I’ve read a lot of horror fiction over the years. It has been something I’ve come back to again and again over the years. Horror is a great way of exploring our fears and dread of what is around us. Sometimes we can’t look at these directly but through the medium of horror stories we can catch a glimpse and gain some understanding.
The aim was to put together a collection of comics that featured zombies in as many different ways as I could find. From Southern Gothic to space ships, I wanted to see what had been done in the genre and on its edges. As one of the more recent horror icons there was some flex in how it was interpreted by writers and artists. Sure there will be a few that aren’t to everyone’s taste but that’s why there are so many. Short, long, sad, bleak, or funny there are more than a few takeaways for every reader.
I absolutely loved this anthology when I first read it in the 90s. It was still very much in my mind when Constable asked me to do another comics anthology for them. Jones searched for the very best zombie stories but also he wasn’t constrained by one idea of what a zombie was/could be. It has the big names from the time Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, and Christopher Fowler but also some of my favourite authors whose writing blurs genre lines such as Charles L Grant and Dennis Etchinson. It put in my mind that the zombie was as much about ideas of outsiders, rejection, and control as dead flesh continuing to move.
The zombie - a soulless corpse raised from the grave to do its master's bidding - may have had its factual basis in the voodoo ceremonies of the West Indies, but it is in fiction, movies, video games and comics that the walking dead have flourished. What makes a zombie?
This Twentieth Anniversary Edition of one of the first and most influential zombie anthologies answers that question with 26 tales of rot and resurrection from classic authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, M. R. James and J. Sheridan Le Fanu, along with modern masters of the macabre…
Okay, I know Frankenstein’s Creature is generally viewed as a Monster rather than zombie but hey, he’s built from graveyard flesh and bone. His creator is generally seen as a ‘man of science’ but he dabbled in the occult and alchemy, too, even if he abandoned those ideas to try modern alternatives. It’s an amazing book using The Creature’s plight to challenge our ideas and morals. These ideas of how we should treat people and the results remain poignant but it is the loneliness of the Creature and its battle to survive its rejection by its creator and society that holds the modern-day reader even now.
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
'That rare story to pass from literature into myth' The New York Times
Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley on Lake Geneva. The story of Victor Frankenstein who, obsessed with creating life itself, plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, but whose botched creature sets out to destroy his maker, would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity. Based on the third…
A horror classic that crisscrosses the vampire and the zombie genres with a post-apocalyptic world. This book had a huge impact on me when I first read it. [spoilers] to have the narrator battle so hard against the world and then at the end accept that it was no longer worth fighting changed my idea of what novels could do. Endings were not always about winning.
An acclaimed SF novel about vampires. The last man on earth is not alone ...Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth ...but he is not alone. Every other man, woman and child on the planet has become a vampire, and they are hungry for Neville's blood. By day he is the hunter, stalking the undead through the ruins of civilisation. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for the dawn. How long can one man survive like this?
Now this isn’t in the zombie genre but it has that sense of being overwhelmed by numbers of nameless foes that seems very much a central tenet of the modern zombie genre. It has the outpost of an empty island that put our narrator (a pacifist) in the position of having to kill again and again. So often the zombies are faceless hordes – perhaps that is the fear they encapsulate but here, in what feels like the setting of a late-night movie I used to watch as a kid, here the narrator is tested again and again. A fantastic novel that defies categories.
'A troubling, hammering and glorious novel' DAVID MITCHELL
On the edge of the Antarctic Circle, in the years after World War One, a steamship approaches a desolate island. On board is a young man on his way to assume the post of weather observer, to live in solitude for a year at the end of the earth. But on shore he finds no trace of the man whom he has been sent to replace, just a deranged castaway who has witnessed a horror he refuses to name. The rest is woods, a deserted cabin, rocks, silence and the surrounding sea.…
I’m a 70s kid so the Six Million Dollar Man was a staple of TV viewing but Deathlok, a cyborg created from dying/dead soldier Luther Manning, chilled and thrilled me in equal measures. The idea of waking up in the remains of your shattered body with cold metal taking the place of most flesh and a computer talking in your head: your consciousness, a voice forever trapped in a dead but unable-to-die body was something that struck deep. ‘Alert: human personality reasserting itself. Repress immediately before…’
Col. Luther Manning has been locked in a state of living death. He is no longer a man, but a mockery of a man. He has become an amalgam of reanimated flesh and computer circuitry, stripped of his family, his humanity -- but not his will. He has become Deathlok the Demolisher -- a weapon of war programmed solely for destruction.
I became fascinated with 16th-century and 17th-century Europe after reading Don Quixote many years ago. Since then, every novel or nonfiction book about that era has felt both ancient and contemporary. I’m always struck by how much our environment has changed—transportation, communication, housing, government—but also how little we as people have changed when it comes to ambition, love, grief, and greed. I doubled down my reading on that time period when I researched my novel, Dulcinea. Many people read in the eras of the Renaissance, World War II, or ancient Greece, so I’m hoping to introduce them to the Baroque Age.
Dolça Llull Prat, a wealthy Barcelona woman, is only 15 when she falls in love with an impoverished poet-solder. Theirs is a forbidden relationship, one that overcomes many obstacles until the fledgling writer renders her as the lowly Dulcinea in his bestseller.
By doing so, he unwittingly exposes his muse to gossip. But when Dolça receives his deathbed note asking to see her, she races across Spain with the intention of unburdening herself of an old secret.
On the journey, she encounters bandits, the Inquisition, illness, and the choices she's made. At its heart, Dulcinea is about how we betray the people we love, what happens when we succumb to convention, and why we squander the few chances we get to change our lives.
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