Book: The New Dead – a zombie anthology

This was another zombie book that I got in the mail and that, again, I failed to review for a few months. On the bright side, I read it right away, I just couldn’t get motivated to post about it. I’m not sure how that makes me feel better, but it does.

Now, brace yourself for a shocking confession. While it is true that I am a voracious reader (reading mainly Hugo and Nebula award winners), I believe this is the first zombie book that I had ever read. This is especially weird considering that I have easily seen over 100 zombie-themed movies. I’m not sure why I was keeping each of the genres separate in their own mediums. I’m sure if you mucked around in my brain you’d figure out that it has something to do with my childhood…. or possibly penises? Anyway, back on track.

The New Dead is a collection of zombie short stories (and one story that doesn’t have anything to do with zombies at all, for some reason). There are 19 stories in the collection and over-all I would say the quality of the stories is above-average. Sure, there are some real clunkers in there (don’t even get me started about “The Zombie Who Fell From the Sky”), but I think there are more winners than clunkers.

For me, some of the real highlights were “Lazarus” by John Connolly and “Closure, Limited” by Max Brooks (you know, the Zombie Survival Guide guy). Probably the biggest surprise was that I actually enjoyed a story by Joe Hill, “Twittering from the Circus of the Dead”, that was actually written in the format of a string of tweets. It sounds goofy, but it was actually pretty entertaining.

Anyway, since I’ve read this anthology, I’ve read Autumn and Dog Blood by David Moody (or maybe I read Dog Blood first?). So, while I might not have an extensive zombie library to compare this to, I’d say it’s a strong zombie book and I enjoyed reading it. Now, where do I find the literary equivalent of Zombie Lord of the Rings? or Zombie Ender’s Game?