Zombie CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead
Paperback
Written by Jonathan Maberry
Citadel Press
Release date: September 1, 2008

It’s a good time to be a zombie, or at least a lover of all things zombie-related. Max Brooks recently had two best sellers about the undead hordes, The Zombie Survival Guide (a sort of “worst case scenario” book for dealing with the ghoulish undead) and World War Z (an oral history of the coming war against the zombie hordes.) Call To Duty: World At War had a special game play mode after the credits rolled, where suddenly you have to fight your way through hordes of carnivorous Nazi undead in order to extend your miserable life. Zombies from the Third Reich also appear in Dead Snow, a selection at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival in which a group of Scandinavian kids who accidentally awaken Wehrmacht and SS zombie hordes in the Nordic snow. We will even soon be treated to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a classic Regency zombie romance re-write of a Jane Austen classic by Seth Grahame-Smith.

To all this zombie gold, we must add Zombie CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead by Jonathan Maberry. Taking something of an opposite tack from Max Brooks’ work, Maberry starts by asking “What would a real zombie outbreak look like?” and then goes to find answers from real pathologists and criminologists who are interested in the subject. Along the way, he provides frequent little detours into zombie-related subjects like the roots of the modern zombie phenomenon, lists of key zombie films, differences between zombie film genres, the zombie in art and illustration, and quotes from fellow zombie-philes in the arts and sciences.