chiller blog

Posted Mar 15, 10 01:36 PM

CHILLER's CHALK OUTLINE: The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology

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THE NEW DEAD: A Zombie Anthology
Edited by Christopher Golden

Publication date: February 16, 2010
St. Martin's Griffin
Trade Paperback Original
400 pp; $14.95; 0-312-55971-2
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In the world of pop culture, nothing is hotter than zombies right now. Thanks to the commercial success of Max Brooks' World War Z, the phenomenal video game series Resident Evil, or movies like Dawn of the Dead and Zombieland, the living dead are here to stay. There are many ways to interpret these zombie myths. Stoker Award-winning author Christopher Golden has assembled an all-original anthology of zombie stories from an eccentric array of today's hottest supernatural, fantasy, and literary writers giving their takes on death and resurrection, and all new versions of the zombie apocalypse.

With stories from Kelley Armstrong, Joe Hill, John Connolly, Max Brooks, Tad Williams, David Wellington, David Liss, Aimee Bender, Jonathan Maberry, and many others, this is a wildly diverse and entertaining collection...the Last Word on the New Dead.

I suppose it's indicative, somewhat. In my pantheon of personal horror tastes, a year and a half in on various articles, this is my inaugural foray a la zombie. Not that I hold anything against reanimated cannibals. Maybe it was their food source.

The living, breathing characters in zombie movies are largely interchangeable. They bicker across racial lines, have their babies at inopportune junctures, and revert to behavior less humane than the waves of the undead. Through looting or stumbling upon vacant malls or mansions, they temporarily revel in the good "life" (if you laughed, the pun was intended). That is, until struggling through all those montages of grubby arms protruding through boarded-over windows, yanking at hair and rifles.

Of course, there's usually that under-developed character who spends the entire movie in bed, "recovering" from a prior off-screen chomp. And the lower the billing, the more likely an actor is to be spending cadaver time in the prosthetics trailer. Some of the living will become the "un-". Some will return to eat their co-stars. The more recognizable faces may escape near the end of Act III, typically only thinking that they have.

And all the time, I'm thought-nagged by how easy it oughta be for functioning brains to prevail. A zombie, after all, only has two speeds: Shuffle and rabid sprint. I don't think I became tired of zombies; I became tired of their counterpart prey. Switch the characters with the lazily-considered cast from virtually any early '80s slasher pic, and the results will be the same.

But those complaints are whew-ingly exempt (mmm...maybe a "whew" or three) from The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology from St. Martin's Press (a publishing casa which certainly has a keen eye for aligning themselves with writers who are growing the genre). Stoker Award-winning author Christopher Golden compiles a collection of 19 creative pens and keyboards who, at once, re-inject themselves as artists, fans, literates and cinephiles.

The gauntlet immediately hits the ground with John Connolly's profound "Lazarus," a dream-drift exploration of the biblical "if" consequences Scorsese tred into with his adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ. Connolly's narrative weaves deep into the nightmarish fallout of a spectacular miracle. Followed by David Liss's "What Maisie Knew," the anthology kickstarts with a potent one-two beginning. Revolving around a not-too-distant future Everyman, literally, "keeping" his shameful past (the Reanimate lady-fair of the title), Liss's prose is addictive...

"She had taken her secret to the grave, but then had left the grave and brought the secret with her."

...while his social commentary subtly, patiently waits below the floorboards:

"If people wanted to torture the dead, that was their own business."

Beyond, there are more dark delicacies. Perhaps starting with a remarkable twist ending and dutifully - and dramatically - working back, Brian Keene's emotionally ironic "The Wind Cries Mary" stands out. Though more genre-obvious, I particularly savored the slow-fuse sea-turn atmospherics of Rick Hautala's "Ghost Trap;" the cold, calculated, and carefully-crafted plot stuns of Kelley Armstrong's "bastard-bigwig's-gotta-find-a-cure" tale, "Life Sentence"; and in "Delice," what Holly Newstein skillfully leaves - and does not leave - to the imagination in the Creole voodoo comeuppancer.

Gotta carp. Certain tellings are likely more audienced to the hardcore sub-genre-ist. Joe Hill's "Twittering from the Circus of the Dead" plays like Hitchcock's Rope: An experiment undertaken for experiment's sake (Here, the author restricts his story-telling to "tweets." If you don't know what that is, you have a lot of pop culture to catch up on). Ingenious, but don't question the logic too much of what's still a pretty good gallows joke. Tim Lebbon's "In the Dust" works hard to inject immediacy into ground already exhausted by 28 Days/Weeks Later. Its vague plague (I know, I know...he probably wants us only to know what his characters do) and occasional self-reflexivity are a distraction (a protagonist barks to a military type: "What movie do you think you're in?"), all in service to an ending that you may figure out well in advance. Hmm.

But, even days after, I keep going back to the unfrozen arrangement within the pages of Derek Nikitas's really, really, REALLY hilarious meat lockerer "My Dolly." (You have got to meet "Grunta".)

"Milos, he is dead from heart attack!"

"Oh...can I talk to him anyway?"

Nikitas is a hoot, the kind of natural storyteller you wish one of your friends could be over a round of Heinekens or late show lattes.

But I digress.

The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology is a hot addition to the cold slab.