With The Walking Dead stumbling badly in its latest season, hopes that there might yet be life in the zombie subgenre in the medium of the written word are only fitfully realised in this random, slightly repetitive collection of short stories curated by the late George A Romero, ‘godfather’ of the genre, who provides a bittersweet introduction to nineteen tales of often alarmingly-varying quality.
There doesn’t really seem to be a point to many of the stories in Nights of the Living Dead, which celebrates fifty years of the movie which started it all and purports to set its stories within the first forty-eight hours of the original outbreak in Romero’s movie. Stories of terrified innocents who find themselves caught in the middle of an undead uprising rush along in a whirlwind of gore and cheap violence before coming to a dead (if you’ll pardon the expression) stop. Nothing much has been learned, little achieved and too often there are no clever twists, moral imperatives or any suggestion that the writers have any narrative ambition beyond writing linear stories about shuffling, groaning zombies and people running away from them. For example, Joe R Lansdale’s Dead Man’s Curve concerns a teenage road-race challenge cut short by the arrival of the zombie horde and how a brother and sister escape the carnage and then… well, that’s about it. In Ryan Brown’s Mercy Kill, a soldier exacts revenge on a vindictive local sheriff (and love rival) in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. They’re pithy and punchy tales but they can’t help but engender a sense of ‘so what?’ when they run out of steam having done very little with a very thin idea.
The best stories are those which have actually given some thought to the whole idea of zombie fiction and attempt to give the concept a fresh spin. Mike (Girl with all the Gifts) Carey’s terrific In That Quiet Earth is the story of scientist Richard Cadbury who can’t bear to be parted from his wife when she becomes a victim and takes heart-breaking steps to be reunited with her and Carrie Ryan’s The Burning Days is an off-kilter romance played out against the backdrop of a group of survivors keeping themselves alive inside a ring of fire. Romero’s own contribution, John Doe, is an atmospheric and creepy story of an unidentified body which might not be as dead as it appears but which disregards the ’theme’ of the book by being intentionally set in the 21st century. You’d do well to avoid the worst story in the collection though; The Day After is the work of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead co-writer John A Russo which is a piece of bad writing in itself, content just to riff on the original film by featuring the undead Barbara (sic), her brother Johnny and ‘a beastly little girl’ named Karen as if simple fan service is enough to get by. It isn’t.
Ultimately, there’s something for every zombie zealot here and if simple tales of chaos and random slaughter float your boat you’ll find much to entertain you. Sadly, Nights of the Living Dead really only becomes animated when its contributors find a new angle to a genre which appears to be lurching towards its expiry date.
NIGHTS OF THE LIVING DEAD / EDITED BY GEORGE A ROMERO AND JONATHAN MABERRY / PUBLISHER: DUCKWORTH OVERLOOK / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
