"When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth."

From White Zombie to Dawn of the Dead; from Resident Evil to World War Z, zombies have invaded popular culture, becoming the monsters that best express the fears and anxieties of the modern west. The ultimate consumers, zombies rise from the dead and feed upon the living, their teeming masses ever hungry, ever seeking to devour or convert, like mindless, faceless eating machines. Zombies have been depicted as mind-controlled minions, the shambling infected, the disintegrating dead, the ultimate lumpenproletariat, but in all cases, they reflect us, mere mortals afraid of death in a society on the verge of collapse.

Gathering together the best zombie literature of the last three decades from many of today's most renowned authors of fantasy, speculative fiction, and horror, including Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, George R. R. Martin, Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Joe R. Lansdale, The Living Dead, covers the broad spectrum of zombie fiction. The zombies of The Living Dead range from Romero-style zombies to reanimated corpses to voodoo zombies and beyond.

Contents:

• Introduction by John Joseph Adams
• This Year's Class Picture by Dan Simmons
• Some Zombie Contingency Plans by Kelly Link
• Death and Suffrage by Dale Bailey
• Ghost Dance by Sherman Alexie
• Blossom by David J. Schow
• The Third Dead Body by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
• The Dead by Michael Swanwick
• The Dead Kid by Darrell Schweitzer
• Malthusian's Zombie by Jeffrey Ford
• Beautiful Stuff by Susan Palwick
• Sex, Death and Starshine by Clive Barker
• Stockholm Syndrome by David Tallerman
• Bobby Conroy Comes Back From the Dead by Joe Hill
• Those Who Seek Forgiveness by Laurell K. Hamilton
• In Beauty, Like the Night by Norman Partridge
• Prairie by Brian Evenson
• Everything is Better With Zombies by Hannah Wolf Bowen
• Home Delivery by Stephen King
• Less Than Zombie by Douglas E. Winter
• Sparks Fly Upward by Lisa Morton
• Meathouse Man by George R. R. Martin
• Deadman's Road by Joe Lansdale
• The Skull-Faced Boy by David Barr Kirtley
• The Age of Sorrow by Nancy Kilpatrick
• Bitter Grounds by Neil Gaiman
• She's Taking Her Tits to the Grave by Catherine Cheek
• Dead Like Me by Adam-Troy Castro
• Zora and the Zombie by Andy Duncan
• Calcutta, Lord of Nerves by Poppy Z. Brite
• Followed by Will McIntosh
• The Song the Zombie Sang by Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg
• Passion Play by Nancy Holder
• Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man by Scott Edelman
• How the Day Runs Down by John Langan