Books of the Dead

The zombie has cropped up in many forms-in film, in television, and as a cultural phenomenon in zombie walks and zombie awareness months-but few books have looked at what the zombie means in fiction. Tim Lanzendrfer fills this gap by looking at a number of zombie novels, short stories, and comics, and probing what the zombie represents in contemporary literature. Lanzendrfer brings together the most recent critical discussion of zombies and applies it to a selection of key texts including Max Brooks's World War Z, Colson Whitehead's Zone One, Junot Daz's short story ""Monstro, "" Robert Kirkman's comic series The Walking Dead, and Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Within the context of broader literary culture, Lanzendrfer makes the case for reading these texts with care and openness in their own right. Lanzendrfer contends that what zombies do is less important than what becomes possible when they are around. Indeed, they seem less interesting as metaphors for the various ways the world could end than they do as vehicles for how the world might exist in a different and often better form.