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The Living Dead


Cover"When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth."

From White Zombie to Dawn of the Dead; from Resident Evil to World War Z, zombies have invaded popular culture, becoming the monsters that best express the fears and anxieties of the modern west. The ultimate consumers, zombies rise from the dead and feed upon the living, their teeming masses ever hungry, ever seeking to devour or convert, like mindless, faceless eating machines. Zombies have been depicted as mind-controlled minions, the shambling infected, the disintegrating dead, the ultimate lumpenproletariat, but in all cases, they reflect us, mere mortals afraid of death in a society on the verge of collapse.

Gathering together the best zombie literature of the last three decades from many of today's most renowned authors of fantasy, speculative fiction, and horror, including Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, George R. R. Martin, Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Joe R. Lansdale, The Living Dead, covers the broad spectrum of zombie fiction. The zombies of The Living Dead range from Romero-style zombies to reanimated corpses to voodoo zombies and beyond.

Edited by John Joseph Adams (Wastelands), The Living Dead is more than 200,000 words of zombie fiction (31 stories!), collecting the best tales from Book of the Dead, Still Dead, and Mondo Zombie, along with the best zombie fiction from other sources.

Please note that for this electronic edition of The Living Dead, the following stories originally included in the print edition have been omitted:

Dan Simmons, "This Year's Class Picture"
Sherman Alexie, "Ghost Dance"
Douglas E. Winter, "Less than Zombie"

Cover Art by David Palumbo


ORDER Hardcover
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

First printing, December 2008

Distributed by Night Shade Books
1423 33rd Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94122

www.nightshadebooks.com

Printed in Canada

ISBN-13: 978-1-59780-143-0
ISBN-10: 1-59780-143-7

The Living Dead © 2008 by John Joseph Adams
This edition of The Living Dead © 2008 by Night Shade Books
"Introduction" and author notes © 2008 by John Joseph Adams

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

Electronic version by WebWrights
http://www.webscription.net


Acknowledgment is made for permission to print the following material:

"Some Zombie Contingency Plans" by Kelly Link. © 2005 Kelly Link. Originally published in Magic for Beginners. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Death and Suffrage" by Dale Bailey. © 2002 Dale Bailey. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Blossom" by David J. Schow. © 1989 David J. Schow. Originally published in Book of the Dead, 1989. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"The Third Dead Body" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman. © 1993 Nina Kiriki Hoffman. Originally published in The Ultimate Zombie, 1993. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"The Dead" by Michael Swanwick. © 1996 Michael Swanwick. Originally published in Starlight 1, 1996. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"The Dead Kid" by Darrell Schweitzer. © 2002 Darrell Schweitzer. Originally published in The Book of More Flesh, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Malthusian's Zombie" by Jeffrey Ford. © 2000 Jeffrey Ford. Originally published in SCI FICTION, May 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Beautiful Stuff" by Susan Palwick. © 2004 Susan Palwick. Originally published in SCI FICTION, August 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Sex, Death and Starshine" © 1984 Clive Barker. Originally published in Books of Blood, Volume 1 by Little, Brown Book Group Limited.

"Stockholm Syndrome" by David Tallerman. © 2007 David Tallerman. Originally published in Pseudopod, June 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead" by Joe Hill. © 2005 Joe Hill. Originally published in Postscripts #5, December 2005; and also in 20th Century Ghosts, copyright © 2005, 2007 by Joe Hill, published by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

"Those Who Seek Forgiveness" by Laurell K. Hamilton. © 2006 Laurell K. Hamilton. Originally published in Strange Candy, 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"In Beauty, Like the Night" by Norman Partridge. © 1992 Norman Partridge. Originally published in Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales, 1992. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Prairie" by Brian Evenson. © 1997 Brian Evenson. Originally published in The Silver Web #14, 1997. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Everything Is Better with Zombies" by Hannah Wolf Bowen. © 2006 Hannah Wolf Bowen. Originally published in Phantom #0, 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Home Delivery" by Stephen King. © 1989 Stephen King. Originally published in Book of the Dead, 1989. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Sparks Fly Upward" by Lisa Morton. © 2005 Lisa Morton. Originally published in Mondo Zombie, 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Meathouse Man" by George R. R. Martin. © 1976 by Damon Knight. Copyright renewed 2004. © 2004 by George R. R. Martin. Originally published in Orbit 18, 1976. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Deadman's Road" by Joe R. Lansdale. © 2007 Joe R. Lansdale. Originally published in Weird Tales, February/March 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"The Skull-Faced Boy" by David Barr Kirtley. © 2002 David Barr Kirtley. Originally published in Gothic.net, March 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"The Age of Sorrow" by Nancy Kilpatrick. © 2007 Nancy Kilpatrick. Originally published in Postscripts #10, April 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Bitter Grounds" by Neil Gaiman. © 2003 Neil Gaiman. Originally published in Mojo: Conjure Stories, 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"She's Taking Her Tits to the Grave" by Catherine Cheek. © 2008 Catherine Cheek. Originally published in Ideomancer, June 2008. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Dead Like Me" by Adam-Troy Castro. © 2000 Adam-Troy Castro. Originally published in A Desperate, Decaying Darkness, 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Zora and the Zombie" by Andy Duncan. © 2004 Andy Duncan. Originally published in SCI FICTION, February 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Calcutta, Lord of Nerves" by Poppy Z. Brite. © 1992 Poppy Z. Brite. Originally published in Still Dead, 1992. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Followed" by Will McIntosh. © 2007 Will McIntosh. Originally published in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet #18, Summer 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"The Song the Zombie Sang" by Harlan Ellison® and Robert Silverberg. © 1970 by Harlan Ellison® and Robert Silverberg. Renewed, 1998 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation and Agberg, Ltd. All rights reserved. Harlan Ellison® is a registered trademark of The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

"Passion Play" by Nancy Holder. © 1992 Nancy Holder. Originally published in Still Dead, 1992. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man" by Scott Edelman. © 2007 Scott Edelman. Originally published in Postscripts #12, December 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"How the Day Runs Down" by John Langan. © 2008 John Langan. Original to this volume.

 

Other books edited by John Joseph Adams

Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse
Seeds of Change

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