New Book: Zombies: An Illustrated History of the Undead

Zombies!: An Illustrated History of the Undead by Jovanka Vuckovic came out on March and I had it on the second tier of my to-read list.  Well, after this review by Jeff VanderMeer for the Amazon.com blog, I am moving it up to the top of the list.

In all seriousness, as I discuss in the new book, zombies have been around for a long time, but today's zombies are based on the zombies George Romero created in Night of the Living Dead back in 1968.  With the popularity of a specific kind of zombie sweeping through the popular media, now is a great time to go back and look at the evolution of zombies.  How did we get here?

But WHY are zombies everywhere these days?  This is also an issue I tackle in the book.  Here is a teaser from Chapter 7:  Zombies:  Follow the Walking Dead:

...In our current stressful economic and political climate, where we have been waging long-standing wars all over the world, a mass zombie uprising does not feel that far from our terrifying realities.  This theme underscores the appeal of horror novels as an escape from the true horrors of life.  Things may be bad right now, but at least we are not in the middle of a zombie apocalypse...

My job may ask me to analyze the "why," but the zombie loving reader part of me says, bring on more zombies!