The Living Dead

THE LIVING DEAD

edited by John Joseph Adams

The Living Dead © 2008 by John Joseph Adams

This edition of The Living Dead © 2008 by Night Shade Books

Cover art © 2008 by David Palumbo

Cover design by Michael Fusco

All rights reserved

"Introduction" and author notes © 2008 by John Joseph Adams

Other books edited by John Joseph Adams

Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse

Seeds of Change

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 Dawn of the Dead

When I first started assembling this anthology, I thought to myself: This is not going to be the sort of book that begins with an origin of the word zombie. Because that's not the point, is it? Zombie fiction is about the unburied dead returning to life and seeking human victims. It's about battling a frightening, implacable foe and imagining what it would be like to survive the end of the world and trying to figure out what to do when the dead won't stay dead.

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 Night of the Living Dead. In his short fiction collection Zombie Jam, author David J. Schow explains the influence of Romero: "The plain fact is that the aptly-christened 'Romero zombies' have infiltrated the culture to the extent that even people who have never experienced the movies 'know' what zombies are in shortform: They're dead, they walk, they want to eat you, and they usually outnumber you."

Most of the stories in this book are either inspired by Romero's "unholy trilogy"—Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead—or are a reaction to it. That influence is obvious in much of the fiction contained herein, and authors frequently cite seeing Romero's films as pivotal moments in their youth (and, indeed, their lives).

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 us, pretty much as we are, maybe with a little damage, and we consume one another.  No eroticism, no animal violence, just a single, overwhelming appetite. That's simultaneously very straightforward and very disturbing."

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."