Skipp & Spector - Book Of The Dead

Time for some (mostly) splatterpunk fun!

Chan McConnell - Blossom: "Quinn thought of that crazy shit on the news. Cannibal attacks on the eastern seaboard. Some whackpot scientist had claimed that dead people were reviving and eating live people. It was all Big Apple rat shit ....."

Or maybe not. Quinn wines and dines Amelia, a secretary at Columbia Savings, and takes her home for some sexy fun and games. He's interested in people's 'aberrations' (hers is eating flowers) or maybe he just needs reassurance over his own. Unfortunately, he doesn't think to ask her if she has any respiratory problems before zipping her into a leather mask and she expires, still tied to the bed, with Quinn ramming away inside her. He doesn't even notice. Until she gets hungry ....

Richard Laymon - Mess Hall: Jean and Paul are disturbed by a stranger while enjoying a romp in the park after nightfall. When he blows Paul's brains all over Jean's face, beats her up and makes off with her in his car, Jean realises she's fallen into the clutches of the Reaper, a torture murderer with seven victims to his name. Handcuffed to a tree in the 'Mess Hall' - the lonely stretch of woodland where the Reaper does his stuff - Jean watches hopefully as six shadowy figures emerge from the thickets and crawl toward the killer as he's dipping into his tool-box. But look at the state of them .... !

Violent, grisly, sick, well nasty .... one of Laymon's most effective shorts!

Philip Nutman - Wet Work: "There is no time to care, just the will to survive."

Washington, AZ ("After Zombification") and Corvino, Harris, Skolomowsky and Lewis front a team of wet workers, a Government clean-up operation who prowl the streets bagging up the leftovers and report directly to the President. All have trained killer backgrounds with the Pole being particularly sadistic. But there's such a thing as too much job satisfaction and a certainly amount of local hostility from the living makes for a supremely meaty confrontation.

Brian Hodge - Dead Giveaway: "The first television program conceived entirely for zombies. I want my ZTV.": A fairly extravagant claim perhaps, but The X Factor & Co were still some years away. Following the zombie apocalypse, Monty Olsen, former Game Show host, heads for the studio where he made so many of his hits, intent on blowing his brains out. But his one-time producer - himself a walking dead - has realised that the zombies still spend much of their time slumped before the TV screen and persuades Olsen to host Dead Giveaway, a variant on Wheel Of Fortune with truly to-die-for prizes!

Stephen King - Home Delivery: Maddie, a lobster-man's widow at 22, three months pregnant and the dead scampering from their graves eating the living. It could be better. At least the remote Jenny Island doesn't have much by way of a dead population to worry about - just the one tiny graveyard which Old Frank and the men keep under constant surveillance. Her late husband Jack proves what a doting father he'd have been by slithering out of the sea for the birth, but - unlike any other story in Book Of The Dead I can think of - there's a quietly optimistic tone to Home Delivery which also reads as though it was extracted from a longer piece.

Les Daniels - The Good Parts: In Dawn Of The Dead, Romero had the mindless zombies flock to the shopping mall as that's where they'd spent most of their lives. Not the obese slob in The Good Parts who opts for the Naughty Nites Bookstore. With a never-ending supply of free porn and - in the early days, at least - as much fresh meat as he can stuff his face with, becoming a zombie is the best result he's ever had! He even finds himself a 'girlfriend' and enjoys his first legover, albeit losing his dick in the process. And now his decomposing babe is pregnant ....

Pitch black comedy from the brilliant 'Don Sebastian' man!