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Post by dem bones on May 15, 2012 18:55:25 GMT
Stephen Jones (ed.) - The Dead That Walk: Zombie Stories (Ulysses Press, 2010) Les Edwards Stephen Jones - Introduction: Shoot 'em in the brain Richard Matheson & Richard Christian Matheson - Where There's A Will Yvonne Navarro - For The Good Of All Michael Marshall Smith - The Things He Said Mark Samuels - The Last Resort Joe Hill - Bobby Conroy Comes Back From The Dead Weston Ochse - The Crossing Of Aldo Ray David J. Schow - Obsequy Nancy Holder - Zombonia H.P. Lovecraft - Cool Air Ramsey Campbell - Call First Lisa Morton - Joe & Abel In The Field Of Rest Brian Keene - Midnight At The Body Farm Gary McMahon - Dead To The World Joe. R. Lansdale - The Long Dead Day Kelly Dunn - A Call To Temple Clive Barker - Haeckel's Tale Christopher Fowler - The Rulebook Robert E. Howard - Black Canaan Stephen Woodworth - The Silent Majority Harlan Ellison® - Sensible City Robert Shearman - Granny's Grinning Kim Newman - Amerikanski Dead At The Moskow Morgue or: Children Of Marx And Coca Cola Scott Edelman - Tell Me Like You Done Before Stephen King - Home Delivery Blurb Of all the ghoulish monsters, zombies are the most horrific. Reanimated corpses of real people—perhaps even a former friend or relative—these undead brethren rise from the grave to devour your delicious, living flesh. Far more sophisticated than the brain-eating mobs popularized in movies, zombies are as diverse as living humans, and this collection presents the complete blood-rich history of zombie literature set in the early 19th century, the Great Depression and the futuristic zombie apocalypse of tomorrow. Bringing together the greatest zombie authors — Stephen King, Richard Matheson, Clive Barker, Harlan Ellison, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Ramsey Campbell, Joe R. Lansdale, Kim Newman, Michael Marshall Smith, Joe Hill, and many others— The Dead That Walk offers terrifying tales of dread that will drag you screaming into a nightmare world where dissolution does not mean the end and those who survive are next on the menu. Anybody had the pleasure? Robinsons had nothing to do with The Dead That Walk but will include it here as a bridge between the Stephen Jones edited Mammoth Book Of Zombies and Zombie Apocalypse. I guess the biggest compliment i can pay Terror Tales Of The Cotswolds and Female Of The Species is that this and Body Horror have had to patiently wait their turn and like it for a fortnight. Hope to get stuck into both over coming days - should be fun bouncing between the two!
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Post by dem bones on Jun 15, 2012 7:42:01 GMT
Finally got to make a start on this and am mightily pleased to have done so as things have got off to the most promising start.
Richard Matheson & Richard Christian Matheson - Where There's A Will: Charlie wakes up in a casket, buried alive, he strongly suspects, by business partners determined to cheat him out of the company. Why oh why did he confide his worst fear to those bastards?
Fumbling in his pockets he finds keys and a lighter, begins the desperate struggle to burn, burrow and claw his way out of the grave ...
Fans of the Tales From The Crypt story Reflection of Death should get a kick from this horribly endearing opener.
Yvonne Navarro - For The Good Of All: The living dead roam the earth but deeply religious Fida still keeps a boarding house for life's (and death's) waifs and strays. Of course, the misfits, junkies, hookers and teenage runaways are more troublesome than ever since they became walking corpses, but Fida regards them as family, it's her Christian duty to protect them and tend to their spiritual needs as best she can, no matter that their solitary concern is eating people. Perhaps if a priest were to give them Holy Communion? "That the dead can walk is itself a miracle .... what's to say that a reverse miracle can't occur?"
Fida's faith is rock solid. Father Stane had better pray that his is, too.
Michael Marshall Smith - The Things He Said: "I was a handyman before the thing and I am, therefore, kind of handy. I'm glad about that now. Probably a lot of people thought being computer programmers or bankers or TV stars was a better deal .... It's likely by now they may have changed their minds".
Oregon. One of very few survivors of the zombie uprising shares the details of his daily routine. He's an industrious fellow and 'the thing' has been the making of him. His abusive father always taught him you look after number one in this world and if he's grateful to the old bastard for anything, it's that handy piece of advice. For a short while he had a companion, but Ramona's discovery of the shed and what he kept in there led to an abrupt parting of the ways ....
Three absolute beauties.
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Post by Shrink Proof on Jun 15, 2012 15:13:19 GMT
I can recommend Ramsey Campbell's "Call First" - pleasantly nasty!
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Post by dem bones on Jun 21, 2012 11:56:10 GMT
yeah, Mr. Jones has made good use of judiciously selected reprints. Am ashamed to admit i didn't remember the Mathesons' collaboration from Dark Forces!
Managed to read some more from The Dead That Walk. The Landsdale and Keene's worked for me, the Hill and Holder - not so much. MMS's regular one man Sawney Beane clan operating from a remote cabin in the Noqualmi woods is still out in front.
Joe. R. Lansdale - The Long Dead Day: His daughter Ellen says it was a dog bit her, but Pa doesn't believe her and he doubts his wife, Carol, does either. A patrol of the back garden confirms his suspicions. The zombie is easily taken care of but that's the least of his worries. What is doing right by your loved ones in the face of such appalling circumstances?
Nancy Holder - Zombonia: From fat, impoverished loser to popular and respected 'I fuck for food' gal. Juanita reflects that the zombie invasion is the one stroke of good fortune ever to come her way, because without it, she'd never have wound up among a small desert community of 24 hour party people. Even when the virus hits and she eats the love of her life, phenomenally well hung Surfer Bob, it can't dampen her spirits.
Joe Hill - Bobby Conroy Comes Back From The Dead: Bobby and Harriet, former college sweethearts and captains of the Die Laughing Comedy Collective, are reunited when they land parts as extras on the Dawn Of The Dead shoot. Harriet's married to Dean, a short-arsed lumberjack who finds even embittered, failed stand-up Bobby's attempts at humour hilarious. Their little boy (also Bobby) lost two fingers in an accident with a table saw. It's an allegory/ fable/ something, i neither know nor care, because smug Bobby got on my nerves so. Guest appearances from George Romero and Tom Savini (looking like a Black Metal God) can't save it.
Brian Keene - Midnight At The Body Farm: Hector Bolivar reckons he's relatively safe on the Body Farm as, even if a stray zombie happens to penetrate the fence, they're by now too mutilated, slow and weak to do much harm. Unfortunately for him, the disease which began in rats and infected mankind is about to jump species again.
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Post by DemonSpawn on Jun 22, 2012 15:14:51 GMT
Dark Forces is next on my paperback (as opposed to Kindle) reading list. The print seems a little on the small side, though On the actual book that is the topic of this thread - I haven't read it yet, but Mr. Jones seems to know his stuff and no mistake.
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Post by dem bones on Jun 22, 2012 17:22:55 GMT
We've a ready-made thread (of sorts: it's mostly concerned with T. E. D. Klein's Dark Gods ) for Dark Forces. Looking down the table of contents and the Mathesons' story is not the only one that's since resurfaced. As to The Dead That Walk, more and more its reading like a dry run for Zombie Apocalypse, though my guess is it was conceived as Mr. Jones' answer to John Skipp & Craig Spector's excellent Book Of The Dead Lisa Morton - Joe & Abel In The Field Of Rest: Six months after the dead rose from their graves and Joe's still tending his crops and remaining livestock just as he always did. The walkers occasionally penetrate the fence but they're easily taken out with a bullet to the head and he dumps their bodies in "The Field Of Rest", a huge pit he dug specifically for the purpose. He's getting by but it's been a lonely life since he cremated his father. One day a walker blunders into the deep pit. Joe recognises him as a neighbour, Abel, and, rather than shoot him, he takes to confiding all his problems to the poor dumb brute. They become - for want of a better word - friends, though it's all very one-sided. Joe realises that his pet zombie will starve if he doesn't get something to eat, and that's a huge problem, Abel being fussy where his diet is concerned. A car pulls up at the farmhouse .... Kim Newman - Amerikanski Dead At The Moskow Morgue or: Children Of Marx And Coca Cola: How best to combat the US dead now amassed on Soviet soil? "Resurrect Rasputin" might not be everybody's suggestion but mad scientist Konintsev is a driven man and, now he's obtained Grigori's skull and a case-load of modelling clay, can finally dare to dream. Kim Newman has the capability to both thrill and - when he gets insufferably clever clever (e.g., that title, his desperately unfunny contribution to Zombie Apocalypse) - annoy the hell out of me: he's similar to R. Chetwynd-Hayes in that respect. On this occasion, he manages to do both. Different strokes, etc. Christopher Fowler - The Rulebook: "I hated him because he had a dead grey eye like the guy in Pirates Of The Caribbean and had painted all his flowerpots in Arsenal strips and he kept my football whenever it went over the fence. He probably had footballs enough to open a branch of J. D. Sports."When Mrs Hill walks out on her creepy husband on Bonfire Night, twelve year old Paul, who lives next door, lets on to a school-chum that she's been murdered. The rumour spreads, everyone adding their own little juicy extras to help the 'facts' along, until it's widely believed that Mr. Hill has decapitated his wife, "kept her head on a stick in his shed and cast a spell on it to make it predict the football results." When Paul eventually gets an opportunity to peek inside the Bluebeard's castle that is Mr. Hill's evil-reeking house, he discovers that his wild speculations weren't so far wide of the mark after all.
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Post by DemonSpawn on Jun 22, 2012 19:08:36 GMT
Thank you. I shall bow to your (vastly) superior knowledge of horror books and get "Book Of The Dead" first. And my apologies if you felt that my post was derailing.
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Post by dem bones on Jun 23, 2012 6:42:03 GMT
Thank you. I shall bow to your (vastly) superior knowledge of horror books and get "Book Of The Dead" first. And my apologies if you felt that my post was derailing. Ha! no "superior knowledge" involved, trust me. And please don't apologise for derailing threads (you didn't, but that's how our better ones tend to come about). That Skipp & Spector anthology likely kick-started the whole revival, mainly because they dispensed with the traditional zombie slaves of William Seabrook's Dead Men Working In The Cane Fields in favour of Romero's voracious cannibals. Offhand, I can't remember any anthologists going that way before them? Brilliant, properly horrible collection, anyway, arguably the mischievous Splatterpunk "movement"s finest hour.
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Post by dem bones on Jun 30, 2012 14:10:35 GMT
Mark Samuels - The Last Resort: According to Mark's comments in the introduction, a story inspired by Dawn Of The Dead and Machen's The Shining Pyramid. As with Keeping Your Mouth Shut from The Sixth Black Book Of Horror, i found it almost unbearably poignant on first reading, laugh-out-loud funny (in places) on a second. Grey Hill, Mynydd Lloyd, four days after the zombie uprising of April 1st. Henry Lewis, perhaps the last living man in the Black Hills, takes his shotgun and ventures up to the standing stones to get a clear view of what's happening in the city, all the radio stations having now gone off air. As he climbs, Henry thinks back on his marriage break-up and wonders if Marie is still alive. To his grim amusement, the hideously mutilated Bryn Owen, in life a local historian and tour guide, has unwittingly assumed leadership of the walking corpses. The lumbering zombies are easily outmanoeuvred but, having verified that Newport is a smoking ruin, Henry still has a few desperate moments on his way back to the farmhouse. And there, pounding on his barricaded windows, the two people he'd least wish to see again were they still alive. The Last Resort would have slotted seamlessly into Zombie Apocalypse, though it's for the best that Mr. Jones commissioned a new story or we'd have been deprived The Reign Of Santa Muerte! Harlan Ellison - Sensible City: Brutal Police Lieutenant Gropp and his lunk-headed henchman Sergeant Mickey Rizzo jump bail when it's clear that the Jury are going to recommend the death penalty for their several torture-murders of convicted felons. Taking a wrong turning on the highway, they drive into a creepy green mist behind which waits the town of Obedience, and a ravenous population which has long since mutated into something very other than human .... Weston Ochse - The Crossing Of Aldo Ray: A four-strong party of involuntary drug-mules douse themselves in pig entrails to infiltrate a legion of Mexican zombies tramping the Sonoron Desert toward California. Aldo Ray is an old hand at the game and has safely escorted others across the border but his charges are terrified novices and therefore liabilities in his current predicament (his son has been abducted from the playground by local dealers and will not be long for this world Ray messes up on the delivery). Will the living dead catch on that their food walks among them?
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Post by dem bones on Jul 30, 2012 11:36:51 GMT
Stephen Woodworth - The Silent Majority: A nuclear air-strike wipes out New York and Richard Nixon returns from the grave to gain a chance of redemption. Can he make his peace with American casualties of the Vietnam war who've taken to eating their fellow countrymen?
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Post by dem bones on Oct 5, 2012 3:32:31 GMT
Robert Shearman - Granny's Grinning: It's Granny Forbes's first Christmas as a widow and, much to Mum's horror, Dad invites the ghastly old sow to spend the holiday. Bad enough that the recession has already bitten hard, now there are two days of round the clock misery to endure. Little Graham, four, is oblivious to the torture as he's too busy prancing around in his new werewolf costume to care, but Sarah, his elder sister, finds herself zipped inside a dusty, foul-smelling zombie suit (she wanted to be the vampire), and all to placate the old girl. Sarah somehow manages to mask her disappointment but then, come bedtime, her parents usher her into Grandma's room .... It's not quite as outrageous as Chris Miller's The Magic Show, but let the following comment from Shearman's serve as a warning. "I tried the basic idea of this in one of my stage comedies once. But you could see on the audience's faces that they were revolted ..." Gary McMahon - Dead To The World: "We have two options ... die now or die later. As soon as I stop seeing the point of dying later, I'll sit down on the ground and swallow a bullet from this rifle." Rural England, ten years after the zombie uprising, and it's become increasingly difficult to distinguish between the dead-alive and the living dead. The narrator and wife Coral are two of the last remaining human survivors. Coral's mastery of the baseball-bat-to-zombie-skull technique sits badly with the woman she once was, a tireless charity worker who lived to give to others. Her husband realises that Coral has not been the same since the miscarriage ("I was forced to top the squawking undead thing"), that eventually, she will be the death of them both. There comes a point when a man has had his fill of charity. 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. 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 Skipp & Spector's zombie anthology Book Of The Dead I can think of - there's a quietly optimistic tone to Home Delivery which reads like it was extracted from a longer piece.
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