Shark-Jumping Zombies

As a kid, the only book I reread as much as Stephen King’s The Stand was the grand-daddy of the zombie apocalypse genre, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. My favorite horror movie is still Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. I was passing around The Zombie Survival Guide to friends and family in 2003, did the same with Day by Day Armageddon in 2004. I’ve bought and enjoyed both “literary horror” zombie novels The Passage and The Reapers Are the Angels.

In short, I love zombies.

But when the Washington Post– that bastion of bastardization, that mendacious mediocrity– starts getting in on the act, you just know the zombie genre is well and truly fucked.

via The Washington Post:

5 Books on Zombies

For horror fans who can’t bear to watch as defanged vampires and cuddly werewolves make goo-goo eyes over some girl with shiny hair, there’s still one monster who resists taming: You will never catch a zombie mooning pretentiously over his true love. Nor are the reanimated likely to be cast in a love triangle with a werewolf with overdeveloped abs. (There’s the drooling, and the shambling, and the whole eating intestines thing.) And these undead don’t — praise George Romero — sparkle. No less an authority than Stephen King has proclaimed that in a quest for world domination between zombies and vampires, zombies win. And this Halloween, there are enough new zombie books to fill a morgue, with the horde invading everywhere from Tokyo and Sweden to Lake Wobegon. (You might not be able to romanticize a zombie, but you sure can parody it.)