when less-than-human is family, friends and neighbors, but hey, strangers, in numbers, will do it for most of us—I think there's an inherent fear of mindless mobs in all of us. It's the hordes that swarm over you. Add to that our unconscious horror of our rampant consumption in the first world and it's like a hundred-thousand inhuman Pac-Men, eating everything in sight. There's not much in the horror field that terrifies me, but zombies do. Their driven, single-minded quality is both terrifying and awe-inspiring. I think it's what all sane people fear, being confronted by something/someone that has your destruction at heart and which/who can't be stopped."
And now a note about the stories that are in this book and the ones that aren't.
In the process of assembling this anthology, I read more zombie stories than you could possibly imagine, and I found more good ones than could possibly fit in one volume, even a mammoth tome like this one. So, in order to help narrow down my selections, I created a few loose guidelines for myself.
First, I wanted to avoid taking too many stories from any one source.
Second, I wanted to avoid taking too many stories from other zombie anthologies. I discovered a lot of great zombie fiction elsewhere and thought that this book would be more valuable to zombie fans if it were to collect that material. Many hardcore zombie aficionados will have already read John Skipp and Craig Spector's zombie anthologies (Book of the Dead, Still Dead, and Mondo Zombie) or James Lowder's Eden Studios zombie anthologies (The Book of All Flesh, The Book of More Flesh, and The Book of Final Flesh), so rather than reprint a large number of stories from those books, I reprinted a few from those volumes, but focused my efforts elsewhere. (And for those of you who haven't read any of those other zombie anthologies, well, go dig them up.)
Third, I deliberately didn't always choose the "obvious" story from an author. (Assuming, of course, that the stories I included instead were just as good.) For instance, I didn't reprint Joe R. Lansdale's "On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks" or David J. Schow's "Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy" because they each have written other great zombie stories as well, and I figured if you've read one story by either of them, it would have been that one.
Fourth, I didn't want to use anything that felt like an excerpt of a larger work, so, for example, that meant omitting anything from Max Brooks's excellent zombie novel World War Z. (Although the novel is episodic, reading the episodes separately robs them of some of their power, I thought; instead, I'll just urge you to go buy it right now. Well, after you've bought this book.)
And finally, I wanted the anthology to include a wide range of zombie fiction, incorporating all types of zombies, from the Romero-style zombie to the techno-zombie and everything in between. So herein you will find the dead mysteriously returned to life hungering for human flesh, corpses reanimated by necromancers, corpses reanimated by technology and/or science, voodoo zombies, revenants, and other, less easily categorized zombies.
But getting back to the appeal of zombies . . . So what about it? Why do you enjoy zombie fiction? Well, whatever your reason for liking zombie stories, there are enough great zombie stories in the pages that follow to please even the most discerning zombie aficionado. So dive in and consume these stories as if they were the brains of the last human left on Earth. Bon appétit!
Some Zombie Contingency Plans
by Kelly Link
Kelly Link is the author of many wonderful short stories, which have been collected in two volumes—Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners—with a third, Pretty Monsters, due out shortly. Her short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Asimov's Science Fiction, Conjunctions, and in anthologies such as McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, The Dark, The Faery Reel, and Best American Short Stories. With her husband, Gavin J. Grant, Link runs Small Beer Press and edits the zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. Grant and Link also co-edit (with Ellen Datlow) The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror annual. Her fiction has earned her an NEA Literature Fellowship and won a variety of awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Stoker, Tiptree, and Locus awards.
"Some Zombie Contingency Plans" first appeared in Link's collection, Magic for Beginners (which, incidentally, also includes another great zombie
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