Weekly Lizard

Otto Penzler’s latest anthology has a very singular focus: Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! The master of pulp fiction has culled though his extensive archives to bring the world a delightfully creepy collection of stories and artwork that feature the undead.

Though modern zombie tales are most often told in film or on television, Penzler explains in his introduction to the collection that these brain-seeking monsters also have a fascinating literary pedigree:

Stories of the living dead, or ghouls, or reanimated people, have existed since the Arabian Nights tales and borrowed from other horror story motifs, from the lurching reanimated monster of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the undead vampires of John Polidori’s The Vampyre and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Several of the most distinguished short-story writers of the nineteenth century turned to figures who had been dead but then, uh-oh, were alive. Edgar Allan Poe was almost relentless in his use of the dead coming back to life, most famously in “The Fall of the House of Usher” but most vividly in his contribution to this volume, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” Guy de Maupassant’s poignant “Was It a Dream?” lingers in the memory as an example of how a corpse leaving a grave can destroy the living without a single act or thought of violence.

Many of these stories originally appeared in the horror-focused magazines of the 1930s and were accompanied by lurid illustrations. Below, a glimpse of some of the most sensational artwork.

Click to see the anthology’s table of contents and to read Otto Penzler’s full introduction to Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!