The Living Dead

In time for the Halloween season, I picked up a collection of zombie short stories called The Living Dead.

One thing I have learned over the years running into zombie fans on the internet and out in the world is that everyone has their favorites.  Some like the slow Romero zombies (my personal favorite), others like the fast running Dawn of the Dead remake style, while still others prefer the hoodoo voodoo zombies, and there are many more flavors.  This collection of short stories pretty much covers them all.  From the cursed living who return from the dead to the mindless drones and even to actors playing extras in Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead at the mall.

Because of this wide range of coverage, I can’t say I loved every story.  In fact, I’d probably say I only loved maybe a third of them, possibly less.  Some of them I could barely trudge my way through, so alien were the concepts of zombies envisioned by their authors (hence the reason why it took me well over a month to read the whole thing).  But, it did make me realize how wide the idea of “zombies” can run, and that perhaps the ideas I’ve been nurturing are not as common as I thought they were.

When I closed the cover of this tome, I was relieved to finally be done what, in part at least, had been a chore to get through.  But I was also satisfied, and really, what more can you ask of a book than that?

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