While zombies have played a minor role in literature for years, often lurking as a sinister other or playing the role of the consequence of our terrible actions, theyve all of a sudden shambled their way on to the literary radar. The list below highlights some classic zombie fiction, some postapocalyptic approaches to the shambling undead, and some more light-hearted takes on the now-familiar zombie trope.
If weve missed a key title that you think deserves a place here, let us know, and well add it to the list.
(PS, if youre a zombie fan, you might also like our list of YA dystopian fiction)
The Reapers are the Angels by Alden Bell (see our review)
Blurb: God is a slick god. Temple knows. She knows because of all the crackerjack miracles still to be seen on this ruined globeOlder than her years and completely alone, Temple is just trying to live one day at a time in a post-apocalyptic world, where the undead roam endlessly, and the remnant of mankind who have survived, at times, seem to retain little humanity themselves. This is the world she was born into. Temple has known nothing else. Her journey takes her to far-flung places, to people struggling to maintain some semblance of civilization and to those who have created a new world order for themselves. When she comes across the helpless Maury, she attempts to set one thing right, if she can just get him back to his family in Texas then maybe it will bring redemption for some of the terrible things shes done in her past. Because Temple has had to fight to survive, has done things that shes not proud of and, along the road, shes made enemies. Now one vengeful man is determined that, in a world gone mad, killing her is the one thing that makes sense.
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Outpost by Adam Baker (see our review)
Blurb: They took the job to escape the world. 'They didnt expect the world to end.'Kasker Rampart: a derelict refinery platform moored in the Arctic Ocean. A skeleton crew of fifteen fight boredom and despair as they wait for a relief ship to take them home. But the world beyond their frozen wasteland has gone to hell. Cities lie ravaged by a global pandemic. One by one TV channels die, replaced by silent wavebands. The Rampart crew are marooned. They must survive the long Arctic winter, then make their way home alone. They battle starvation and hypothermia, unaware that the deadly contagion that has devastated the world is heading their way..
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Play Dead by Ryan Brown (see our review)
Blurb: For the first time in Killington High School history, the Jackrabbits football team is one win away from the district championship where it will face its most vicious rival, the Elmwood Heights Badgers. On the way to the game, the Jackrabbits's bus plunges into a river, killing every player except for bad-boy quarterback Cole Logan who is certain the crash was no accident'given that Cole himself was severely injured in a brutal attack by three ski-masked men earlier that day. Bent on payback, Cole turns to a mysterious fan skilled in black magic to resurrect his teammates. But unless the undead Jackrabbits defeat their murderous rival on the field, the team is destined for hell. In a desperate race against time, with only his coach's clever daughter, Savannah Hickman, to assist him, Cole must lead his zombie team to victory. . . in a final showdown where the stakes aren't just life or death'but damnation or salvation.
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This is Not a Test by Courtney Summers
It's the end of the world. Six students have taken cover in Cortege High but shelter is little comfort when the dead outside won't stop pounding on the doors. One bite is all it takes to kill a person and bring them back as a monstrous version of their former self. To Sloane Price, that doesn't sound so bad. Six months ago,'her'world collapsed and since then, she's failed to find a reason to keep going. Now seems like the perfect time to give up. As Sloane eagerly waits for the barricades to fall, she's forced to witness the apocalypse through the eyes of five people who actually'want'to live. But as the days crawl by, the motivations for survival change in startling ways and soon the group's fate is determined less and less by what's happening outside and more and more by the unpredictable and violent bids for life'and'death'inside. When everything is gone, what do'you'hold on to?
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The Strain by Guillermo del Toro
Blurb: The Strain They have always been here. Vampires. In secret and in darkness. Waiting. Now their time has come. In one week, Manhattan will be gone. In one month, the country. In two months'the world. 'A Boeing 777 arrives at JFK and is on its way across the tarmac, when it suddenly stops dead. All window shades are pulled down. All lights are out. All communication channels have gone quiet. Crews on the ground are lost for answers, but an alert goes out to the CDC. Dr. Eph Goodweather, head of their Canary project, a rapid-response team that investigates biological threats, gets the call and boards the plane. What he finds makes his blood run cold. 'In a pawnshop in Spanish Harlem, a former professor and survivor of the Holocaust named Abraham Setrakian knows something is happening. And he knows the time has come, that a war is brewing . . . 'So begins a battle of mammoth proportions as the vampiric virus that has infected New York begins to spill out into the streets. Eph, who is joined by Setrakian and a motley crew of fighters, must now find a way to stop the contagion and save his city'a city that includes his wife and son'before it is too late.
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The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
Blurb: In Marys world there are simple truths.'The Sisterhood always knows best.'The Guardians will protect and serve.'The Unconsecrated will never relent.
And you must always mind the fence that surrounds the village; the fence that protects the village from the Forest of Hands and Teeth.'But, slowly, Marys truths are failing her. Shes learning things she never wanted to know about the Sisterhood and its secrets, and the Guardians and their power, and about the Unconsecrated and their relentlessness. When the fence is breached and her world is thrown into chaos, she must choose between her village and her future-between the one she loves and the one who loves her.'And she must face the truth about the Forest of Hands and Teeth. Could there be life outside a world surrounded in so much death?
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Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry
When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week theres either something wrong with your world or something wrong with your skills and theres nothing wrong with Joe Ledgers skills.' And thats both a good, and a bad thing.' Its good because hes a Baltimore detective that has just been secretly recruited by the government to lead a new taskforce created to deal with the problems that Homeland Security cant handle. This rapid response group is called the Department of Military Sciences or the DMS for short. Its bad because his first mission is to help stop a group of terrorists from releasing a dreadful bio-weapon that can turn ordinary people into zombies. The fate of the world hangs in the balance.
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Blurb: Civilization slipped into its second dark age on an unsurprising track of blood but with a speed that could not have been foreseen by even the most pessimistic futurist. By Halloween, every major city from New York to Moscow stank to the empty heavens and the world as it had been was a memory. The event became known as The Pulse. The virus was carried by every cell phone operating within the entire world. Within hours, those receiving calls would be infected. A young artist Clayton Riddell realises what is happening. He flees the devastation of explosive, burning Boston, desperate to reach his son before his son switches on his little red mobile phone
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You are So Undead to Me by Stacey Jay
Blurb: Megan Berry is a Zombie Settler by birth, which means shes part-time shrink to a whole bunch of semi-dead people with killer issues. All Megan really wants is to go to homecoming, but when youre trailed by a bunch of slobbering corpses whenever you leave the house, its kinda hard to score a date. Lets just say Megans love life could use some major resuscitation.'Megans convinced her life cant get any worse until someone in school starts using black magic to turn average, angsty Undead into scary, hardcore flesh-eating Zombies. Now its up to Megan to stop the Zombie apocalypse. Her life and more importantly, the homecoming dance depends on it.
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Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindqvist
Blurb: Something very peculiar is happening in Stockholm. Theres a heatwave on and people cannot turn their lights out or switch their appliances off. Then the terrible news breaks. In the city morgue, the dead are waking up What do they want? What everybody wants: to come home. Handling the Undead is a story about our greatest fear and about a love that defies death.
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Blurb: It began with rumours from China about another pandemic. Then the cases started to multiply and what had looked like the stirrings of a criminal underclass, even the beginnings of a revolution, soon revealed itself to be much, much worse. Faced with a future of mindless, man-eating horror, humanity was forced to accept the logic of world government and face events that tested our sanity and our sense of reality. Based on extensive interviews with survivors and key players in the 10-year fight-back against the horde, World War Z brings the very finest traditions of American journalism to bear on what is surely the most incredible story in the history of civilisation.
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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Blurb: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austens beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone crunching zombie action.
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Day by Day Armageddon'by JL Bourne
Sporadic news reports indicate chaos and violence spreading through U.S. cities. An unknown evil is sweeping the planet. The dead are rising to claim the Earth as the new dominant species in the food chain.This is the handwritten journal depicting one man's struggle for survival. Trapped in the midst of global disaster, he must make decisions; choices that ultimately mean life, or the eternal curse to walk as one of them. Enter if you will into his world. The world of the undead.
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Zombie, Ohio by Scott Kenemore
When rural Ohio college professor Peter Mellor dies in an automobile accident during a zombie outbreak, he is reborn as a highly intelligent (yet somewhat amnesiac) member of the living dead. With society crumbling around him and violence escalating into daily life, Peter quickly learns that being a zombie isn't all fun and brains. Humans'unsympathetic, generally, to his new proclivities'try to kill him at nearly every opportunity. His old friends are loath to associate with him. And he finds himself inconveniently addicted to the gooey stuff inside of people's heads.
As if all this weren't bad enough, Peter soon learns that his automobile accident was no accident at all. Faced with the harrowing mystery of his death, Peter resolves to use his strange zombie 'afterlife' to solve his own murder.
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Flesh Eaters'by Joe McKinney
They RiseOut of the flooded streets of Houston, they emerge from plague-ridden waters. Dead. Rotting. Hungry. And as human survivors scramble to their rooftops for safety, the zombie hordes circle like sharks. The ultimate killing machines. They FeedHouston is quarantined to halt the spread of the zombie plague. Anyone trying to escape is shot on sight living and dead. Emergency Ops sergeant Eleanor Norton has her work cut out for her. Salvaging boats and gathering explosives, Eleanor and her team struggle to maintain order. But when civilization finally breaks down, the feeding frenzy begins. They MultiplyBiting, gnawing, feasting but always craving more the flesheaters increase their ranks every hour. With doomsday looming, Eleanor must focus on the people she loves her husband and daughter and a band of other survivors adrift in zombie-infested waters. If she cant bring them into the quarantine zone, theyre all dead meat.
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The First Days'by Rhiannon Frater
The morning that the world ends, Katie is getting ready for'court and housewife Jenni is taking care of her family. Less than two hours later, they are fleeing for their lives from a zombie horde.'Thrown together by circumstance, Jenni and Katie become a powerful zombie-killing partnership, mowing down zombies as they rescue Jenni's stepson, Jason, from an infected campground.
They find sanctuary in a tiny, roughly fortified Texas town.''There Jenni and Katie find they are both attracted to Travis, leader of the survivors; and the refugees must slaughter people they know, who have returned in zombie form.
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Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection by Don Roff and Chris Lane
Blurb: The year is 2011, and what starts as a pervasive and inexplicable illness ends up as a zombie infestation that devastates the worlds population. Taking the form of a biologists illustrated journal found in the aftermath of the attack, this pulse-pounding, suspenseful tale of zombie apocalypse follows the narrator as he flees from city to countryside and heads north to Canada, where he hopes the undead will be slowed by the colder climate. Encountering scattered humans and scores of the infected along the way, he fills his notebook with graphic drawings of the zombies and careful observations of their behavior, along with terrifying tales of survival. This frightening new contribution to the massively popular zombie resurgence will keep fans on the edge of their seats right up to the very end.
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Zombie Blondes by Brian James
Blurb:'From the moment Hannah Sanders arrived in town, she felt there was something wrong.'A lot of houses were for sale, and the town seemed infected by an unearthly quiet. And then, on Hannah's first day of classes, she ran into a group of cheerleaders'the most popular girls in school.'The odd thing was that they were nearly identical in appearance: blonde, beautiful, and deathly pale.'But Hannah wants desperately to fit in'regardless of what her friend Lukas is telling her: If she doesn't watch her back, she's going to be blonde and popular and dead'just like all the other zombies in this town. . . .
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Monster Island by David Wellington
Blurb: Its one month after a global disaster. The most developed nations of the world have fallen to the shambling zombie masses. Only a few pockets of humanity survive ' in places rife with high-powered weaponry, such as Somalia.'In New York City, the dead walk the streets, driven by an insatiable hunger for all things living. One amongst them is different; though he shares their appetites he has retained his human intelligence. Alone among the mindless zombies, Gary Fleck is an eyewitness to the end of the world ' and perhaps the evil genius behind it all.'From the other side of the planet, a small but heavily-armed group of schoolgirls-turned-soldiers has come in search of desperately needed medicine. Dekalb, a former United Nations weapons inspector, leads them as their local guide. Ayaan, a crackshot at the age of sixteen, will stop at nothing to complete her mission. They think they are prepared for anything. On Monster Island they will find that there is something worse even than undeath, as Gary learns the true price of survival.
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I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
Blurb: Robert Neville may well be the last living man on Earth . . . but he is not alone. An incurable plague has mutated every other man, woman, and child into bloodthirsty, nocturnal creatures who are determined to destroy him. By day, he is a hunter, stalking the infected monstrosities through the abandoned ruins of civilization.'By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for dawn.
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Blurb: The dead are returning to life as intelligent zombies. Trapped by the undead, escape seems impossible for Jim Thurmond. But Jim's young son is alive and in dire peril hundreds of miles away. Despite overwhelming odds, Jim vows to find him' or die trying.'Joined by an elderly preacher, a guilt-ridden scientist, and a determined ex-prostitute, Jim embarks on a cross-country rescue mission. They must battle both the living and the living dead. And for Jim and his companions, an even greater evil awaits them at the end of their journey. This is the time ofThe Rising.
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Married with Zombies by Jessie Petersen
Blurb: A heartwarming tale of terror in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. Meet Sarah and David. Once upon a time they met and fell in love. But now theyre on the verge of divorce and going to couples counseling. On a routine trip to their counselor, they notice a few odd things the lack of cars on the highway, the missing security guard, and the fact that their counselor, Dr. Kelly, is ripping out her previous clients throat. Meet the Zombies. Now, Sarah and David are fighting for survival in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. But, just because there are zombies, doesnt mean your other problems go away. If the zombies dont eat their brains, they might just kill each other.
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Can You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse?'by Max Brailler
Inside these pages lies unspeakable horror. Bloodsplattering, brain-impaling, flesh-devouring horror. You've probably read your fair share of zombie stories. But this time it's different. No longer can you sit idle as a bunch of fools make all the wrong moves. All hell is about to break loose'and YOU have a say in humanity's survival. You have choices to make. Moral dilemmas. Strategic decisions. Weapons. Vehicles. Will you be a hero? Or will you cover your own ass at all costs? Can you withstand the coming hours, days, weeks, and months? Or will you die amidst the chaos and violence of a zombie uprising?'Or, worst of all, will you become one of them?
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Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion'(see our review)
Blurb: R is a zombie. He has no name, no memories, and no pulse, but he has dreams. He is a little different from his fellow Dead. Amongst the ruins of an abandoned city, R meets a girl. Her name is Julie and she is the opposite of everything he knows warm and bright and very much alive, she is a blast of colour in a dreary grey landscape. For reasons he cant understand, R chooses to save Julie instead of eating her, and a tense yet strangely tender relationship begins. This has never happened before. It breaks the rules and defies logic, but R is no longer content with life in the grave. He wants to breathe again, he wants to live, and Julie wants to help him. But their grim, rotting world wont be changed without a fight
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Generation Dead by Daniel Waters
Blurb: Phoebe is just your typical goth girl with a crush.' Hes strong and silent.and dead.''All over the country,'a strange phenomenon is happening.' Some teenagers who die arent staying dead.' They are coming back to life, but they are no longer the same-they stutter, and their reactions to everything are slower.'' Termed living impaired or differently biotic, they are doing their best to fit into a society that doesnt want them.''Fitting in is hard enough when you dont have the look or attitude, but when almost everyone else is alive and'youre not, its close to impossible.'' The kids at Oakvale High dont want to take classes or eat in the cafeteria next to someone who isnt breathing.' And there are no laws that exist to protect the differently biotic from the people who want them to disappear-for good.'With her pale skin and Goth wardrobe, Phoebe has never run with the popular crowd.' But no one can believe it when she falls for Tommy Williams, the leader of the dead kids.' Not her best friend, Margi, whose fear of the differently biotic is deeply rooted in guilt over the past.' And especially not her neighbor,'Adam, the star of the football team.' Adam has just realized his feelings for Phoebe run much deeper than just friendship.'' He would do anything for her, but what if protecting Tommy is the one thing that would make her happy?
Married With Zombies ha! Love the title! (c:
(Sadly, from your list, the only one Ive managed to read is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I really must expand my zombie reading list before the zombie apocalypse. You know, as research)
That one looks great, doesnt it? Im going to have to pick up a review copy (its out just this week, I think, but couldnt resist putting it in!)
Good collection of books. There were actually some Id never heard of , which will give me something to hunt down. Thanks!
Thanks so much for stopping by! I'm glad you managed to find some new and interesting reads from this list'it's given me a bit of reading to do myself.