A well-ranged collection of non-revisionist cracking good zombie stories. Hooray!

I’ve already had the opportunity to review one so called zombie story anthology on this site. Since that critique was less than glowing, I thought I’d toss in a recommendation for one of my favorite horror collections. I’d loath to bring up such sourness without balancing it out with something sweet.

‘The Mammoth Book of Zombies’ is a bit hard to come by nowadays. Out of print, and a bit overpriced on the second-hand market due to scarcity, if you should ever stumble across a copy in your favorite used bookstore, I suggest picking it up while you can. (The charmingly disgusting cover art is worth a chuckle all by its lonesome.)

I’ll keep this review brief ; a collection of short stories must be judged a little differently than a novel. (I.e., not as a true whole but as a sum of its parts) The great thing about this book is that it presents such a wide variety of tales without ever losing sight of its central theme. There’s a great mix of talent on display here, from famous authors ( Lovecraft, Poe, Bloch ) to more obscure but nonetheless imaginative contributors. Those among us who tend to think of zombie fiction as a recent phenomenon might be interested to sample tales of inhuman revenant corpses spanning back well over a century. ( Contrary to popular belief, George Romero was not the first to invent cannibalistic zombies. Flesh-devouring corpses appear in Lovecraft’s original version of ’Herbert West- Reanimator’ )

There’s a little something for every taste here. Tales of traditional Haitian voodoo share space with NOTLD style man-eaters. You’ll find both disturbing and gruesome narratives, as well as darkly humorous E.C. comics-esque yarns. Jones seems to have firm grasp not only on what makes a zombie story entertaining, but what makes a zombie story a zombie story to begin with. In this way, ‘Mammoth’ succeeds in every area where ‘The Ultimate Zombie’ fails.