Jeffrey Shanks’ Zombie from the Pulps is exactly what it says on the tin – a collection of twenty stories from the old pulps dealing with the walking dead.
Not, mind you, the shambling hordes of post-Romerian cinema, but the subtler, more personal and vaguely more anthropologically correct zombies of old fiction.
The selection includes at least two well-known pieces, H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West and Robert E. Howard’s Pigeons from Hell – most readers are likely to have read these before, and probably own multiple copies of both stories. I know I do.
The same goes, probably, for H.S. Whitehead’s Jumbee, another true classic, and for C.A. Smith’s Empire of the Necromancers, a true wonder of macabre humor and baroque imagination.
But it’s the rest of the collection that is a treasure-trove of surprises.
We find that often forgotten gem, Henry Kuttner’s The Graveyard Rats, and then a number of little-known stories of Haitian magic and walking corpses, by the likes of August Derleth, Manly Wade Wellman, Henry Kuttner, E. Hoffmann Price and Seabury Quinn.
But there’s also a nice little number by our old friend H. De Vere Stacpoole, and a fine story by Garnett Weston, who penned the original story for White Zombie, and here hides under the alias of G.W. Hutter.
And more.
A nice little anthology, highly recommended to seekers of the macabre.
In a related department, I’ve been reading Cetacean Paleobiology, one of those strange cases in which the profession written on my documents and what I do to pay my bills (when I manage to pay them!)
Karavansara 