Generation Zombie is a fun read. Because they are multiple essays they are quick and easy to get through. (Honestly, it made for great bathroom material because you could pick it up and put it down without too much stress or need for continuity.) It was great fun to read and I would recommend it to my friends. Although some of the essays are arguable that is to be expected in a book of this nature. ( )

This is a collection of eighteen scholarly essays, plus a meaty introduction by the editors, that explore the theme of the zombie in books, films, and popular culture. I should clarify at the outset that these essays are not for the literary faint-of-heart: if you are not comfortably steeped in postmodern literary theories, then you might want to reconsider investing in this collection, or at least resign yourself to finding some essays less legible than others.

I found some of the essays to be extremely thought-provoking. “Zombies as Internal Fear or Threat” by the redoubtable Kim Paffenroth was particularly interesting and well put together. Two pieces that explore the early history of the zombie in the American zeitgeist (“White Zombie and the Creole: William Seabrook’s The Magic Island and American Imperialism in Haiti” by Gyllian Phillips and “The Origin of the Zombie in American Radio and Film: B-Horror, U.S. Empire, and the Politics of Disavowal” by Chris Vials) were equally fascinating, but then again I am a historian who studies ideas of empire and imperialism in this particular period in U.S. history. Like most edited collections of essays, some of the essays are a bit more immediately useful or interesting than others. Some of the essays went a bit too far into the deepest depths of literary criticism, even for me. “Rhetoric Goes Boom(er): Agency, Networks, and Zombies at Play” by Scott Reed and “Ztopia: Lessons in Post-Vital Politics in George Romero’s Zombie Films” by Tyson E. Lewis were, I thought, two of the essays that lent themselves least well to ease of comprehension by most readers. Several of the essays were also too loosely connected to the central idea of the zombie to fit neatly into a collection like this. Andrea Austin’s “Cyberpunk and the Living Dead” stretches the definition of “zombie” a bit far for my tastes, and I was surprised to find that two pieces (offered comparisons between the late, great John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids and zombies. I must confess that such a comparison would have never occurred to me, so at least these pieces were thought-provoking, if not entirely convincing.

Recommended for those with a literary or scholarly bent and a strong interest in zombie fiction or zombie-esque themes in literature. If you’re a casual fan of zombie films or horror fiction, you’ll find these essays mostly too jargon-laden or tendentious (which isn’t to say that they’re at all uninteresting, just that I don’t assess they will be of interest to typical lay readers).

Review copyright 2012 J. Andrew Byers ( )

This book of essays is a bit of a mixed bag. Some of them, like Cyberpunk and the Living Dead by Andrea Austin, were just too chewy for me. Others, such as The E-Dead: Zombies in the Digital Age by Brendan Riley, were much more enjoyably and readily digestible, if you'll pardon the pun. The biggest plus me for was that the essays covered Zombies in film, fiction and gaming.

Apparently one of the greatest appeals of zombies is that they represent whatever happens to scare us the most. For some of us that's a unruly mob, for some it's contagion, and for others it's our most base and animalistic instincts. But for most of us it's simply death. To quote Simon Pegg from Riley's essay: "As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of 'most potent metaphorical monster.' Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large."

If you have any doubt that zombies will be part of popular culture for some time to come then give this book a go. It’s not for the squeamish, though. ( )

Anyone who knows me knows I love plague literature, although they, like me might not know that plague lit is considered an actual genre. So I wanted to really really like this book. Academic essays about the zombie phenomenon. How awesome. And some of the essays were pretty good. I very much liked "The National Strategy for Zombie Containment" which compares how Homeland Security works vs. organizations like Zombie Squad (which is kind of like a survivalist group through a zombie lens). But most of the essays would seem to appeal only to an academic audience, and even then, to a small group of academics. And one in particular had such a huge error that it called the conclusions into question. That would be "Gray Is the New Black." The author refers to The Canterbury Tales as plague literature. And I quote: "WWZ [World War Z, which I personally loved] could be read as a descendant of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales with zombie apocalypse substituted for the Black Death." No! No no no no no! The Canterbury Tales is a series of stories recounted by travelers on a pilgrimage. To Canterbury. Hence the title. They're on their way to the shrine of Thomas a Becket. There is nothing about their travels related to the Black Death! I'm guessing the book the author is thinking of is Boccaccio's Decameron, which admittedly did in part inspire Canterbury Tales. In The Decameron, however, it's made clear these people are waiting out the terrors of the plague. Nothing is really added to the essay by the comparison and much is lost by using the wrong work of medieval literature.

I also thought I read in one essay a sentence about Barbara from Night of the Living Dead killing her child. However, I couldn't find it looking back through the book, so I may have misread something, and that makes me feel a LOT better, since someone involved in a book about zombies should catch an error that grave.

So a few I liked, a few I didn't, one I was disappointed in, and most I just didn't care about. Whether you like it will depend on what lens you view zombies through. After all, that's one of the great things about zombies: they're the ultimate monster because they're a blank slate: you can view them as any terror you choose. ( )

Zombies stop being fun when people start taking them as seriously as the contributors to this book do. Why does a zombie have to be a metaphor for anything? Why can’t it just be a scary monster?