Zombies

July 27, 2015
These 36 short stories and poems survey the current state of the z-word in this wide-ranging follow-up to 2010's Zombies: The Recent Dead. Despite a bias toward the apocalyptic, Guran's flexible definition of "zombie" yields diverse results, setting the familiar flesh-eating shamblers of Matthew Johnson's "The Afflicted" and Maureen McHugh's "The Naturalist" alongside more folkloric revenants such as the Anglo-Saxon dréag of Marie Brennan's kenning-laden "What Still Abides" or the clawed matchi wanisid manitou that haunt contemporary Manitoba in Jacques L. Condor's "Those Beneath the Bog." Scientific and science-fictional zombies feature in Carrie Vaughn's "Kitty's Zombie New Year" and Charles Stross's "Bit Rot." Alex Dally MacFarlane's "Selected Sources for the Babylonian Plague of the Dead (572â571 BCE)" is a standout of historical impersonation. Traditional interpretations pack some of the most powerful punches in Mike Carey's slow-burning "Iphigenia in Aulis," Nicole Kornher-Stace's fiercely protective "Present," and Joy Kennedy-O'Neill's stunning "Aftermath," which imagines a now-cured America uneasily divided between former "Turners" and "Moles." If not all stories deliver the same provocative shock, the grab-bag of genres ensures there's something for every zombie fan.

November 1, 2010
In this hefty anthology of 22 short stories originally published between 2000 and 2010, zombies run the gamut from shambling, mindless killers to transformed super-cool high school students. Introductions by Guran and David J. Schow contextualize the zombie oeuvre. In Kevin Veale's darkly hilarious "Twisted," two men manage to escape the zombies by ingesting huge amounts of drugs. In Kit Reed's call-and-response "The Zombie Prince," a strange creature and a recently rejected woman have an increasingly intimate conversation about loss and life. Tim Lebbon's coming-of-age novella, "Naming of Parts," in which a boy and his parents flee zombies across postapocalyptic England, delivers an emotional punch despite its by-the-numbers adult–child role reversal. In "Zora and the Zombie," Andy Duncan combines fact and fiction as Zora Neale Hurston confronts zombies in Haiti. This collection has something for every zombie fan.