Steve Berman: Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages (Prime, 2013; mix of reprinted and original stories)
Holly Black & Justine Larbalestier: Zombies vs. Unicorns (Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2010; half zombie, intended for YA)
John Joseph Adams: The Living Dead 2 (Night Shade, 2010, mostly reprints)
Christopher Golden: The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2010)
Christopher Golden: 21st Century Dead: A Zombie Anthology (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2012)
Paula Guran: Extreme Zombies (Prime Books, 2012; reprints and only for fans of the extreme)
Stephen Jones: Zombie Apocalypse! (Running Press, 2010)
Stephen Jones: Zombie Apocalypse! Fightback (Running Press, 2012)
Silvia Moreno-Garcia: Dead North: Canadian Zombie Fiction [Exile Editions (Canada, but distributed in US), 2013]
Otto Penzler: Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! (Vintage, 2011; aka as Zombies: A Compendium of the Living Dead; historical overview; reprints)
Check the acknowledgments at the back of this volume, and you’ll discover a broad range of sources of zombie stories from the past few years. You might also note that all but seven of the thirty-six entries collected here were published in 2010 or after. Of those seven: two are poems (which I did not consider for the 2010 volume), one has been published only in Australia, two were not then available for reprint, and the other two I was simply unaware of.
One thing I noticed as I discovered (or rediscovered) these very recent zombie stories: in our fictional worlds, we seem to accept that zombies exist or will exist far more readily than we did a decade ago. They are almost considered inevitable. Their fictional popularity is even sometimes referenced. This, perhaps, allows the writer to venture further from the generic trope and deal more with dead that live in different ways rather than adhere to the more common ideations—including the more fantastic. It may also allow the authors to be either more compassionate with the undead or even less understanding of the once-human monsters. We’ve known all along the living dead are really us, but authors seem to be using the metaphor of the zombie in ever more creative ways.
Usually, of course, the stories are more about living humans than the living dead—if and how they remain human after the world is utterly, irrevocably, (but not always horribly) changed. Our reaction to zombies is far more telling than the existence of the dead that walk and prey on the living—if they pose a threat to the living at all.
I won’t name titles, so as not to spoil any plots, but among these thirty-six stories you will find both the humorous and the achingly serious. Naturally, using tales of the living dead to comment on culture as a whole, religion, and politics are still fair game, and—
Zombies, along with other apocalyptic events, are used purely as a metaphor for personal pain . . .
The affliction is not immediate onset, you gradually get “sicker” until you are an “end-stager” . . . or the infection comes on in a hour—there is time to record your turning from a thinking person to a brain-eater . . .
Instead of a mass event, returning from the dead can be individual happenstance: a spouse comes back from the grave, a guy at the office shows up after he’s dead, through strange science one explores the liminal spaces that separate life from death . . .
The living dead are part of history, and the world has put itself back together one way or another. Zombies, like disease, are just another truism or merely something else that messes your life up . . .
The dead are raised for convenience, through inadvertent or intentional science or even necromancy. Society has contrived ways to deal with them . . .
Zombies are revived in various alternate histories: a pre-Roman Britain . . . First Nation legends . . . ancient Babylon . . . among nineteenth-century pox-ridden cadavers . . . during World War Two . . .
The dead return to life and nothing has changed for them or anyone else . . .
A few zombis, with roots in a mixture of Afro-Caribbean lore and the religion of voudou, appear . . . as well as other dead things commanded by more fantastic magic . . .
There is an outbreak of zombism in a posthuman far-future (complete with all the trappings of hard science fiction) on a spaceship traveling to distant stars . . .
Of course there are a variety of gritty futures where civilization has turned into an environment worse than any primitive jungle and one must fight the dead to live . . . and much more.
Are these all truly zombie stories? To me, they are: all deal with the dead coming back to some semblance of physical life. At the very least, they are worthy of your perusal and debate. The zombie subgenre, as I mentioned four years ago, is a hardy virus and continues to mutate and thus thrive.
So, once again, dear readers—BONE appetit!
The Afflicted
Matthew Johnson
In the end I managed a bit of sleep, wedged between the trunk and branches of the oak, before dawn came. My knees and elbows ached as I lowered myself to the ground and I could feel a blister forming on my shoulder where the strap of my .30-06 Winchester had rubbed against my oilskin all night. I went over the previous day’s events in my mind, walking myself carefully through every mundane moment from when I woke up to when I climbed into the tree to sleep; then I looked down at my watch, waited for the minute to turn over and started to rattle off words that started with L: life, leopard, lizard, loneliness . . . Twenty words and thirty seconds later I took a breath and started down the train tracks.
It was about an hour’s walk to the camp, my last stop on this circuit. The clearing was packed with tents, their walls so faded by years of sun I could hardly make out the FEMA logo on the side; here and there ripped flaps of nylon fluttered in the breeze. The camps, cramped to begin with, were made even tighter by the lean-tos that had been built to expand the tents or shore them up, so that in places I had to turn sideways to squeeze my way toward the center of the camp.
As I got deeper into the camp, pale figures began to emerge from the tents, most of them dressed in filthy pajamas and bathrobes and nearly all bearing scars or fresh wounds on whatever flesh was exposed. I kept my .30-06 at my side and quickened my pace as they began to shuffle after me on slippered feet.
A single tent stood in the middle of the camp, as worn as the rest but bearing a faded Red Cross logo. When I reached it, I turned around and shrugged out of my backpack one arm at a time. All the narrow paths that led here were now blocked by the shambling forms that had come out of the tents: they paused as they reached the clearing, watching me carefully as I cradled my rifle.
After a few moments, one of them stepped forward. He was bald, save for a fringe of white hair, and he had a bloody gash down the side of his face. Unlike most of the others he was still in reasonably good shape, his skin the color of a walnut. I leveled my rifle at him; he took another shambling step and then stopped.