The Afflicted by Matthew Johnson; Dead
Song by Jay Wilburn; Iphigenia in Aulis by Mike Carey; Pollution by Don Webb; Becca
at the End of the World by Shira Lipkin; The Naturalist by Maureen
F McHugh; Selected Sources for the Babylonian Plague of the Dead (572-571 BCE)
by Alex Dally MacFarlane; What Maisie Knew by David Liss; Rocket
Man by Stephen Graham Jones; The
Day the Music Died by Joe McKinney; The Children’s Hour by Marge Simon; Delice by Holly Newstein;
Trail
of the Dead by Joanne Anderton; The Death and Life of Bob by William
Jablonsky; Stemming the Tide by Simon Strantzas; Those Beneath the Bog by
Jacques I Condor (Maka Tai Meh); What Still Abides by Marie Brennan; Jack and Jill by Jonathan
Maberry; In the Dreamtime of Lady Resurrection by Caitlin R Kiernan; Rigormarole by Michael A Arnzen; Kitty’s
Zombie New Year by Carrie Vaughn; The Gravedigger of Konstan Spring by
Genevieve Valentine; Chew by Tamsyn Muir; ‘Til
Death Do Us Part by Shaun
Jeffrey; There is No “E” in Zombi Which Mean there Can Be No You or We
by Roxanne Gay; What Once We Feared by
Carrie Ryan; The Harrowers by Eric Gregory; Resurgam by Lisa
Mennetti; I Waltzed with a Zombie by
Ron Goulart; Aftermath by Joy Kennedy-O’Neill; A Shepherd of the Valley by
Maggie Slater; The Day the Saucers Came by Neil Gaiman; Love Resurrected by Cat
Rambo; Present by Nicole Kornher-Stace; The Hunt: Before, and the
Aftermath Joe R Lansdale; Bit Rot by Charles Stross
My first impression of this book: 36? Thirty-six? That’s
a vast amount of stories for an anthology! Even 20 would have been pretty big
My second impression: No, really, 36? Seriously?
My third impression: wait, 36 stories and it’s only 480
pages long? How does that work?
Simply, a lot of it doesn’t – we have some frankly weird,
surreal, barely related and generally random filler fluff pieces some of which
defy me even commenting on them because I have no idea why they’re there other
than to pad an already hugely stuffed book – so The Day the Saucers Came is just some randomness that barely
covers two pages and is only, at best, tangentially related to the theme (or
any theme for that matter), The Children’s Hour is a poem and
not a particularly good one. Rigormarole feels like a tiny scrap
that was edited out of a longer book and is kind of lost and pointless without
the rest
But then we get down to the inherent problem of zombies
and short stories. Now, I know I’ve said before that I’m generally not a huge
fan of short stories anyway – and I hold on to that. A short story is usually
too short to establish characters, world or a decent plot line, so often it
relies on lots of info dump and no plot, lots of short cuts or relies on a lot
of prior knowledge of a longer series. Then we get to zombies – there’s
actually not a lot you can do with zombies. Oh, you can switch around the
origin and nature and properties of zombies but, ultimately, a zombie is
generally a rapacious killing machine with low intellect and (usually) both
spreads rapidly and is made up of our former loved ones. Most zombie stories
actually focus less on zombies and more on the characters reacting to grief,
shock, horror, struggling to survive, etc etc – look at most zombies stories
out there: from The Walking Dead to World War Z, most of the time zombie
stories are about the people in an apocalypse
Which is damn hard to do in a short story – because you
have a few short words in which to make me care enough about this person and
the situation they’re in. Worse, you have a few short words to make me care
enough about this person and the situation we’re in while 30+ other stories
have already tried to convince me about their person in, basically, the same
situation. It’s hard not to reach story 30 and not think “can you just be eaten
already so I can get to the next one?”
So a lot of these stories rely on the emotional horror of
loss in a dystopian. Some work and some not so much. Becca at the End of the World manages a very real emotional impact
with a mother facing her 16 year old daughter turning in front of her, but it
also feels heavy handed. I mean, we have a mother watching her child turn
zombie – you’d have to be a horrendously awful writer not to make that
emotional. I found it both very impactful but also kind of lazy – the easy
route. I also thought Jack and Jill with its comparisons of zombiehood to terminal illness (and
presenting someone with cancer – and in remission no less - as being,
effectively, the living dead) both problematic and, again, a way of forcing
emotional impact by hammering it in. Shepherd of the Valley was a man in
a zombie apocalypse with a rather unique way of dealing with things but the
story primarily centred around his sadness for his daughter which just wasn’t that well conveyed- lots of
moping with an odd setting. Which also kind of describes Love Resurrected; it’s a fantasy
setting with the twist of a “zombie” point of view – but there was too much
distraction from character development to get any real emotion out of the
character
