Zombie Fiction

It's getting to the point where everyone is trying to cash in on zombies. It's been happening with vampires for a while, with genre crossovers piling atop one another. After all, what is Twilight if not a Christian vampire romance? Unfortunately, walking corpses with a taste for human flesh don't lend themselves to exploitation in the way that seductive vamps do. Still, here are a few authors who try.

Zombies and football get together in a small Texas town in this sloppy debut by the son of best-selling author Sandra Brown. When the Killington Jackrabbits are drowned in their bus following a misguided prank by bitter rivals, the team's number one fan brings them back from the dead to win the district championship. But things go wrong, and quarterback Cole Logan teams up with school journalist Savannah Hickham to stop the players from eating their way through the populace. Only winning the game can save their souls. This ridiculous premise might have worked if played for laughs, but as straight horror, it fails completely. The exposition is ham-handed, the plot is predictable, and characters are stereotyped and wooden. VERDICT Billed by the publisher as Friday Night Lights meets Dawn of the Dead, this book is too clichéd to be either. Not recommended.

There have been two other recent zombie anthologies. The Living Dead, edited by John Joseph Adams, did a great job of collecting previously published stories, while The New Dead, edited by Christopher Golden, gathered new material. This new collection splits the difference; half of the stories are reprints. With a couple of exceptions ("The Crossing of Aldo Ray" and "Tell Me Like You Done Before"), it's the older works that stand out—in particular, H.P. Lovecraft's "Cool Air" and Kim Newman's "Amerikanski Dead at the Moscow Morgue." Robert E. Howard's novella "Black Canaan" is also included, but this reviewer found its casual racism offensive. VERDICT Consider this purchase if you don't have any other books of zombie stories, but otherwise only for large horror collections.

This third novel featuring reanimated fashionista Amanda Feral (after Happy Hour of the Damned and Road Trip of the Living Dead) goes for the gross-out. It begins in a strip club where Feral is scheduled to meet Johnny Birch, a lecherous wood nymph and reality TV star in Seattle's magical demimonde. Several pages of tasteless jokes later, the two are attacked by a yeti. Eventually, there is a locked-door mystery on the set of a Big Brother-type show. The book is incomprehensible if you haven't read the first two and not much better if you have. The Feral character is aggressively unsympathetic, and crude humor and gutter language abound. VERDICT If you can find a reader equally fond of Irvine Welsh and MaryJanice Davidson, or if the two previous books circulate briskly, buy it. Otherwise, pass.

In the dark future of Knapp's debut, biotechnology has developed the ability to reanimate the dead. More like cyborgs than traditional zombies, "revivors" were first created on the battlefield as a kind of cannon fodder, but now they are used for various legitimate and illicit purposes. Society is stratified, with members of the underclass buying their way up the ladder by selling their bodies to be made into revivors after death. Four characters—an FBI agent, a cop, a cage fighter, and a psychic—come together around a series of strange murders. VERDICT State will appeal to readers who liked Jonathan Maberry's zombie thriller Patient Zero, and fans of gritty sf author Richard K. Morgan (Altered Carbon) will enjoy it as well. Highly recommended.