Another day, another killer review of my PS Publishing zombie collection What Will Come After.

This latest one is written by the Adam-Troy Castro, whose own zombie tale “Dead Like Me” is a must-read, and appears in the June 2010 issue of SCI FI magazine.

(Full disclosure for those who worry about such things: Adam wrote the introduction for my last horror collection, the 2001 These Words Are Haunted, while I wrote the introduction for Castro’s 2002 collection Vossoff and Nimmitz: Just a Couple of Idiots Reupholstering Space and Time. Take that as logrolling if you will, but I prefer to think of it as two guys who really, really like each other’s writing. Birds of a feather, and all that.)

Here’s what he had to say in a review that gave the book a grade of A:

Zombies are not renowned for their individuality. Once transformed, they become part of the same vast shambling horde, with little in the way of an agenda beyond chowing down on any living people in their vicinity.

But authors of zombie stories are of course a different matter entirely, and so the subgenre that sometimes seems unable to offer much more than endless variations on the trope of intrepid zombie-killers finding a way to put one in the brain, proves richer and deeper and even more emotionally effective in the hands of storytellers who take the trope’s seeming limitations as a personal challenge. Witness Scott Edelman, who here seems to say, “Okay. They shamble. They eat flesh. They’re not too pleasant to the nose. That’s a given, and that’s frankly old news. Want to see what else I’ve got?”

In case you’re wondering, this is what else he’s got. Three of the stories are splendid literary mash-ups. “Live People Don’t Understand” is a riff on Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, in which the deceased Emily learns terrible things about her husband George and rises from her grave to confront him. “Tell Me Like You Done Before” offers similar treatment to John Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men, following the ending where Lenny dies at George’s hands; George wanders the ranches of Salinas, evading the unliving embodiment of guilt for his terrible crime.

The most unlikely tour-de-force, and also possibly the best story in the collection, is a feat few horror authors could even attempt far less pull off: an actual, complete Shakespearean play, the Stoker nominee “A Plague On Both Your Houses,” which puckishly applies the approximate plot of Romeo and Juliet to a star-crossed romance between a living boy and zombie girl. That one’s worth the cover price all by itself.

Beyond that, Edelman also offers “The Man He Had Before,” a coming-of-age story about a teen who has grown up during the zombie apocalypse and rebels against the harsh survival lessons he’s been taught by his remote and abusive father. Some of the kid’s coping mechanisms establish that life in a world overrun by the living dead is not exactly a tonic for mental health. “The Human Race” is the powerful tale of a deeply depressed woman whose father and sister have just been killed in a London suicide bombing; her own despair and yearning for death take on an entirely new meaning when the zombie uprising suddenly changes the definitions of life and death. Then there’s “The Last Supper,” a fantasia on just what future the zombies face, when all the humans are dead and there’s nobody left to eat; it’s deeper and richer and more cosmically tragic than you would expect any story about bereft ghouls to be.

By comparison, “Goobers” is a slapstick romp. It’s the tale of a theatre projectionist whose auditorium offers a nonstop diet of zombie movies—his lonely tale of survival enters the realm of metafiction as the zombies prove an eager if somewhat unruly audience. The Stoker nominee “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man,” is almost as different from that one as another story can be: it’s a dense reflection on the art of storytelling: a writer barricaded in a library deals with the last days by penning zombie tales as dark as his own predicament.

And finally, there’s “What Will Come After,” original to this volume, which functions as Scott Edelman’s zombie self-portrait. Transformed into one of the undead, he shuffles across the state of West Virginia, inexorably drawn to the Maryland home where his wife has gone into hiding. Edelman doesn’t shy away from an encounter with his actual son, or from what happens when he and his wife finally meet face-to-rotting-face. This is also more than most writers would have dared, and it functions not just as a elegiac horror story but also—in a deeply perverse manner—as his testament to the strength of the bond between the author and his family.

What Will Come After will not be an easy volume to find. Its small print run and premium cover price will leave it beyond the reach of casual readers. But those moved to seek it out will find a deeply worthwhile collection by one of dark fiction’s most versatile authors.

If these words should happen to tantalize you, Pete Crowther of PS Publishing will happy employ government agents to deliver one right to your door.