I’m starting to feel a little like the host on “Saturday Night Live” when the show’s almost over and they have to introduce that week’s music guest for the second time. “Once again, ZOMBIES.”

Yawn.

On the bright side, this zombie anthology, BOOK OF THE DEAD, is not only a mass market anthology, but it’s pretty much the forerunner to just about every other zombie book out there. Published in 1989 and edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector, BOOK OF THE DEAD is a collection of zombie stories set in the world of George Romero’s Living Dead movies. Authors include such notables as Ramsey Campbell, Douglas E. Winters, Joe R. Lansdale, Robert R. McCammon, and of course Stephen King. While I don’t believe every story stuck to the idea of being set in the Romero universe, they certainly offered a plethora of original zombie fiction, stuff not even the current zombie anthologies are publishing.

In Richard Laymon’s “Mess Hall”, a woman, Jean, and her lover Paul are confronted mid-coitus by a serial killer, the Reaper. Not the most original, I’ll grant you. The Reaper gets Paul out of the way and hauls Jean to the “mess hall” where he stages his killings, leaving the bodies for the animals to do away with. Only this particular night, he discovers the animals don’t always finish what’s on their plates and when whatever it was that made the dead come back to life happens, the victims all return seeking vengeance.

Steve Rasnic Tem offers “Bodies and Heads” which finds nurse Elaine disturbed by the epidemic of shaking heads. People all over town are being admitted and confined in the hospital where Elaine works, having lost all mental capacity as well as control of their bodies. The patients are kept strapped down while their heads shake violently back and forth in a “no no no” gesture. Meanwhile outside of town the world is falling to pieces as the dead are walking the earth, feasting on the living. Elaine wonders if what’s happening to the dead may be connected to what’s happening to the patients, perhaps some form of airborne virus that doesn’t need a bite to infect you. In the end, the secret to the shaking heads and what happens to them is, in standard Tem form, absolutely amazing and unexpected.

Brian Hodge’s “Dead Giveaway” gives the walking dead new life as former TV host Monty plays to the masses every night on television as the star, and only living crew member, of the hit game show “Dead Giveaway”. Living dead spin a wheel and win a prize.

“Who’ll ever forget last May twenty-third?” said the announcer, as cheerful and bouncy as ever. “Flight nine-oh-one out of O’Hare Airport? It crashed a minute after takeoff, but the nation’s third-worst airline disaster is YOUR gain, Cynthia. Direct to you from cold storage in the Cook County Morgue, it’s the last of flight nine-oh-one! Courtesy of DEAD GIVEAWAY.”

I was surprised in this anthology just how many stories featured living dead that thought, spoke, carried on as normal. “A Sad Last Love at the Diner of the Damned” by Edward Bryant featured a revenge-seeking deadhead. Steven R. Boyett’s “Like Pavlov’s Dogs” showed the dead being trained and herded (as did David J. Schow’s “Jerry’s Kids Meet Wormboy”). In Robert McCammon’s “Eat Me”, two living dead meet up at a singles bar for a night of grotesque love.

For diversity and style, BOOK OF THE DEAD is about as good a zombie anthology as you’re likely to find. However, when you’re talking ease, this book took way too long to read. 16 days for me, which is way longer than 390 pages should take, and I attribute part of that, surely, to this being the 4th or 5th zombie book I’ve read in recent weeks, but part of it is also due to length. If I’m reading an anthology, I’m looking for short stories. They don’t have to be 5 pages, I’m not that wimpy, but Boyett’s story is 64 pages and that is overkill. Another story was over 40, while still one more topped 50 pages. In a really good anthology, I can deal with one novella, but three stories of that length just kills my motivation to keep reading on a daily basis.

And really, length is my only gripe with this one. All of the authors involved are recognizable names in the horror field, and these stories show why that is. None of the stories felt cobbled together just because there was a zombie anthology looking for stories, and none of them felt as if they were pre-existing stories with a little editing done in post to turn them into zombie stories, even though for all I know this was exactly the case in at least one or two instances. If it was, the authors hid it well.

If BOOK OF THE DEAD is the precursor, the one that got the ball rolling on the whole zombie fiction phenomenon, I’m not surprised so many hopefuls took up the mantle in an effort to produce something as original or interesting. Naturally, I wish those that followed had all been as talented as this group, but you can’t have everything, right?

While it took the longest of all the zombie books I’ve read recently to work through, in the end BOOK OF THE DEAD was the one that was most worth the effort. Pay attention to this table of contents, folks. There’s a reason these people are stars.

Recommended: Yes