Mammoth Books presents A Clutch of Zombies

Book 226: Mammoth Books

by Albert E. Cowdrey, Joe R. Lansdale, Karina Sumner Smith, Scott Elderman, Scott Elderman

Genres: Horror

Synopsis

In this grizzly anthology of the undead, four fascinatingly horrid dystopian universes are described, with zombies taking centre stage. Included are: What Will Come After - Scott Edelman In this most personal of zombie stories, the author imagines himself as the protagonist, looking ahead to what would happen after his own death . . . and rebirth. Christmas with the Dead - Joe R. Lansdale The ultimate in holiday horror stories. Fort Clay , Louisiana : A Tragical History - Albert E. Cowdrey When a young photographer welcomes an elderly man to her house to see the book she has published about a long-deserted 19th century military fort on the Mississippi, watery southern horrors emerge from the past. When the Zombies Win - Karina Sumner-Smith The ultimate in dystopian what-ifs, Karina Sumner-Smith's story is set after the zombie apocalypse has reached its zenith. When there's no one left to infect, where do the zombies turn?

Release date: July 26, 2012

Publisher: Robinson

Print pages: 50

Sample

SCOTT EDELMAN HAS PUBLISHED more than seventy-five short stories in magazines such as The Twilight Zone, Absolute Magnitude, Science Fiction Review and Fantasy Book, and in many anthologies, including The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Crossroads, MetaHorror, Once Upon a Galaxy, Moon Shots, Mars Probes and Forbidden Planets. New short stories are forthcoming in Why New Yorkers Smoke, PostScripts, Space and Time and other publications.

What Will Come After, a collection of his zombie fiction, and What We Still Talk About, a collection of his science fiction stories, were both published in 2010, and he has appeared in two previous volumes of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. He has been a Bram Stoker Award finalist five times, in the categories of both Short Story and Long Fiction.

Additionally, Edelman has worked for the Syfy channel for more than a decade, where he’s currently employed as the editor of Blastr. He was the founding editor of Science Fiction Age, which he edited during its entire eight-year run, and has been a four-time Hugo Award finalist for Best Editor.

“When Peter Crowther agreed to collect my many zombie short stories for publication by PS Publishing,” recalls the author, “he asked only one thing of me – that I write a new piece of fiction for the volume to entice readers who might already be familiar with my undead oeuvre. Which I, of course, immediately agreed to do.

“But having already pushed the zombie envelope as far as I thought it could go with the story I’d written most recently at the time, ‘Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man’, and wanting to make the new story truly special, I realised that there was only one place to go. I had to get personal. Very personal.

“And so, I wrote a story in which I was the protagonist, and looked ahead to what would happen after my own death . . . and rebirth. It was an emotionally difficult story to write, but what I didn’t realise was that it would become even more emotionally difficult for me as time went by.

“What I should have known when writing ‘What Will Come After’ was that it would become more difficult for me to reread as time went on. You see, because the story is about me, it is also about the people I love. Even though within the story, many of them are dead, at the time I wrote the tale, they were all alive – and I still had trouble not losing it at the ending during a public reading.

“It’s been a rough couple of years since I wrote this story, and when I next read it aloud, one of those loved ones had died, and my voice cracked and I had trouble keeping it together during the section that mentioned that death. Now yet another relative is gone, and I had difficulty even proofing this for publication. And there are other relatives still alive, but they, too, will go someday . . .

“So I appear to have set myself up for many more difficult emotional experiences in the future. But it was, of course, worth it. I only hope that when you read the story that follows, some small part of that love bleeds through from me to you . . .”

 

I AM ALREADY AWARE of certain events surrounding my coming death – which, if I’m reading the signs correctly, is not that far off – as surely as if they’d already occurred and I am merely remembering them.

I will not really begin to live until after I die. I will not be alone in that. It will be that way for many, as if what had up until then been the entirety of human existence had suddenly instead become its prologue. Death – though not dying, which will remain as painful, frightening, and mysterious as ever – will have lost its finality. We won’t understand why. There’ll be no explanation, at least none which will be found acceptable to us. That’s just the way it will be one sudden morning, when we will all wake to a world in which death has become only temporary. Some of us will take it to be the vengeance of God, while others will place the blame on the hubris of science. But the finger-pointing of billions will not alter our new situation. Life, for lack of a better word, will go on, and what will come after will more often than not be far more interesting than what had come before. Because how many of us, if tasked to speak the truth, could ever say that we fully used what we had been given in the first place?

Long before everything changes, I will have already seen the script for my desired death acted out by others. It won’t, however, have been an end capable of rehearsal. It’s a scenario I will have hoped for, but which I, which we, will be denied. I will not be as lucky as the ninety-year-old woman, married for sixty-seven years, who had a stroke, or her husband, also ninety, who then phoned 911. I have already read about their ends, now, even as I write these words, long before the world’s rebirth, long before I’ll need to fear the transformation. As the emergency crew bundled up that elderly woman to rush her to the hospital, the stress from the flurry of activity, from seeing his wife limp and unmoving, caused her husband to have a stroke as well. Neither of the pair ever regained consciousness. They died within days of each other. If I could choose a manner in which to leave this world, it would be that one, my wife and I taken from the world at once, neither of us suffering extended solitude, never alone for long. Those few minutes apart would be an eternity enough. My wife and I have talked about that, hoped for that, and will continue to hope, even after everything changes. But who among us gets to choose the time and place of his or her death? Especially when the world becomes the way the world will henceforth be forever.

I will die in my own home. Even though I will have sickened, I will not have sought help as once I might have. The world will no longer contain enough help to go around, not for . . .