Nights of the Living Dead: An Anthology
Paperback | Digital Book | Audio CD
Edited by Jonathan Maberry & George A. Romero
St. Martin’s Griffin
Release Date: July 11th, 2017

In 1968, a horror movie from director George A. Romero came out called Night of the Living Dead. Nearly 50 years later, zombie horror is “alive” and well, with hit shows like The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead based on Robert Kirkman’s comic book series. Over the past decade, we’ve seen a renaissance of zombie fiction in all forms of entertainment, from comics to novels like World War Z (Max Brooks) and Pride & Prejudice & Zombies (Seth Grahame-Smith) to TV and film. Zombie even manage to cross over into other genres. The TV series iZombie takes the flesh eaters into the world of police forensics and the underground “brain trade.” Movies like Warm Bodies (2013) showed zombies can be romantic and of course Shaun of the Dead (2004) proved they can be the butt of jokes.

Though, there was a time when zombies were not the “it” thing in horror, but back in 1989, an undead anthology called Book of the Dead (edited by John Skipp & Craig Spector) made zombie literature cool again. Nights of the Living Dead is a collection of original zombie short stories all based in the world Romero built. What’s really interesting is reading the introductions by Romero himself and co-editor, author, and unabashed Romero fanboy, Jonathan Maberry.

The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor
Hardcover | Kindle
By Robert Kirkman & Jay Bonansinga
Hardcover
St. Martin’s Press
Release Date: October 11, 2011

In The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor, the reader gets a previously untold back story on one of the greatest villains from the Walking Dead universe: The Governor. In this first of three prequel novels from St Martin’s Press, fans of the Walking Dead comics and television show get a treat and learn about the origins of The Governor and how he became the vicious psychopath that we meet later in the comic book series.

I’ve been a fan of the Walking Dead for a very long time. When a new issue of the comic is released, it’s the first thing I read on my weekly stack of comics. When St. Martin’s Press announced that they were releasing a trilogy of prequel novels, I was excited and hesitant at the same time. I wanted the novels to have the same level of excitement as the comic series and the television series.

The Walking Dead started out as a comic book series, and will soon see life as a TV series on AMC, and now it will set out to conquer another format as a series of prose novels, set to release sometime next year. As reported by Deadline, Robert Kirkman’s story about life after the zombie apocalypse will get three novels published by St. Martins Press’s Thomas Dunne books.

The three books will be based on ideas and an outline from Kirkman, with horror novelist Jay Bonansinga writing the actual texts. Bonansinga has several novels to his credit already, and looking at the description of the books (Perfect Victim, Twisted and Shattered) he seems to be a writer whose style will fit well with Kirkman’s own style. Deadline says that the story will take place in the Walking Dead “universe,” so I’m not sure if it will feature Rick Grimes and the rest of the cast of the comic book series, or if Bonansinga will create his own characters and keep them separate from the main cast.