(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

Early in the zombie story collection What Will Come After, author Scott Edelman actually flat-out states what exactly is wrong with penning a collection of zombie stories: "The writer types out many variations of this outline, because that is all he knows how to do, and when there are no more stories to tell, he's going to continue to tell them anyway. Some of his tales are set in city streets. Some are on country roads. Still others take place in zoos, in shopping malls and schools and airplanes. But whatever the setting, at their heart, they are all the same. Shuffle. Shamble. Shuffle a little more quickly. Run. (Well, as zombies run anyway.) Run, run, run. Eat!" But unfortunately, Edelman ignores his own revelation here, turning in a story collection that gets very tedious very fast: because he's right, zombies as a literary device are not that different from a natural disaster like a fire or a tornado, and there's simply not much to be said in a story about natural disasters besides, "Natural disaster hits town; humans in that town run away." This leads Edelman then into trying out a whole series of gimmicks in order to maintain our attention, which after all is what most zombie stories in general do; and so do we get a story about a dysfunctional family that are fleeing zombies, and a story about a bookish intellectual who is fleeing zombies, and a story about a theatre owner who is fleeing zombies, not to mention a whole series of ultra-gimmicky zombie mashups of famous older literary stories. ("It's John Steinbeck meets zombies!" "It's Shakespeare meets zombies!" J-sus, ask me how ready I am for that literary trend to be over!) A big disappointment from the normally great PS Publishing.

Out of 10: 4.8 ( )