Zombies from the Pulps!: Twenty Classic Stories of the Walking Dead

by Jeffrey Shanks

ZOMBIES! From The Walking Dead to World War Z to Plants vs. Zombies , they have become a multimedia pop culture sensation. But this isn’t the first zombie boom—in the 1920s and 30s, stories of voodoo zombie masters, mad scientists animating corpses, and evil sorcerers raising undead armies first began to appear in books, in movies, and in the pages of the pulp magazines. This volume collects twenty creepy tales from pulps like Weird Tales , Dime Mystery , and Terror Tales by writers like H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, Manly Wade Wellman, Henry Kuttner, and E. Hoffmann Price. From genuine horror classics like “Herbert West—Reanimator” and “Pigeons from Hell” to rare and hard-to-find tales from the notorious shudder pulps, this anthology edited with an introduction by Jeffrey Shanks is one that no zombie fan should miss!

Genres: Horror, Zombies

414 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 12, 2014

Reviews

[Steven Ramirez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zombies from the Pulps! is an impressive collection of zombie stories that span the early-to-middle period of the twentieth century. These twenty stories predate George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” by decades, and many have sprung from the Haitian voodoo origins of zombies. Others, however, like H.P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator” and “Corpses on Parade” by Edith and Ejler Jacobson deviate from the tradition to wonderful effect. One thing to note—In most of the stories, the zombies are not bloodthirsty, brain-eating monsters, but doped-up slaves who always do their master’s bidding. A brilliant exception is “Pigeons from Hell” by Robert E. Howard—my favorite in the collection.

Over the years, I’ve enjoyed reading and watching movies about zombies, and I believe that Romero really was responsible for reinvigorating the sub-genre. Since his landmark film, zombies always want to eat the flesh of the living. It’s what they do. Aside from the violence, though, the most disturbing thing for me was the overt racism captured in some of these stories, which really does mirror a time when many Americans were comfortable—both in speech and in print—referring to people of color in less than flattering terms, and fully expecting that they would not to be corrected.

For those who enjoy reading horror and are only familiar with the “modern zombie,” I encourage you to pick up this book. It’s both entertaining and eye-opening.

[Kace · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think this author shows an astounding lack of integrity by voting his book #1 in the best New Weird list above China Mieville, Neil Gaiman, Jeff Vandermeer, and every other author there is. Pathetic.