The Dead That Walk: Flesh-Eating Stories

While questions of quality are entirely subjective, I'm writing this review to address the statement, "so he instead produced this comparatively slim volume (300 pages versus the 500-600 pages that most Mammoth books have.)" As someone who works in publishing, I can tell you that trim size is a very tricky beast. Narrow margins, typesetting, font, and line spacing can easily add or subtract several hundred pages to the book. The Mammoth book of Zombies has 26 to Dead That Walk's 24 stories. However, Dead That Walk also includes much lengthier introductions to the authors' works. I personally found the intros quite interesting, as it sometimes included the author's motivations for writing each story or what got them interested in zombies, or other tid-bits specific to this anthology. With the comprehensive introductions, I highly doubt that there is more content in the Mammoth Book than in Dead That Walk, page count notwithstanding. Personally, though I'm not a zombie fanatic, I enjoyed this book a great deal. Full disclosure, I work for the publisher, but I don't review all our books! Some of my favorites from this anthology: "The Crossing of Aldo Ray" (Weston Ochse), which combines the horrors of zombies with the horror of illegal border crossings! "The Things He Said" (Michael Marshal Smith) dotes on small details that highlight the impact of any kind of apocalypse/dystopia. "Obsequy" (David J. Schow) is a very well-constructed short story that departs from the traditional expectation of what a zombie is. "A Call To Temple" by Kelly Dunn really captures what people are willing to do for love. I also loved "For the Good of All" by Yvonne Navarro. It combines zombie apocalypse with religious fervor. Overall, I enjoyed the quality of the writing of these stories and the wide variety of ways that the zombie concept was approached.