"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.

Edited by John Joseph Adams (Wastelands), The Living Dead is more than 200,000 words of zombie fiction (31 stories!), collecting the best tales from Book of the Dead, Still Dead, and Mondo Zombie, along with the best zombie fiction from other sources.

Please note that for this electronic edition of The Living Dead, the following stories originally included in the print edition have been omitted:

Dan Simmons, "This Year's Class Picture"
Sherman Alexie, "Ghost Dance"
Douglas E. Winter, "Less than Zombie"