Zombies: The Recent Dead

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. (Jan.)