John Joseph Adams, Robert Kirkman, Steven Barnes, Tananarive Due, Paula R. Stiles, Adam-Troy Castro, Karina Sumner-Smith, Matt London, Marc Paoletti, Molly Brown, Seth Lindberg, Walter Greatshell, Jamie Lackey, David J. Schow, David Wellington, Brian Keene, Amelia Beamer, Steven Popkes, Barr Kirtley, Brenna Yovanoff, Max Brooks, Charles Coleman Finlay, Mira Grant, Gary A. Braunbeck, Cherie Priest, Mark McLaughlin, Kyra M. Schon, S. G. Browne, Bret Hammond, Bob Fingerman, Kelly Link, Scott Edelman, David Moody, Rory Harper, Simon R. Green, Kelley Armstrong, Paul McAuley, Joe McKinney, Carrie Ryan, Kim Paffenroth, R. J. Sevin, Julia Sevin, Catherine MacLeod, Steven Gould, Catherynne M. Valente, Jonathan Maberry, Genevieve Valentine, John Skipp, Cody Goodfellow, Sarah Langan
The Living Dead 2
© 2010
Introduction by John Joseph Adams
Turns out, zombies really don’t want to die.
When Night Shade Books and I put the first The Living Dead anthology together a couple years ago (which I will refer to hereafter as Volume One), we had the sense that zombies would be big, but I don’t think any of us realized just how big they would become.
When the book actually came out in September of 2008, it seemed like the timing was perfect, that we would be hitting right at the crest of the zombie’s popularity. But now it looks like they’ve only become more popular in the intervening period, spreading throughout an unsuspecting population like zombiism itself.
In the last couple years there have been a slew of new zombie entertainments released, across all media. There have been new movies (Quarantine, REC2, Deadgirl, Diary of the Dead, Survival of the Dead, Dead Snow, Zombie Strippers, Zombieland); video games (Plants vs. Zombies, Dead Rising 2, Dead Space, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2); and a veritable horde of books (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and its sequel, books from several of the contributors to this anthology, and even a Star Wars zombie novel called Death Troopers). Plus, a film adaptation is in the works for Max Brooks’s World War Z, and Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead is being made into a television series.