Photo by David Cowles

Zombie novels are putting authors on the bestseller lists. Zombie fiction is helping authors—pros and first-timers alike—break through into mainstream, genre and young-adult markets. Since 2002, living-dead enthusiasm has spread like a pandemic, and there is no end in sight. (See the sidebar, "Dawn of the undead," below for a look at how the popularity of these creatures has spread in recent years.)

Over the years, I’ve discussed the zombie genre with many of the key players; each of them was willing to share his insights.

“Zombies bring up the fear of becoming paranoid—having the ones you love turn up against you; and they bring up our fear of disease,” says James Gunn, screenwriter for the 2004 remake of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. There’s no other movie trope that works on so many levels ...”

Not so with the living dead. Except in a handful of zombie tales, the walking dead do not possess intellect or personality, and therefore all the writer has to do is establish that they are the threat. Once that’s done, the story focuses on the humans who are caught up in that threat, and from a storytelling perspective that’s a pretty deep fishing hole.

Stress warps personality, changes the dynamics of relationships, allows hidden personality traits to emerge, and makes every character go through that process of change that is key to all good fiction.

They allow the fiction writer to create and sustain suspense. They are a constant and pervasive threat. Blood and gore, however, is not absolutely required. We don’t need to see a zombie chow down on someone to grasp how horrible that is.

Well, start with a good story. The thing that’s so delicious about the genre is that editors, agents and readers are looking for good stories. Sure, they want zombies in them, but they want to read a piece of quality fiction. And previous involvement in the genre—or in any specific genre—doesn’t really matter. It’s like the growing young-adult market in that way: The storytelling has become more important than the writer’s previous track record—and new voices are always welcome.

Think about that: a growing and lucrative genre that not only accepts first-time authors, but can make stars out of them.

I broke into the genre with a nonfiction work, Zombie CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead. I wrote it as a guide to how forensic science works, and I wrapped the science around the premise: How would the real world react and respond to zombies?

I started doing zombie short stories, ranging from comedy to horror to a sensitive coming-of-age short story (“Family Business,” published in The New Dead). My agent used that story to land me the biggest deal (at the time) of my career for two zombie YA novels, Rot & Ruin and, a follow-up, Dust & Decay. Because of those books—and their zombie themes—Creative Artists Agency people scouted me and have now placed Rot & Ruin on the desks of some of the biggest producers in Hollywood.

• Zombie tales aren’t about zombies. If you focus on the monster, you’ll kill off your audience. Zombie tales are about people in crisis, so focus on them and their experience.
• Try the short-story market. In a market where anthology sales are generally soft, zombie anthologies have real life. Getting into one, even one of the lower-pay books, can quickly bring you to the attention of the fan base. St. Martin’s Griffin and Night Shade Books are established big-ticket markets; Permuted Press and Library of the Living Dead are small but have often helped launch writers into the genre mainstream.
  
• Read the genre. Don’t assume you know what is good fiction in this genre; go find out. Read the books I’ve mentioned, then go hunting for more. The diversity of theme, expression, quality and presentation is remarkable, and very encouraging to writers of all kind.

Go on. Bring a zombie to life.

The living dead first shambled into our culture in George Romero’s 1968 film classic, Night of the Living Dead. By the late 1970s, European filmmakers had saddled the “living dead” genre with the inaccurate but nonetheless memorable label of “zombies,” though they aren’t connected to the creatures related to the Vodoun beliefs of Haiti.

Films dominated zombie pop culture for years, most of them forgettably bad. There was very little in the way of zombie fiction until anthologists John Skipp and Craig Spector gathered together 18 new zombie tales for Book of the Dead in 1989. The anthology included a foreword by Romero and works by Stephen King, Robert R. McCammon, Joe R. Lansdale, Ramsey Campbell and other top horror writers. These weren’t throwaway stories, either. They were intelligent, insightful and beautifully crafted. It’s fair to say that zombie literature was born with that anthology.

In 1996 the video game Resident Evil was released for Sony PlayStation. It was a massive global hit, spawning countless sequels and kicking off the new Age of the Dead with a 2002 movie adaptation that was also a major hit. This not only presented zombies to a younger audience, but made them cool.

The same year saw the release of a quasi-zombie film, 28 Days Later, directed by Danny Boyle (who later helmed Slumdog Millionaire). This film introduced an important new twist: humans under the influence of a plague that turned them into mindless killing machines. This film was enormously successful, and was labeled a zombie film because it followed the same basic apocalyptic formula.

The growing popularity of films and video games led to the publishing of the humorous book The Zombie Survival Guide by former Saturday Night Live writer Max Brooks (son of Mel). What had been intended as a bit of fun became an international bestseller, burning through print runs like—well, an epidemic.

The following year, 2003, saw the release of the first major zombie novel, The Rising, by Brian Keene. The book flew off the shelves to become the most successful zombie-themed fiction to that point.

In 2004, Hollywood released two more hugely popular movies: Edgar Wright’s hilarious Shaun of the Dead and the big-budget remake of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (by Zack Snyder, whose later films included 300 and Watchmen). The coup de grâce came with the release in 2006 of Brooks’ novel World War Z. The book was a hardcover bestseller for more than a year, and then began a tireless run in paperback. It caused a bidding war for film rights between Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio (Pitt won).

After that, the reading public could not get enough of zombies. Zombie comics became red-hot, led by Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead (adapted for TV) and Marvel Zombies; collections of these have become staples of the bestseller lists.

Stephen King took a swing at the genre with Cell (a New York Times No. 1 bestseller), and Seth Grahame-Smith shoved zombies into classic literature with the runaway bestseller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies—which itself kicked off a subgenre of classics that are retold with horrific elements.

Ryan Brown had a hit with the sports-themed zombie novel Play Dead, and S.G. Browne gave us living-dead existential literature with Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament. New zombie anthologies such as The New Dead (edited by Christopher Golden) include excellent new stories by writers like historical-fiction author David Liss and paranormal-romance author Kelley Armstrong.

Even the young-adult market has had serious hits with Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth and Daniel Waters’ Generation Dead. Many more titles are on the way.

There is also zombie erotica, zombie science fiction, zombie Westerns, zombie Steampunk, and zombie just about everything else.