The New York Times takes a look at the rise, and rise, of zombie literature.
From the article...
The thing about these newly empowered 21st-century zombies is that they keep coming at you, relentlessly, wave upon wave of necrotic, mindlessly voracious semi-beings. According to the current convention, the individual reanimatee can be dispatched by shooting or stabbing it in the brain, but the strength of this inexorably advancing zombie population is in its numbers: the ambulatory dead are, you might say, a fast-growing demographic. This sort of creature is an extremely convenient monster for low-budget filmmakers like Romero, who had the wit to realize that with zombies he wouldn’t have to break the bank on highly skilled professional actors. Anybody can shamble along looking vacant.
In fiction, however, these alarming entities have fewer obvious attractions because, unlike vampires, werewolves, demons, witches, goblins and shape-shifters, zombies can’t plausibly be endowed with rich, complex inner lives. They don’t even have personalities. Christopher Golden, in the preface to his anthology of zombie stories, The New Dead (St. Martin’s Griffin, paper, $14.99), owns up to a degree of puzzlement about the current popularity of these creatures. “I have never had any trouble understanding the fascination with vampires,” he writes. “But zombies? Not so much.” Undeterred, Golden has put together a hefty collection of zombiana to take its place on the sagging shelf next to John Joseph Adams’s anthologies The Living Dead and The Living Dead 2 (Night Shade, paper, $15.95 and $15.99); Max Brooks’s World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (Three Rivers, paper, $14.95); the freak best seller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, “by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith” (Quirk, paper, $12.95); and The Walking Dead: Compendium One (Image Comics, paper, $59.99), which compiles the first 48 issues of the comic, written by Robert Kirkman, that was turned into a popular cable series last fall.
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