Dead of Night by Jonathan Maberry

I got an advance copy of Dead of Night: A Zombie Novel through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. I've been a fan of zombies ever since I was a kid and saw Night of the Living Dead on latenight TV.  These days though, it seems like everybody is writing a zombie novel or making a zombie movie. This makes it hard to tell a good zombie story, because it's all been done before.

Maberry has managed to tell a good story. The key to doing this is having an interesting plot and interesting characters. The plot doesn't have to be original. There's only so many ways a zombie story can go, just like with a love story, or a mystery, or an alien invasion, or any other kind of story. The key is to take the story and make it your own.

The plot isn't  what I would call original, but Maberry makes it his own, and that's what makes it good. It's basically a standard zombie outbreak; a corpse wakes up and attacks someone, who becomes a zombie. Then that person becomes a zombie, and pretty soon things spiral out of control. The few people who are aware of what's going on aren't believed until it's too late. There's a lot of blood and gore and violence.

It's the characters that really make the story. You've got a seriously messed up police officer and her partner and her ex. I felt enough for these people to be rooting for them the whole time, even when I knew their actions were putting the whole world at risk.

The only thing that I found at all annoying about the book is that the word zombie wasn't even used until halfway through the book. Even when characters saw dead people walking and feasting on the living, they never called them zombies and it took them way too long to figure out they needed to aim for the head. The only thing I can figure is that this story must be set in some alternate reality where George Romero never picked up a camera, and consequently the modern flesh-eating zombie genre never existed. Even so, this is a book all zombie fans will enjoy.

Houdini Gut Punch: An Anthology of Bizarro Horror ed. by Jonathan Moon

Houdini Gut Punch is an anthology of bizarro short stories.If you don't know what bizarro, is you should probably click on the link, which goes to the Wikipedia entry for bizarro fiction. If you want a quick summary, it is really f'ed up, bizarre stuff.

This book features stories with lots of f'ed up, bizarre subjects:a man who keeps his soul inside a duck, a woman who adopts an insect angel the crawls out of her drain,the eternal conflict between a moth and some kind of monster thing, a guy whose head starts absorbing animals causing him to give birth to monster things, etc.

Not all of the stories were winners, though. A couple were kind of boring. One kept switching between the first, second, and third person viewpoints and changed which character had which viewpoint, which was confusing, but sort of made sense at the end. Some of the stories mad no sense, but were usually still enjoyable. If you like the weird like I do, then you will probably enjoy this book.

Classics Mutilated ed. by Jeff Conner

Classics Mutilated is a collection of short fiction in the genre of what is apparently called Monster Lit, which is when authors take classic works and add in zombies or whatnot or famous historical people and put them in some kind of supernatural situation. At least according to the introduction anyway; I've been avoiding that stuff.

Technically speaking only one of the stories in the collection is the "take a classic and add stuff to make it weird" type. That's Rick Hautala's "Little Women in Black," which combines a scene from Little Women with some men in black type action. Basically, I found that story to be weird and confusing, though still entertaining.

The rest of the stories are more or less evenly divided between weird tales featuring historical personages and weird literary (or other media) mashups. Overall, I preferred the mashups. The historical ones weren't bad, but mostly featured people I don't particularly care about.

"Fairest of Them All" by Sean Taylor is a very strange mashup of Snow White and Alice in Wonderland.  This story was just cool.

"Anne-droid of Green Gables" by Lezli Robyn is a steam punk version of Anne of Green Gables. It's a very heart-warming story.

"Death stopped for Miss Dickinson" by Kristine Katherine Rusch tells the story of Emily Dickinson's love affair with Death. It was interesting,but as I'm not particularly a fan of poetry, I wasn't as entranced as I was with some of the stories.

"Twilight of the Gods" by Chris Ryall is the story of Loki told in the style of Twilight. This was funny.

"Pokky Man" by Marc Laidlaw is basically a non copyright infringing Pokemon story told in the style of a documentary film. Definately my least favorite of the mashups, but still not a bad story.

"Vicious" by Mark Morris is the tale of how Sid Vicious got put under a Voodoo curse. I'm not really that much of a fan of punk or 70s rock in general,  but I actually liked this story and felt kind of bad for Sid.

"From Hell's Heart" by Nancy Collins is the story of what happened to Ahab after he died in Moby Dick. This was a cool story with one of my favorite monsters in it.

"Frankenbilly" by John Shirley is a story about Billy the Kid meeting up with Victor Frankenstein. As you might guess, it was inspired by Billy the Kid Versus Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter., which means it's cool (at least if your like me).

"The Green Menace" by Thomas Tessier is about Joe McCarthy fighting killer frogs. The only downside to this story is that since MCarthy is a real person, you know the frogs aren't going to kill the bastard even though you wish they would.

"Quoth the Rock Star" by Rio Youers is about Jim Morrison meeting the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe. The Doors aren't really my kind of music any more than The Sex Pistols are, but I still enjoyed this one.

"The Happiest Hell on Earth" by John Skipp & Cody Goodfellow is the tale of what would have happened if the animal people from The Island of Dr. Moreau had gone on to work for a company that is very much like Disney, but not called that since no one wants to get sued. This was a very cool story.

"Dread Island" by Joe Lansdale is Huck Finn meets Uncle Remus meets Cthulu. I think it's the best story in the book.