Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!

by Otto Penzler

Overview

Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! is the darkest, the living-deadliest, scariest—and dare we say most tasteful—collection of zombie stories ever assembled. It’s so good, it's a no-brainer.
 
There is never a dull moment in the world of zombies. They are superstars of horror and they are everywhere, storming the world of print and visual media. Their endless march will never be stopped. It's the Zombie Zeitgeist! Now, with his wide sweep of knowledge and keen eye for great storytelling, Otto Penzler offers a remarkable catalog of zombie literature. Including unstoppable tales from world-renowned authors like Stephen King, Joe R. Lansdale, Robert McCammon, Robert E. Howard, and Richard Matheson to the writer who started it all, W.B. Seabrook, Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! will delight and devour horror fans from coast to coast.
 
Featuring: 
   • Deadly bites
   • Satanic Pigeons
   • A parade of corpses
   • Zombies, zombies, and more zombies

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307740892
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/20/2011
Pages:	832
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.12(h) x 1.44(d)

About the Author

Otto Penzler lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!

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By Otto Penzler

Vintage

Copyright © 2011 Otto Penzler
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780307740892

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Introduction
by Otto Penzler

ZOMBIES AIN'T WHAT they used to be. Not so long ago, they were safely ensconced on Haiti so the rest of the world could merely scoff at the bizarre myth of the living dead on one relatively small Caribbean island. Well, they have proliferated at an alarming rate, invading the rest of the world, and it seems unlikely that they have any intention of going away anytime soon.

W. B. Seabrook, in his 1929 book, The Magic Island, recounted “true” tales of voodoo magic on Haiti bringing the recently dead back to life as slow- moving, virtually brain-dead creatures who would work tirelessly in the fields without pay and without complaint. These stories introduced the zombie to much of the world, though most national folklores have similar tales and legends. A decade after Seabrook’s groundbreaking volume, Zora Neale Hurston researched Haitian folklore and told similar stories of eyewitness accounts of zombies, as have subsequent anthropologists, sociologists, and others not prone to imaginative fancies.

If zombie literature began with the reportage of Seabrook, it had powerful ancestral works on which to draw. Stories of the living dead, or ghouls, or reanimated people, have existed since the Arabian Nights tales and borrowed from other horror story motifs, from the lurching reanimated monster of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the undead vampires of John Polidori’s The Vampyre and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Several of the most distinguished short-story writers of the nineteenth century turned to figures who had been dead but then, uh-oh, were alive. Edgar Allan Poe was almost relentless in his use of the dead coming back to life, most famously in “The Fall of the House of Usher” but most vividly in his contribution to this volume, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” Guy de Maupassant’s poignant “Was It a Dream?” lingers in the memory as an example of how a corpse leaving a grave can destroy the living without a single act or thought of violence. Ambrose Bierce’s famous “The Death of Halpin Frayser” may be interpreted as a ghost story, a vampire story, or a zombie story, and is equally terrifying as any of them; it is not included in this volume because I selected it for inclusion in The Vampire Archives.

Now a staple of horror fiction, zombies, as we know them today, have a very short history. Tales of resurrected corpses and ghouls were popular in the weird menace pulps of the 1930s, but these old-fashioned zombies had no taste for human flesh. For that, we can thank George Romero, whose 1968 film Night of the Living Dead introduced this element to these undead critters. Writers, being writers, took to this notion as a more extreme depiction of reanimation and have apparently made every effort to outdo one another in the degree of violence and gore they could bring to the literature.

While this incursion into the realm of splatterpunk may be welcomed by many readers, I have attempted to maintain some balance in this collection and have omitted some pretty good stories that, in my view, slipped into an almost pornographic sensibility of the need to drench every page with buckets of blood and descriptions of mindless cruelty, torture, and violence. Of course, zombies are mindless, so perhaps this behavior is predictable, but so are many of the stories, and I have opted to include a wider range of fiction. While the characters in early stories are not called zombies, they are the living dead (or, occasionally, apparently so), and they qualify for inclusion.

Inevitably, some of the most popular writers and their best stories will have been collected in other anthologies, so will seem familiar. For a definitive collection like this one, I wanted them to be included, so if you’ve already read the stories by H. P. Lovecraft, Poe, and Stephen King, skip them if you must, though they became popular because they are really good and bear rereading. On the other hand, you will find in these pages some stories that you’ve never read by authors of whom you’ve never heard, and you are in for a treat.

To cover the broad spectrum and significant history of zombie literature required a good bit of research, and I am indebted to the welcome and needed assistance of numerous experts in the genre, most notably John Pelan, Robert Weinberg, John Knott, Chris Roden, Joel Frieman, Michele Slung, and Gardner Dozois.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! by Otto Penzler Copyright © 2011 by Otto Penzler. Excerpted by permission of Vintage, a division of Random House, Inc.
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Table of Contents

Otto Penzler: Introduction
W. B. Seabrook: Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields
David A. Riley: After Nightfall
Hugh B. Cave: Mission to Margal
Chet Williamson: The Cairnwell Horror
Arthur Leo Zagat: Crawling Madness
Lisa Tuttle: Treading the Maze
Karen Haber: Red Angels
Michael Marshall Smith: Later
Vivian Meik: White Zombie
Guy de Maupassant: Was It a Dream?
Steve Rasnic Tem: Bodies and Heads
Dale Bailey: Death and Suffrage
Henry Kuttner: The Graveyard Rats
Edgar Allan Poe: The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
Yvonne Navarro: Feeding the Dead Inside
Charles Birkin: Ballet Nègre
Geoffrey A. Landis: Dead Right
Graham Masterton: The Taking of Mr. Bill
Jack D’Arcy: The Grave Gives Up
H. P. Lovecraft: Herbert West–Reanimator
H. P. Lovecraft: Pickman’s Model
Robert Bloch: Maternal Instinct
Kevin J. Anderson: Bringing the Family
Richard Laymon: Mess Hall
Sheridan Le Fanu: Schalken the Painter
Thorp McClusky: While Zombies Walked
Mary A. Turzillo: April Flowers, November Harvest
Mort Castle: The Old Man and the Dead
Henry S. Whitehead: Jumbee
Peter Tremayne: Marbh Bheo
Thomas Burke: The Hollow Man
Anthony Boucher: They Bite
Gahan Wilson: Come One, Come All
Ramsey Campbell: It Helps If You Sing
R. Chetwynd-Hayes: The Ghouls
Seabury Quinn: The Corpse-Master
F. Marion Crawford: The Upper Berth
Ralston Shields: Vengeance of the Living Dead
Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg: The Song the Zombie Sang
John H. Knox: Men without Blood
Uel Key: The Broken Fang
Theodore Sturgeon: It
Day Keene: League of the Grateful Dead
Garry Kilworth: Love Child
Edith and Ejler Jacobson: Corpses on Parade
Richard and Christian Matheson: Where There’s a Will
Michael Swanwick: The Dead
Manly Wade Wellman: Song of the Slaves
H. P. Lovecraft: The Outsider
Robert McCammon: Eat Me
Joe R. Lansdale: Deadman’s Road
Robert E. Howard: Pigeons from Hell
Scott Edelman: Live People Don’t Understand
August Derleth and Mark Schorer: The House in the Magnolias
Stephen King: Home Delivery
Arthur J. Burks: Dance of the Damned
Theodore Roscoe: Z Is for Zombie

Editorial Reviews

Penzler's latest monster-sized anthology of monster stories is sure to call attention to the living dead the same way that his Vampire Archives (2009) spotlighted the undead. The 57 stories mostly feature the two main types of fictional zombie: pre–Night of the Living Dead voodoo-resurrected corpses (Manly Wade Wellman's "Song of the Slaves," August Derleth and Mark Schorer's "The House in the Magnolias") and modern Romero-esque brain-eating machines (Robert R. McCammon's "Eat Me," Stephen King's "Home Delivery"). Penzler makes a solid case for some horror classics being zombie tales in spirit if not in specifics, among them Robert E. Howard's Southern Gothic masterpiece "Pigeons from Hell" and Theodore Sturgeon's backwoods monster tale "It." He overreaches somewhat, though, in including H.P. Lovecraft's ghoul-fest "Pickman's Model" and F. Marion Crawford's haunted-stateroom story "The Upper Berth." Zombie fans will find this book controversial as well as comprehensive. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Rollicking . . . Over-the-top . . . Hard to resist." —The Wall Street Journal

“We would do well to page through a wonderfully thorough new anthology of short fiction called, straightforwardly enough, Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! . . . Showcas[es] countless terrific writers, known and unknown. . . . If you like your zombies with a dose of literary erudition and horror fiction with character, intelligence, and atmosphere, be [sure to] pick this one up.” —SF Weekly
 
“Presents a . . . nuanced portrayal of death brought to life—one to which Gen Xers, Gen Yers and others probably haven't been previously exposed. . . . high on drama, tension and a feeling of the macabre. . . . I’d say it’s a no-brainer.” —Mike Householder, Associated Press
 
“Splendid. . . . A full dance card of undead heavy hitters that range from the timeless (Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson) to the timely (Scott Edelman, Joe R. Lansdale, Dale Bailey).. . . . Zombie aficionados will eagerly embrace this controversial and comprehensive collection.” —Library Journal

From the Publisher

In this splendid collection, noted anthologist Penzler (The Vampire Archives) has assembled 57 stories that, in his opinion, make up the definitive collection of zombie short fiction. The bulk fall into one or the other of the standard subcategories of zombie lit: traditional voodoo-resurrected living dead, as in Manley Wade Wellman's "Song of the Slaves" and Karen Haber's "Red Angels," or more modern shambling corpses, like those in Stephen King's "Home Delivery" and Robert McCammon's "Eat Me." All the stories have appeared in previous anthologies, so there are few surprises, but rather a full dance card of undead heavy hitters that range from the timeless (Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson) to the timely (Scott Edelman, Joe R. Lansdale, Dale Bailey). Penzler's latest mammoth anthology celebrates the living dead the same way that The Vampire Archives lauds the descendants of Dracula. His choice to largely omit splatterpunk is interesting and will surely raise some hackles, since this excludes some of the genre's signature authors (Poppy Z. Brite, Jack Ketchum, and Clive Barker). Nevertheless, zombie aficionados will eagerly embrace this controversial and comprehesive collection.—Jeanne Bogino, New Lebanon Lib., NY

Library Journal