A modest plug for The Zombist

Well, I have learned that it is not good form to write reviews for anthologies that you contributed to-at least not in places like Amazon, where the reviews are scrutinized for any affiliation to the author(s) of a book and anything that appears to be biased is treated as less than sincere, unfortunately.  I do understand the logic there, though I am a compulsive reviewer, at least of every zombie book I can get my hands on.  I don’t feel the need to review everything I read, but certainly those books that are near and dear to my heart are ones I like to review, and The Zombist certainly falls into that category.

I just got finished reading this massive tome, which clocks in at more than 450 pages of tales of zombies in the old west.  Twenty nine authors provided stories for this book, and the amazing Dr. Pus, publisher for The Library of the Living Dead, couldn’t resist bringing out something that was heavy enough to bash a zombie’s brain in rather than breaking it into two separate volumes.  So anyone who is a fan of zombie fiction is going to have a lot to entertain them and get a great bargain in the process.  We get a pretty good cross section of creative stories in this book, with the traditional Romero slow movers and speedier creations that have become more popular more recent years, zombies sent from hell, zombie ghosts, and the voodoo zombies as well, which are sprinkled through out this book and offer a nice change of pace from the regular flesh eaters (don’t get me wrong- I LOVE my regular flesh eaters!).  My own story “The Woeful Tale of Dalton McCoy” is one such story, and I have to say I enjoyed creating a bit of voodoo and setting it in the area of the country I grew up in.

Quite a few authors I have gotten to know over the past year contributed to this book, along with many others I wasn’t familiar with, but loved discovering them through their stories in this book.   Many, if not most of the stories in this book stood out as excellent, and the one that really stuck with me was probably Michael C. Lea’s “The Hot Springs Zombie Incident of 1875” which gets some big bonus points for creative use of a zombie as well as leaving me torn between laughing and cringing by the end of his tale. A lot of the other stories were just as entertaining and some were even quite touching, as the occasional zombie story tends to do.  Most folks who don’t read this sort of stuff tend to think it is all about the gore and the zombies themselves, but those of us in know enjoy zombie stories because of the compelling human element of them.  I think that is what sets the zombie genre apart from most other monster based horror genre tales-the monsters aren’t the stars of the story, the human beings are.

Another writer with an excellent story in this book is Jamie Eyberg, who unfortunately passed away, along with his wife, in a tragic accident this week.  My sympathies go out to his family on their loss.  It is my hope that Jamie’s memory will live on through the wonderful stories he has created and that this may provide his loved ones some small comfort in the years to come.  I know that at least a couple more of his stories will be appearing in upcoming Library anthologies.  Jamie, you will be missed.

I am very proud of my work in this anthology and even more proud of the fact that I am sharing a Table of Contents with such a tremendous group of writers.  I won’t be writing a review of the book on Amazon, so instead, I offer this:  if you enjoy westerns, and enjoy horror, then The Zombist is right up your alley.  You get a huge value with such a massive tome of twenty nine different tales of undead mayhem, along with six guns, shamans, Voodoo Priests, and even a few historical characters, like George Custer, thrown in for a bit of added flavor.  Go check it out-you won’t be disappointed!