SLEAZE FEATURE: 'ZOMBIE ZOOLOGY' (2010)

Thanks to one of my hooligan friends who brought a grossly age-inappropriate book to 3rd Grade lunch back in 1980, I've been obsessed with zombie fiction.

THE SOURCE OF TWO-DECADES-PLUS-WORTH OF LITERAL NIGHTMARES.

Thing is, aside from the above and novelizations of Night Of The Living Dead and Dawn Of The Dead, there wasn't any zombie fiction.  It simply didn't exist.

At least not until 1989, that is, when Skipp and Spector exploded my brain and helped get the nightmares out of my head.

Note the misprinted "R." initial...should be an "A."!

Therapy resumed in 1992.

Then came The Internet, and the late '90s (1997?  '98?) brought Homepage Of The Dead, where I read each and every story (even the garbage) as they went up.

And in the decade-and-a-half that followed, hundreds of zombooks hit the stands...and thousands more [of generally terrible, Terrible, TERRIBLE offerings] arose from the vanity presses.

I'm a certified zombologist.  I know my stuff.

I'm also bored to tears with said stuff.

So it's always neat to find something unique, and Zombie Zoology fits the bill.  Aside from zombie dogs in vidya games, animal-based undead mayhem isn't all that common in media; Brian Keene has probably done the most with it, in his The Rising franchise, and Dead Sea.

Kill, Ubu.  Kill!

The Zombie Zoology moan-agerie features monstrous primates, panthers, moose, bugs (zombugs!), hounds, birds (zombirds!), sheep, and horses, with the full spectrum of origins mysterious, magical, and scientific.

Of the twelve tales within, Tim Curran's Monkey House is the goopiest, Anthony Wedd's The Roo is the most heebie-jeebie-ing, Carl Barker's Why The Wild Things Are is the most heart-tuggy, William Wood's Loss Of Vector is the most steal-this-idea-for-a-game-ful, and Wayne Goodchild's One Man And His Dog is the the-world-is-totally-fucked-est.

And while Hayden Williams' The Rising [seriously?] is satisfying, I wished more had been done with the concept.  More fossil-things > less fossil-things.  That's just science.

The true duds are Eric Dimbleby's Lucy and Anthony Giangregorio's Dead Dog Tired, because the leads are cartoonishly, obnoxiously awful and ever-so-deserving of their climactic comeuppances. Slogs to read.

The grammatical errors are kept to a minimum (I counted about five), which is a godsdamned miracle in this era of anyone-can-publish-anything.  Severed Press did much, much better than the norm here...but it's weird there's no editor credited for the collection.  None at all.

Human zombies show up in trace amounts.  Zombie Zoology truly showcases the critters, and lives up to its title.

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Most Hilariously Disgusting Evocative Line In The Collection:  "Emma pulled herself away, wet and stinking with the male's drainage."

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RPG Relevance:  In addition to beasties o'plenty to stock your Planet Motherfucker world, there's devil worship and voodoo swamp-billies and lost monkey astronauts and mutagenic viruses and grody worms and revived prehistoric thangs and mutant roaches.  Good, good stuff for the tabletop.

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Final Review Score:  3 Full Moon Fevers out of 5.