What Will Come After

During the three decades Scott Edelman has dedicated himself to the short story, his fiction has been called "darkly hopeful," "deep, disturbing, and emotionally draining," and "unnerving work that peers into the darkest corner of the human soul and makes one fear what lurks at the bottom of that abyss -- but also makes it impossible to look away." In these nine tales, you'll also discover that long before the current craze of mashing up mindless shamblers with the literary classics, Edelman was remixing zombies with "Romeo and Juliet," "Our Town," and other famous fictional worlds. In the Stoker Award finalist "A Plague on Both Your Houses," you'll visit a post-apocalyptic Manhattan that reads like a fever dream created by George Romero collaborating with William Shakespeare, in which the living son of the mayor of New York City falls in love with the daughter of the zombie king. In "Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man," another Stoker nominee, you'll lock yourself in a library as a writer struggles to keep his sanity by making sense of the zombie uprising the only way he knows how. And in "What Will Come After," original to this volume, you'll learn what happens to Scott Edelman himself when he faces his own inevitable end. Gathering his complete zombie fiction to date, Almost the Last Stories proves that the undead can be more than just rampaging braineaters -- though you'll find plenty of gory gorging in these pages as well -- but also a lens through which we can see that the living and the living dead are not so very different after all.

From Publishers Weekly

SF news industry veteran Edelman collects nine zombie-themed short stories, but the content falls short of its promise. Les Edwards's cover illustration, which depicts the author as one of the undead, hints at Edelman's fondness for self-insertion; alas, the title story, in which he narrates his own rise from the grave and rampage through suburbia, goes on rather longer than the thousand words that might match the picture. Even the Stoker-nominated A Plague on Both Your Houses and Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man fall a little flat. Edelman's prose is strong, but each story, regardless of perspective, seems to have been written in the same voice, creating a monotony that undermines any excitement. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Sf veteran Edelman is no stranger to the horror mash-up trend currently sweeping the publishing world. In fact, this collection of his zombie stories proves that he's been giving the undead treatment to classic tales from as early as 1992. “A Plague on Both Your Houses,” his take on Romeo and Juliet, is a tragedy written as a five-act play, in which the son of the mayor of New York falls madly in love with the daughter of a zombie king. “What Will Come After,” a first-person account of life as a zombie, proves unexpectedly warm. In “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man,” a writer seeks shelter in a library that is under siege by a zombie horde and attempts to comprehend what is happening to the outside world. While Edelman's style isn't exactly uplifting—the tales collected here are chock-full of sadness and despair—there is plenty here for diehard zombie fans to love. Such as, of course, ample gouts of gore. --Carlos Orellana

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