Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! is a softcover collection of short stories and novel extracts, edited by Otto Penzler. It was originally published on September 20th 2011 in the USA by Random House, as part of the Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Originals series, with a page count of 832. The book was later published in 2012 in the UK under the title Zombies - A Compendium of the Living Dead by Corvus Books, with a page count of 810, though the contents are identical.
The book aims to be the definitive collection of zombie stories, but editor Penzler admits in his introduction to 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.” This self-censorship ensures that the book is not the complete collection it claims to be.
The oversized format of the book means that the stories are presented, unusually, in a two column format. They are also accompanied by vintage pulp magazine illustrations.
The book opens with an extract from William Seabrook’s pioneering look at voodoo, The Magic Island, here rather misrepresented as both a short story and a work of fiction - of which it is neither. Other stories range from vintage pulp magazine stories to modern works. Among the authors included are Lisa Tuttle, Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe, Graham Masterton, H.P. Lovecraft (with three stories, including Herbert West - Reanimator), Robert Bloch, Richard Laymon, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Peter Tremayne, Ramsey Campbell, R. Chetwynd Hayes, Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Richard and Christian Matheson, Joe R. Lansdale, Robert E. Howard and Stephen King.
David Flint, Horrorpedia
“The rollicking gusto of some of the writing, with its overheated adjectives and over-the-top images, is hard to resist” The Wall Street Journal
Categories: 2010s, folklore and mythology, living dead, novel, voodoo, writer, zombies
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