At last, I’m done assembling my zombie anthology, The Living Dead. It’s scheduled for publication in September 2008, and is available for pre-order from Night Shade Books and Amazon.com. Read on for the preliminary cover copy and the complete table of contents. (For those of you counting, that’s 34 stories, and more than 230,000 words.)

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.

Table of Contents

This Year’s Class Picture by Dan Simmons, from Still Dead (1992)

Some Zombie Contingency Plans by Kelly Link, from Magic For Beginners (2005)

Death and Suffrage by Dale Bailey, from F&SF (2002)

Ghost Dance by Sherman Alexie, from McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales (2003)

Blossom by David J. Schow, from Book of the Dead (1989)

The Third Dead Body by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, from The Ultimate Zombie (1993)

The Dead by Michael Swanwick, from Starlight 1 (1996)

The Dead Kid by Darrell Schweitzer, from The Book of More Flesh (2002)

Malthusian’s Zombie by Jeffrey Ford, from SCI FICTION (2000)

Beautiful Stuff by Susan Palwick, from SCI FICTION (2004)

Sex, Death and Starshine by Clive Barker, from Books of Blood, Vol. 1 (1984)

Stockholm Syndrome by David Tallerman, from Pseudopod (2007)

Bobby Conroy Comes Back From The Dead by Joe Hill, from Postscripts (2005)

Those Who Seek Forgiveness by Laurell K. Hamilton, from Strange Candy (2006)

In Beauty, Like the Night by Norman Partridge, from Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales (1992)

Prairie by Brian Evenson, from The Silver Web (1997)

Everything is Better with Zombies by Hannah Wolf Bowen, from Phantom (2006)

Home Delivery by Stephen King, from Book of the Dead (1989)

Less than Zombie by Douglas E. Winter, from Book of the Dead (1989)

Sparks Fly Upward by Lisa Morton, from Mondo Zombie (2006)

Meathouse Man by George R. R. Martin, from Orbit 18 (1976)

Deadman’s Road by Joe Lansdale, from Weird Tales (2007)

The Skull-Faced Boy by David Barr Kirtley, from Gothic.net (2002)

The Age of Sorrow by Nancy Kilpatrick, from Postscripts (2007)

Bitter Grounds by Neil Gaiman, from Mojo: Conjure Stories (2003)

She’s Taking Her Tits to the Grave by Catherine Cheek, from Ideomancer (2008)

Dead Like Me by Adam-Troy Castro, from A Desperate, Decaying Darkness (2000)

Zora and the Zombie by Andy Duncan, from SCI FICTION (2004)

Calcutta, Lord of Nerves by Poppy Z. Brite, from Still Dead (1992)

Followed by Will McIntosh, from Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (2006)

The Song the Zombie Sang by Harlan Ellison^® & Robert Silverberg, from Cosmopolitan (1970)

Passion Play by Nancy Holder, from Still Dead (1992)

Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man by Scott Edelman, from Postscripts (2007)

How the Day Runs Down by John Langan, original to this volume (2008)