I'm curious to see what a zombie apocalypse story is like in prose. I'm explicitly looking for relatively "normal" zombie outbreaks, not people putting wildly new spins on the concept.
The Reapers are the Angels by Alden Bell. That’s my favorite zombie book.
To a lesser extent, I like the Rot and Ruin series by Johnathan Maberry. It’s a little more YA, but it’s good.
perpetualmotionmachi on
Zone One by Colson Whitehead. He went on to win two Pulitzer prize awards, but his talent was already there when he wrote this one
r_killey on
Nightmare Jungle is Romero zombies in Vietnam during the war.
rabidstoat on
The Feed book and series, by Mira Grant.
Drascio1773 on
The Girl With All The Gifts
DueRest on
The first book in the John Ringo series of zombie books is called “Under a Graveyard Sky” and it’s pretty normal! The main difference in the series vs others are:
– the first four books are by John Ringo, the other books are by different authors and have different protagonists but still reference events in other novels
– the majority of the books take place on boats
Blecher_onthe_Hudson on
1st read *Day of the Triffids (1951)*, the “ur” zombie story despite having no zombies. *28 days Later* lifted it’s opening in it’s entirety! Walking venomous plants stand in for zombies, but it hits all the important notes, ‘humans are the bigger enemy’, ‘what do we owe less able survivors’, ‘how do we stay civilized?’
wendycomet on
I second the Rot and Ruin series recommendation, with the caveat that it’s been at least a decade since I read it. This might remind me to pick it back up, though, to make sure it still holds up… Jonathan Maberry also wrote a zombie-based short story, Fat Girl With A Knife, that I highly enjoyed as a heavyset teenager, in the anthology Slasher Girls and Monster Boys (which, if you generally like short horror stories, is excellent IMO).
Another older YA zombie book I recall being terrified of in a good way was The Forest of Hands and Teeth.
Now, this veers a bit from your preference of “normal takes on the genre,” but for a sort of sampling platter of zombie stories, exactly half of the stories in the YA fantasy/horror anthology Zombies vs. Unicorns are about zombies. (There aren’t stories about zombies and unicorns fighting; each author chose a creature they preferred and wrote their story about that. Some of the tales were more traditional zombie fare and some took new angles on the genre.)
9 Comments
The Reapers are the Angels by Alden Bell. That’s my favorite zombie book.
To a lesser extent, I like the Rot and Ruin series by Johnathan Maberry. It’s a little more YA, but it’s good.
Zone One by Colson Whitehead. He went on to win two Pulitzer prize awards, but his talent was already there when he wrote this one
Nightmare Jungle is Romero zombies in Vietnam during the war.
The Feed book and series, by Mira Grant.
The Girl With All The Gifts
The first book in the John Ringo series of zombie books is called “Under a Graveyard Sky” and it’s pretty normal! The main difference in the series vs others are:
– the first four books are by John Ringo, the other books are by different authors and have different protagonists but still reference events in other novels
– the majority of the books take place on boats
1st read *Day of the Triffids (1951)*, the “ur” zombie story despite having no zombies. *28 days Later* lifted it’s opening in it’s entirety! Walking venomous plants stand in for zombies, but it hits all the important notes, ‘humans are the bigger enemy’, ‘what do we owe less able survivors’, ‘how do we stay civilized?’
I second the Rot and Ruin series recommendation, with the caveat that it’s been at least a decade since I read it. This might remind me to pick it back up, though, to make sure it still holds up… Jonathan Maberry also wrote a zombie-based short story, Fat Girl With A Knife, that I highly enjoyed as a heavyset teenager, in the anthology Slasher Girls and Monster Boys (which, if you generally like short horror stories, is excellent IMO).
Another older YA zombie book I recall being terrified of in a good way was The Forest of Hands and Teeth.
Now, this veers a bit from your preference of “normal takes on the genre,” but for a sort of sampling platter of zombie stories, exactly half of the stories in the YA fantasy/horror anthology Zombies vs. Unicorns are about zombies. (There aren’t stories about zombies and unicorns fighting; each author chose a creature they preferred and wrote their story about that. Some of the tales were more traditional zombie fare and some took new angles on the genre.)
I concur with the Rot and Ruin series