The Living Dead

Having last surveyed WASTELANDS, John Joseph Adams edits another apocalyptic anthology — but this time with 100 percent more zombies — in THE LIVING DEAD. Although it’s comprised of previously reprinted material, the Night Shade Books collection contains its fair share of pleasant surprises.

One of them is its opening story, “This Year’s Class Picture” by Dan Simmons. It’s a true original, about a teacher holed up in a school during a plague crisis, going about her daily routine of teaching her young pupils. They’re infected and she’s not, but sticking to what she knows is about all she can do to retain her sanity as everything outside her walls looks so bleak. Although it uses a horror element as a jumping-off point, it’s an emotional stunner.

THE LIVING DEAD is filled with tales that take the zombie in wildly different directions, as opposed to the George Romero-ready “we’re surrounded” scenario that so many emulate. For instance, in “The Third Dead Body,” Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s first-person prostitute comes back to life to exact revenge on the boyfriend who killed her. Douglas E. Winter channels Bret Easton Ellis in “Less Than Zombie,” a parody of LESS THAN ZERO, and in “Sparks Fly Upward,” Lisa Morton asks, “Do the aborted reanimate, too?”

See what I mean? And yet there’s more where that came from. Darrell Schweitzer’s moving “The Dead Kid” is like STAND BY ME, only with a member of the undead, as some students find a reanimated child in the woods and keep him in a hole to taunt, poke at and humiliate. It’s tough to shake the memory of this one.

The titular “Meathouse Man” of George R.R. Martin’s contribution is a repeat customer of a brothel whose whores appeal to a rather niche fetish: fucking a husk of decayed flesh. Meanwhile, leave it to Joe Lansdale to figure out how to place the contemporary zombie in Western story tropes, in “Deadman’s Road.”

Catherine Cheek clearly has the best story title of the bunch with “She’s Taking Her Tits to the Grave.” This good-humored number is about a cheating trophy wife who may be newly risen from the dead, but at least she’s got her implants. It doesn’t quite rise to the challenge posed by the plot potential, and neither does Norman Partridge’s “In Beauty, Like the Night,” in which a horny guy has a plan to wait out the zombie apocalypse in an island fortress with a year’s worth of centerfold models. Things don’t go according to plan, for the character or for us.

Among 34 tales total, THE LIVING DEAD includes only a small number of stories I’d read earlier elsewhere, such as those from Sherman Alexie, Joe Hill, Stephen King and Neil Gaiman. Those are big names, and so are Kelly Link, David J. Schow, Jeffrey Ford, Clive Barker, Laurell K. Hamilton, Poppy Z. Brite, Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg — all included.

That’s the one problem — should you choose to see it that way: THE LIVING DEAD is overflowing with good stuff. At nearly 500 pages rendered in small print between thin margins, it’s exhausting. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

“Then Quinn was able to yell, and he did because he could feel the ring of vaginal muscle increasing pressure, locking up beyond the circumference of his cock. The more he tried to pull out, the harder he got. … When he felt the muscle sever his penis like a wire cutter, he began to scream hoarsely. Suddenly freed, he sprawled backward. Blood gushed, ruining the carpet and sputtering from his crotch. He watched the stump of his still-stiff manhood vanish into the slick red chasm between Amelia’s legs, overwhelmed by the sight of it being swallowed whole by the orifice that had bitten it off.”

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• WASTELANDS: STORIES OF THE APOCALYPSE edited by John Joseph Adams

Related posts:

1. Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth
2. The Undead: Zombie Anthology
3. Different Kinds of Dead and Other Tales
4. The Morningstar Strain: Plague of the Dead
5. Already Dead