The 21st century has brought an explosion of interest in zombie stories. Tales of death and resurrection range from Max Brooks’ World War Z to dozens of young adult novels to comic book series like Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead and films like Shaun of the Dead. George A. Romero may have spawned the last century’s “modern” zombie story with Night of the Living Dead, but four decades have passed since then. So what accounts for the current zombie craze?

That is the question that the contributors to The New Dead were asked to ruminate upon while writing the stories in this volume. Do we turn to tales of intimacy with death to deal with its constant presence in our media and our lives? Do zombie stories provide a way to process our feelings about the horrors of war and torture? Or is it merely that death is the final frontier available to us in this new millennium, and we cannot help but explore?

Editor Christopher Golden gathered an array of writers from different corners of the fiction world—horror, fantasy, mystery, thriller, historical, and the literary mainstream—including John Connolly, Joe Hill, Kelley Armstrong, Max Brooks, Tad Williams, Aimee Bender, David Liss, and many more.