Books of the Dead: Reading the Zombie in Contemporary Literature

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 Lanzendِrfer fills this gap by looking at a number of zombie novels, short stories, and comics, and probing what the zombie represents in contemporary literature. Lanzendِrfer brings together the most recent critical discussion of zombies and applies it to a selection of key texts including Max Brookss World War Z, Colson Whiteheads Zone One, Junot Dيazs short story "Monstro, " Robert Kirkmans comic series The Walking Dead, and Seth Grahame-Smiths Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Within the context of broader literary culture, Lanzendِrfer makes the case for reading these texts with care and openness in their own right.

Lanzendِrfer 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.