INTRODUCTION
The Book of All Flesh is a short fiction companion volume to Eden's celebrated All Flesh Must Be Eaten, the roleplaying game of zombie survival horror.
Because this is a book of stories rather than a roleplaying book, I'm going to dispense with my standard Content/Style split in this review. Instead, I'll be giving each story its own overall rating on a 5.0 scale.
Disclaimer: I have submitted a story for publication in The Book of More Flesh, the follow-up to this anthology. While I don't think that I've let that fact affect my review of this book, this knowledge may, at least, give the authors of the stories to which I've given lower ratings the consolation of knowing that they may get the chance to repay me in kind. :-)
CONTENT
To save time and space, I'll be using the following tags for the stages of the zombie plagues featured in each story, if applicable:
Rise: The zombies are just getting started (e.g., Night of the Living Dead).
Apocalypse: Society has started to fall apart in the face of the zombie plague (e.g., Dawn of the Dead).
Post-Apocalypse: The zombies have taken over (e.g., Day of the Dead).
Adaptation: The zombies have been defeated or contained in some manner.
And now, to the stories…
Consumption
Author: Steve Eller
Plague Stage: Post-Apocalypse
Rating: 3.0/5.0
A depressing little tale of a man on the road in the Desert Southwest of an America that's fallen to the zombies. Most of the zombie action comes from second-hand accounts, and the entire story is the setup for an extremely gruesome and unsettling finish. Not bad, but definitely not one of my favorites.
Dust Bowl
Author: C. Dean Andersson
Plague Stage: Adaptation (Early)
Rating: 3.5/5.0
A couple of good ol' boys on zombie poppin' patrol for the Texas Highway Department stumble across an illegal operation using zombies for the ultimate in "extreme sports"… and guess who are our next lucky contestants? A fun little story, although as an actual Texan, the characters' accents started getting on my nerves after a while. (Let me assure you all that should a rise of the undead occur, even the hickiest of my fellow Texans would call the walking corpses "zombies" just like everyone else, not "dead'uns.")
Susan
Author: Robin D. Laws
Plague Stage: Adaptation
Rating: 4.5/5.0
The esteemed Mr. Laws shows that he can still push the weirdometer into the red with another tale of underground zombie extreme sports. A remarkably jaded man is disappointed when even the thrill of watching savage zombies tear each other apart in clandestine arenas begins to fade. But there's yet another zombie-related taboo awaiting his "pleasure"…
Definitely disturbing, and definitely one of my favorites. Aside from the great plot and characterization, Laws's feral zombies are really scary.
Number of the Beast
Author: Kenneth Lightner
Plague Stage: Rise(?)
Rating: 4.5/5.0
A modern tale of a Lovecraftian mad scientist seeking immortality through zombification, told in that most Lovecraftian of formats, the journal. In this case, however, belongs to the subject, no the scientist.
Good, solid pulp horror/B-movie fun.
Dawn of the Living-Impaired
Author: Christine Morgan
Plague Stage: Rise
Rating: 3.5/5.0
A really funny (and all-too-believable) tale of what happens when the bleeding hearts take up the cause of the walking dead. If only the whole thing weren't just a setup for the kind of cornball joke they used to follow up on sitcoms with a "Wah-Wah-Wah-Waaaaaaaaah!"
Trinkets
Author: Tobias S. Buckell
Plague Stage: n/a
Rating: 3.5/5.0
A story set in turn-of-the-19th-century America with an unusual take on zombies that'll have you searching for the undead until the very end. Clever, but a little dry for my tastes.
Murdermouth
Author: Scott Nicholson
Plague Stage: Possibly either Adaptation or very early Rise
Rating: 5.0/5.0
What better circus freak than a zombie? Told from the mute but disturbingly aware zombie's perspective, this one made me extremely uneasy from start to finish in a manner worthy of Clive Barker.
Calliope
Author: Aaron T. Solomon
Plague Stage: Rise
Rating: 4.5/5.0
Another circus-related tale, this one's main flaw is in switching themes in mid-stream. Thankfully, the second theme is as engaging as the first. The story starts out posing the question of just how much of the living is left in the living dead and ends with the first real survival horror shoot'em up of the book -- in this case, a battle with undead circus freaks. The former is unsettling; the latter, intense. Overall, it makes for a good read.
Prometheus Unwound
Author: Matt Forbeck
Plague Stage: Rise
Rating: 5.0/5.0
The author of the supers RPG Brave New World pits gritty superheroes against grittier zombies in a tale that does justice to both. It also illustrates that when it comes to battling zombies, one particular superpower is a very mixed blessing. One of the best stories in the book, and definitely worthy of its Origins award.
Salvation
Author: L. H. Maynard and M. P. N. Sims
Plague Stage: Post-Apocalypse
Rating: 4.0/5.0
A simple, "old school" zombie apocalypse story about a horribly lonely man besieged by the living dead in his isolated farmhouse, resignedly going about the business of surviving without hope.
The authors do a great job of emphasizing the nihilistic despair intrinsic in such zombie takeover scenarios. They also neatly sweep aside the question often asked on AFMBE discussion groups regarding how the military would handle the zombies by making the source of the zombie plague a literal plague.
Take, Eat
Author: John C. Hay
Plague Stage: Rise
Rating: 4.5/5.0
Can a zombie story be touching? This one certainly tries, and (to my mind) succeeds. It's the story of parishioners whose need for their church doesn't lessen in the face of undeath, and of the priest who refuses to abandon them.
The only thing that kept it from a 5.0 was the ending, which involves a decision on the priest's part that I found very hard to swallow (pardon the pun) on anything beyond a purely thematic level.
Sifting Out the Hearts of Men
Author: Warren Brown and Lana Brown
Plague Stage: Rise-Apocalypse
Rating: 5.0/5.0
Another of my favorites. When the American Civil War falls apart in the face of a full-blown rise of the living dead, two Union soldiers struggle to make their way back north in the hopes of finding their home in the city untouched by the plague. The author makes excellent use of atmosphere, with the smaller population and slower communications inherent in the time and place redoubling the sense of isolation and dread inherent in the subgenre.
The Other Side of Theory
Author: Daniel Ksenych
Plague Stage: Rise
Rating: 4.5/5.0
Another great one that earns high marks for originality. In the near future, teleportation experiments result in a rather unique zombie uprising. The self-referential dialogue between the characters (a la Scream) is amusing, although I wish the author had either used it more consistently or else left it out altogether.
Inspecting the Workers
Author: Jim C. Hines
Plague Stage: Rise
Rating: 3.5/5.0
A story that moves zombies away from cinematic flesh-eating and back to their roots in manual labor, albeit via high technology rather than voodoo and for urban renewal rather than farming. Or does it?
Another unusual take on zombies, although I found the payoff a little too predictable.
Last Resort
Author: Michael Laimo
Plague Stage: Post-Apocalypse (or Post-Post-Apocalyse?)
Rating: 3.5/5.0
In a tale about as post-apocalyptic as you can get, a man and his son search an eerily empty Las Vegas for signs of life after a zombie plague so pervasive that the zombies themselves seem to have all died of starvation.
The author uses the bleak visuals of the setting -- a Las Vegas being reclaimed by the desert -- to good effect in emphasizing the bleakness of the situation. However, the details of those visuals didn't quite ring true for me somehow -- in particular, the remarkably passable roads.
Same Night, Different Farmhouse
Author: Gregory G. Kurczynski
Plague Stage: Rise
Rating: 3.5/5.0
A psycho picks the wrong night (of the Living Dead) to ply his perverse trade.
I found myself enjoying the novelty of seeing the events of Romero's movie from a different perspective more than I did the plot story itself, but the latter was fairly entertaining as well.
Middles
Author: Robert E. Vardeman
Plague Stage: N/A
Rating: 4.0/5.0
In a genuinely amusing story with a camp horror style worthy of "Tales from the Crypt," an executive trying very hard to maintain his mental acuity in the face of progressive zombification discovers the value of all those nameless, faceless cogs in the corporate machine...
One Last, Little Revenge
Author: Ed Greenwood
Plague Stage: Rise?
Rating: 4.0/5.0
"Take, Eat" proves that a zombie story can be touching. "Middles" proves (once again) that a zombie story can be funny. This story proves that a zombie story can be cute.
Well, sort of, anyway.
The aging founder of a toy manufacturing company comes up with one last remarkably clever toy line with which to strike back at the ruthless corporate sharks pushing him out of the business. A toy line that calls for formerly living parts...
The Cold, Gray Fingers of My Love
Author: Pete D. Manison
Plague Stage: N/A
Rating: 4.5/5.0
Another one with high marks for originality -- one that, like "Inspecting the Workers," explores the future use of science-spawned zombies as tools, this time on the surface of the Moon.
Here, the zombies aren't a danger in the usual sense, being merely corpses into which certain gifted individuals can transfer their minds temporarily with the aid of technology, effectively making them undead mechas. But if you think this practice sounds a little mentally unhealthy, you're right…
On-Line Zombies and Dry-Land Skates
Author: Scot Noel (from an idea by Tim Yeager)
Plague Stage: Adaptation
Rating: 4.5/5.0
A wildly inventive story in which people who are stinkin' rich really do stink, because they're zombies. Turning the zombie subgenre on its head, "Skates" postulates a world of the near future lorded over by undead elites created by an accident involving an experimental nano-tech Internet interface. A down-on-his-luck member of the human underclass decides to go for his piece of the pie by giving a zombie billionaire a piece of his mind. Literally.
Hollywood Flesh
Author: L. J. Washburn
Plague Stage: N/A
Rating: 4.5/5.0
Part pulp, part film noir, part Western, part zombie flick, and all great fun. In Hollywood circa the Roaring Twenties, a desperate movie scenarist hires an aging Texas Ranger-turned-movie stuntman/private investigator to save him from the jealous producer whose actress girlfriend he stole. And oh yeah, from the zombie of a vengeful voodooist on his tail as a result…
Scenes from a Foreign Horror Video, with Zombies and Tasteful Nudity
Author: Mark McLaughlin
Plague Stage: Rise-Post-Apocalypse
Rating: 4.0/5.0
A clever spoof of exactly what the title describes, complete with pretentious imagery, "arty" quick-cuts, lousy special effects, and, above all, horrifyingly bad dubbed dialogue. The appropriately ludicrous plot of the "movie" involves a coven of evil witches using magic and radiation to turn people who view their "witch web sites" into zombies.
So skillful is the spoof that it may be a victim of its own success, in fact -- after a while, it became almost as irritating as its target.
La Carrera de la Muerte
Author: Joe Murphy
Plague Stage: N/A
Rating: 4.5/5.0
An obsessed American returns to the small Mexican town where he first experienced the place's bizarre mix of La Dia de los Muertos -- complete with actual undead -- and the Running of the Bulls. The object of his obsession isn't the festival itself, per sé, but something even more unwholesome.
This one's notable for its inclusion of the only definitively Inspired character in the entire collection, with the possible exception of "Take, Eat." It's an interesting and entertaining read, although a better explanation for what's really going on would have been nice, space permitting.
The Electric Jesus and the Living Dead
Author: Jeremy Zoss
Plague Stage: Apocalypse
Rating: 4.5/5.0
A lonely, overweight, geeky teenager finds himself lonelier still -- not to mention starving and terrified -- when a remarkably swift zombie rising leaves him trapped alone in his house with only his mother's tacky plastic light-up Jesus for company. Lucky for him, the "Electric Jesus" proves to be a surprisingly talkative companion…
The story manages to be at once funny and sad, although the speed of the zombie rise itself -- which, apparently, causes the total breakdown of society within three day's time -- is a little hard to accept. Thankfully, that's only the backdrop of the story, with the focus on the boy's conversations with Electric Jesus.
I should point out that both the concept and the personality of the latter is remarkably similar to that of the talking Jesus holographic portrait appearing in Stephen King's The Tommyknockers, but I'll chalk that up to literary convergent evolution.
Live People Don't Understand
Author: Scott Edelman
Plague Stage: N/A
Rating: 5.0/5.0
I'm not sure that this counts as the best that's saved for last, although it's awfully close. Certainly, I found it to be among the most unique and fascinating.
If you've seen or read Thornton Wilder's play Our Town, you no doubt remember the final scene in the cemetery. It's one that deeply resonated with me, sticking with me to this very day. Well, here, the author returns to that cemetery and its semi-talkative inhabitants, where he manages the rather remarkable feat of throwing in both a zombie and a startling new interpretation of one event in the play without disrespecting the source material in the slightest.
CONCLUSION
While I wasn't totally blown away by this collection, there are plenty of gems here and no real duds in the bunch. Moreover, taken as a whole, the collection is a great exploration of the potential of the zombie subgenre, making it ideal for those of you stumped over what to do with All Flesh Must Be Eaten. As I mentioned in my review of the latter, I'm probably best described as a "casual" zombie fan, and I really enjoyed this book. That being the case, you real zombie nuts out there should love it with an unhealthy passion.
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