead Kid” (one of the author’s absolute best). I was especially happy to see Brian Evenson’s obscure “Prairie”, a wonderful, classic zombie tale which has (to the best of my knowledge) not seen print since its initial publication in The Silver Web #14. Ditto George R. R. Martin’s “Meathouse Man”. Known primarily as a fantasy author, it’s a safe bet that this haunting and evocative tale would have gone unlooked by many zombie prose fans. It’s inclusion here is a welcome surprise.

I was also pleased with John Joseph Adams’ commendable method of not always selecting the most obvious zombie tale from the various contributors. When you think of David J. Schow and zombies, “Jerry’s Kids Meet Wormboy” immediately comes to mind. Ditto for Joe R. Lansdale and “On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks”. That’s just simple arithmetic. Yet, in both cases, Adams was daring enough to select less familiar, but by no means less powerful, zombie tales (Schow’s “Blossom” and Lansdale’s “Deadman’s Road”–a follow-up to Dead In the West). That gamble should be applauded, because both stories deserve a wider audience.

In summation, The Living Dead features some great seminal tales, several lesser-known stories that definitely deserve more attention, a few outright duds, and one or two contributions that are, quite simply, perplexing in their inclusion, no matter how well-written.

The book will certainly appeal to the casual browser who walks by it on an end-cap at their local Borders and Barnes and Noble, and says, “Oooo, zombies.” But for the more discerning and loyal horror literature fan, your enjoyment of The Living Dead will most likely depend on who you are. If you haven’t been exposed to the current plethora of zombie fiction, or if you are under the age of twenty-five and not yet well-read within the zombie literature sub-genre, then this anthology will most likely appeal to you. But if you’re a die-hard zombie fan who already owns all of the (woefully) out of print Book of the Dead anthologies, as well as the other required books that make up a zombie library, then you probably won’t find much here that will strike your fancy, other than stories you already own.

Still, kudos to Nightshade Books for making this available. In recent years, with a few notable exceptions (Max Brooks World War Z and David Schow’s Zombie Jam come to mind), the overwhelming majority of zombie prose has been confined to micro-presses like Permuted Press or mass-market houses like Leisure and Kensington. Nightshade already deserves a special place in genre heaven for their devotion to bringing back the works of Manly Wade Wellman, Karl Edward Wagner and William Hope Hodgson, among others. It’s nice to see them further legitimizing the zombie sub-genre, which is still the favorite whipping-boy of many a literary critic. Perhaps those critics will reconsider that position when they re-familiarize themselves with some of the classic stories contained herein.