THE LIVING DEAD
edited by John Joseph Adams
This edition of
Cover art © 2008 by David Palumbo
Cover design by Michael Fusco
All rights reserved
Other books edited by John Joseph Adams
Introduction
by John Joseph Adams
'You know Macumba? Voodoo. My granddad was a priest in Trinidad. He used to tell us, 'When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.''
—Ken Foree as 'Peter' in George A. Romero's
When I first started assembling this anthology, I thought to myself:
Regardless of where the word actually comes from, today the word 'zombie' generally refers to the sort of shambling reanimated corpses as depicted in George A. Romero's landmark film
Most of the stories in this book are either inspired by Romero's 'unholy trilogy'—
So why are we so drawn to zombie fiction? What's so appealing about the idea of the living dead?
John Langan, author of 'How the Day Runs Down' (pg. 469), says that zombies—the post-Romero zombie that has defined our current concept of the beast—have the virtue of simplicity. 'While you can trace aspects of their behavior to a host of monsters that have come before (like vampires, they rise from the dead; like ghouls and werewolves, they eat our flesh; like Frankenstein's monster, they're reanimated corpses; like most monsters, they have a particular weakness that will kill them immediately), they boil all that down to the basics: they're back from the dead, they want to eat us, they can be killed with a shot to the head,' he says. 'I suspect that part of their effectiveness lies in the way they present us to ourselves, by which I mean, if you think about a monster like the vampire or the werewolf, you can see them as aspects of human behavior magnified and embodied; i.e. the vampire's connection to various kinds of (taboo) eroticism has been explored ad infinitum, while the werewolf's link to animal violence has also been recognized. With the zombie, what you get is
David Barr Kirtley, author of 'The Skull-Faced Boy' (pg. 331), says that there are two reasons we find zombies appealing. 'One, I think there's an enormous segment of our brain that's evolved for running away from packs of predators, and zombie stories give us a rare opportunity to take this primal part of our psyches out for a spin,' he says. 'And, two, zombies are a great metaphor. The great mass of humanity often comes across to us as unreasoningly hostile and driven to consumption, and the image of the zombie captures this perfectly.'
The popularity of zombies comes from the fact that the vampire that we all loved got lost, says 'The Age of Sorrow' (pg. 343) author Nancy Kilpatrick. 'A lot of us miss the old resuscitated corpse, the ugly vampire, the mindless one that can't be reasoned with,' she says. 'I think zombies were there already and evolved from the Haitian Voodoo zombie to the Romero zombie that evolved further over the course of his film series so that the cause of zombification became different and rather than being bland slaves, they turned into full-blown predators, en masse. Most of us miss the predatory vampire. Zombies I think have ascended in popularity because they not only fill that archetypal void, but they also reflect society's fear of something overtaking us, making us less-than- human, or the victim of that less-than-human. It's especially traumatizing when less-than-human is family, friends and neighbors, but hey, strangers, in numbers, will do it for most of us—I think there's an inherent fear of mindless mobs in all of us. It's the hordes that swarm over you. Add to that our unconscious horror of our rampant consumption in the first world and it's like a hundred-thousand inhuman Pac-Men, eating everything in sight. There's not much in the horror field that terrifies me, but zombies do. Their driven, single-minded quality is both terrifying and awe-inspiring. I think it's what all sane people fear, being confronted by something/someone that has your destruction at heart and which/who can't be stopped.'
And now a note about the stories that are in this book and the ones that aren't.
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. Many hardcore zombie aficionados will have already read John Skipp and Craig Spector's zombie anthologies (
Third, I deliberately didn't always choose the 'obvious' story from an author. (Assuming, of course, that the