Truthfully, I'm not even a super fan of zombies. I mean, I like Night of the Living Dead and The Walking Dead, although I'm a bigger fan of the latter's comic-book incarnation than the TV show adaptation. And World War Z, 28 Days Later, and a few other zombie-centric movies are OK, too.
But my go-to supernatural creature has always been the vampire.
Nevertheless, I can't quibble with the breadth and depth of editor Otto Penzler's zombie volume, published in 2011. He's packed many drooling, shuffle-footed examples into every one of this book's 810 pages.
It helps that Penzler's definition of a zombie is very liberal: If it was once dead and has come back to life, it's a zombie. Fair enough. This book is jam-packed with scary stuff from Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Laymon, Guy de Maupassant, and dozens more.
One reason I like anthologies is that readers can dip into them as frequently or infrequently as they desire. A few months ago, I read the Robert E. Howard classic, "Pigeons from Hell" in this volume. Last week, Theodore Sturgeon's "It" caught my attention.
("It," by the way, predates the muckman-in-comics craze—Swamp Thing, Man-Thing, et al.—by several decades. It's also a heckuva story. Penzler says that Sturgeon "was admired by, and was an influence on, his peers far disproportionate to his success with readers." That may be, but I really enjoy "It.")
I may well put Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! aside for a few weeks or months, but I know another story is waiting whenever I get the urge for things that go shuffle in the night.
I'm always on the hunt for more good anthology titles. Share any favorites!
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