67 books like Cold Skin

Legends are made of powerful stuff, and nothing has greater power than a total flip in perspective. I still recall the gut-punch end to this book, though it’s been decades since I read it. 

Robert Neville is a vampire hunter by day and a tormented man by night. As seemingly the only living human in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, Robert faces depression, isolation, alcoholism, and his undead neighbor, Ben Cortman, who appears outside Robert’s front door each night chanting, "Come out, Neville."

But when Robert is finally captured, and the truth of his situation is revealed, he gets a good look at the world through the eyes of the undead and is forced to ask himself, who am I? What have I become? 

Perhaps the most classic work of horror fiction in both literature and cinema. As an English teacher, I find that there is so much fodder for lessons prevalent in this book–nature vs nurture, the dangers of forbidden knowledge and playing God, the arrogance of science, and who the real monster is. I particularly love the difference between The Monster in the novel and the film, its articulation, desires, abilities, and even its physical appearance. Few written works have been more seminal.

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.

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…’

If you love reading about English royalty and history as I do, then it’s not too hard to let go of reality and let the legendary Queen of England, Queen Victoria, take on an even larger role in her vast empire. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather see keep the kingdom free from zombies and demons than a strong-willed Queen willing to vanquish evil with her scepter.

John Russo co-authored the original Night of the Living Dead script with Romero. Later on, he came up with a new slant on the zombie apocalypse, with a little more humor added, in Return of the Living Dead, which diverged from the grimmer Romero series and created its own franchise. His mass-market paperback novelization of that movie came out in 1978. I found a copy of it in a thrift store in downtown Dallas in the late Eighties, shoved on a shelf amid multiple copies of Reader’s Digest, its spine split, its pages marked up by an unknown reader with inked exclamation points and multiple question marks. It’s a great read, and a worthy addition to the canon.  

I’m not sure if this author is still writing but we swapped novels when I wrote my first book. This is a story about someone who was bitten, but it’s told through their eyes as they turn into a zombie. What do they do? How do they feel? It’s a well-crafted story for a first novel, having a zombie who still thinks like a human. 

I pulled this book out not really expecting much, I had read so many zombie stories that they were all starting to blend together at this point. So I was pleasantly surprised to read a new take, a group of terrorists threatening to use a bioweapon to create a race of zombies. This had very few dead spots, plenty of human/human and human/zombie action to keep me interested while still showing humanity and the conflict of morals when you need to take a life. 

Haywood starts out on day one and the action rarely slows down. Howie and Dave are some of the best characters I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading about and what sets this series apart is the location. Haywood is British and the series is set in England naturally. The challenges are different, the landscape is different and the undead are definitely different. Over the 25-book series, and still going strong, the undead evolve and change and it’s a fascinating tale to follow.

The Rising was one of the first zombie books I read after a while and it was interesting. It went beyond what people expected or thought they wanted from zombie novels. It was less Night of the Living Dead and more Day of the Dead with killing, and mutilations, and suspenseful expectations that no one really thought could be met.