I bought this collection of short stories because I had read several pieces of fiction by Alice Sola Kim and wanted to buy her story "Beautiful White Bodies" in printed form. If you are interested you can also find it online and for free at Strange Horizons.
In all honesty, I have never been a big fan of zombie fiction. In a way it always seemed rather patriarchal to me with the lone (typically male, often white) survivor fighting against the the forces of evil that hunt him down. As with most fantastic literature it is of course unfair to reduce it on such a shallow level and I have since stated that I enjoy zombie fiction a lot more since I realized that zombies are typically a criticism of consumer culture.
The book consists of a variety of stories that often differ significantly from each other in tone and theme. Neil Gaiman contributed one story ("Bitter Grounds") in which he recalls Zora Neale Hurston and her research on Haitian zombie myth. Andy Duncan even went so far as to make Zora Neale Hurston the protagonist of his story "Zora and the Zombie" and set it during her time in Haiti, while she researches for her book Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. As one can imagine the depiction of zombies in those stories are dramatically different to those in modern (western) pop culture.
In "Beautiful White Bodies" the zombies are not even named as such and are chiefly identifiable through the narratives inclusion in the volume. Yet, not all stories convinced me as much. For example Kevin Veale's "Twisted" did not seem as fresh or original to me with its comparison between zombies and drug users and how we as a society might escape the monotony.
What makes the book definitely worth the read is its editor though. Paula Guran did not only write a terrific foreword (or "Deaditorial Note" as she calls it) but also adds some comments and background information to every story included, which significantly enriched the reading experience for me. With the amount of stories included here (altogether twenty-two), there have to be some highlights as well as some disappointments. Which ones those are might vary from reader to reader but I assume everyone will find something they like.
In all honesty, I have never been a big fan of zombie fiction. In a way it always seemed rather patriarchal to me with the lone (typically male, often white) survivor fighting against the the forces of evil that hunt him down. As with most fantastic literature it is of course unfair to reduce it on such a shallow level and I have since stated that I enjoy zombie fiction a lot more since I realized that zombies are typically a criticism of consumer culture.
The book consists of a variety of stories that often differ significantly from each other in tone and theme. Neil Gaiman contributed one story ("Bitter Grounds") in which he recalls Zora Neale Hurston and her research on Haitian zombie myth. Andy Duncan even went so far as to make Zora Neale Hurston the protagonist of his story "Zora and the Zombie" and set it during her time in Haiti, while she researches for her book Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. As one can imagine the depiction of zombies in those stories are dramatically different to those in modern (western) pop culture.
In "Beautiful White Bodies" the zombies are not even named as such and are chiefly identifiable through the narratives inclusion in the volume. Yet, not all stories convinced me as much. For example Kevin Veale's "Twisted" did not seem as fresh or original to me with its comparison between zombies and drug users and how we as a society might escape the monotony.
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