Books like The Mammoth Book of Zombies — picked by fans

I‘ve always been fascinated by the dividing line between human and monster. Because, what is a monster?

I know, this kind of question will usually get a quick answer, but I have been thinking about this particular question for quite some time now. I am Legend revolves around this question, and I love it for that. I also love it for the somewhat unexpected twist in the end, and that one can be interpreted as an answer.

Anyway, for me, this book got me thinking about morale and ethics and other stuff. I just like it when a book gets me to that point where I think: wait a moment, but what if…?

I find that Frankenstein transcends eras by posing critical questions about the ways we develop and use new technology.

I first read a comic-book version in elementary school and have returned to Shelly’s novel over the years because it stimulates my critical thinking about technology, particularly the current rise of AI and our response to it. Frankenstein raises a fundamental ethical question about technology in real life: just because humans can create something, should they actually create it?

For me, the novel also creates the opportunity to explore questions about how we engage technology once we choose to invent it. Dr. Frankenstein abandons his creation, and the creature becomes an angry monster. I ask myself, is this an allegory for our own response to technology?

Now this isn’t in the zombie genre but it has that sense of being overwhelmed by numbers of nameless foes that seems very much a central tenet of the modern zombie genre. It has the outpost of an empty island that put our narrator (a pacifist) in the position of having to kill again and again. So often the zombies are faceless hordes – perhaps that is the fear they encapsulate but here, in what feels like the setting of a late-night movie I used to watch as a kid, here the narrator is tested again and again. A fantastic novel that defies categories. 

I’m a 70s kid so the Six Million Dollar Man was a staple of TV viewing but Deathlok, a cyborg created from dying/dead soldier Luther Manning, chilled and thrilled me in equal measures. The idea of waking up in the remains of your shattered body with cold metal taking the place of most flesh and a computer talking in your head:  your consciousness, a voice forever trapped in a dead but unable-to-die body was something that struck deep. ‘Alert: human personality reasserting itself. Repress immediately before…’

John Russo co-authored the original Night of the Living Dead script with Romero. Later on, he came up with a new slant on the zombie apocalypse, with a little more humor added, in Return of the Living Dead, which diverged from the grimmer Romero series and created its own franchise. His mass-market paperback novelization of that movie came out in 1978. I found a copy of it in a thrift store in downtown Dallas in the late Eighties, shoved on a shelf amid multiple copies of Reader’s Digest, its spine split, its pages marked up by an unknown reader with inked exclamation points and multiple question marks. It’s a great read, and a worthy addition to the canon.  

I love this book’s original take on the “spore” or “fungal” zombie outbreak. It feels like the author took The Last Of Us (which I also adore) and flipped the story on its head. Melanie is this unique character, at once the snarky, hilarious child of the piece and its terrifying monster.

She’s the threat, battlefield, and hope—and I find that combination so compelling. While it’s a grim, often bleak tale set in a decimated UK, this thread of unexpected hope and unusual connections kept me hooked. This story might not give me the future I wanted at the start of the story, but it offers a different vision with its own version of hope for humanity, and because of that, it has a special place on my shelf.

Get your horror on! This collection of flash fiction will activate your taste buds like zombies drawn to fresh brains. These stories oozed from the brains of some of the best horror writers from around the world, the likes of Ramsey Campbell, Nate Kenyon, Tim Lebbon, William F. Nolan, Eric Guignard, Lisa Morton, Jack Ketchum, Nancy Kilpatrick, Del Howison, (yours truly) Fred Wiehe, and many more. Also, Mike Mignola of Hell Boy fame designed the cover art! I was honored to be included in this anthology and thoroughly enjoyed reading the other stories by these masters of horror.

If you're familiar with Hugh Howey's work, it's probably thanks to his Wool series of post-apocalyptic sci-fi. I, Zombie is a very different sort of book. It's still post-apocalyptic in subject, but the tone is even darker and filled with both horror and melancholy for the dying world. The zombies here are prisoners of their own bodies, forced to drift and commit horrific violence that they can feel but cannot prevent. You'll get to meet several such zombies in this book and really feel for them as you see each one's backstory and how they came to be part of the horde – and it's that pathos that makes this book something special.

This is one of my favorite Laurel K. Hamilton books, Dead Ice is Anita Blake at her best, kicking ass and taking names, as a necromancer Anita can raise the dead but she is also a US Marshal with the highest kill count in the US. She deals with misogyny and bigotry for sleeping with the Vampire king—Jean Claude. The mystery is well written in this book but the fight scenes are great and the monsters are scary as heck, Anita comes off as complex as she deals with being engaged but still wanting to maintain her independence as a woman. This is one of LKH better books as she pens the double standards about how a woman is treated in the workplace by others for being good at her job versus a man- Anita has a high kill count and is looked down upon for being violent if it… show more.

Work smarter, not harder. If you want to survive a zombie apocalypse, you'll need to understand the behavior of the undead. And it all starts with a necrotic brain. If you know why zombies hunt, infect and kill their victims, you can devise effective strategies for avoiding and moving among the undead and, if necessary, killing them. I loved that the neuroscience in this book is very real, even if the zombies are not (yet). It is one of the best applications of nonfictional content to a fictional world available today — a must-read for lovers of brains, both alive and dead.