What Will Come After, my Stoker Award-nominated collection of zombie short stories which PS Publishing put out in 2010, is currently available only as an ebook, so if you’re the kind of reader who prefers dead trees to pixels, you’re out of luck. Sadly, the hardcover’s been out of print for a few years.

But that’s about to change.

The latest PS Publishing email newsletter, which mentioned my recent zombification on an episode of Z Nation, took me by surprise with an announcement my collection will soon be out in paperback.

I knew such an edition might be in the offing, but until now, I wasn’t sure.

So for those with an aversion to ebooks … watch out! What Will Come After will be shambling your way soon …

Over at the Night Land Journal, my short story “What Will Come After” was praised as the result of its recent reprinting in Stephen Jones’ latest best horror of the year anthology:

One of the most unusual zombie stories I’ve ever read is Scott Edelman’s “What Will Come After,” which I just read as the lead story in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #22 …

“What Will Come After” got under my skin and into my blood faster than any zombie virus ever could. It’s a live human and undead zombie story all mixed together. Actually, it’s more of a meditation on inevitability than anything else. I found it both frail and strong at the same time—all very affective and certainly unforgettable.

If you can’t find a copy of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #22, you can always catch up with the story in my all-zombie collection of the same name, either in a print edition or as an ebook.

The review is credited only to “DC5,” so I don’t know quite whom to thank, so whoever you are, all I can say is—you’ve got … BRAINZ!

I’ve been so busy recently—what with work, overnight visitors in our home nine of the past ten nights, and three barbecues in eight days—that I haven’t really had time to think about the fact that on Sunday at Readercon, I’ll get to see Laird Barron, Stephen Graham Jones, Jeff VanderMeer, or Karen Joy Fowler get stoned during the Shirley Jackson Awards ceremony for having written the Best Single-Author Collection of 2010. (As you can tell, I’m not terribly optimistic about my chances of winning for What Will Come After.)

But today I won something that reminded me of what’s coming up while at the same time putting it all in perspective—I won a reader. And a wildly enthusiastic reader at that, who wrote, not just a review, but a lengthy “unbarred squeeing session.”

Over on her blog, teenybuffalo had this to say, among other things:

I bought the book because I’d enjoyed one of his stories, “The Last Supper”, in a horror anthology I found at Arisia. It’s about the end of the zombie apocalypse. Edelman manages the difficult trick of being gentle and crushingly sad while writing a viewpoint character who has about one thought and two emotions. Chalk up another story for my small set of favorite zombie protagonists. It was enough to get me to buy his collection—all zombies, all the time. Nine pieces, all good, some brilliant. Of the stories, I’d select the title piece and “Live People Don’t Understand” as standouts. …

… as the introduction is keen to point out, Edelman was writing literary zombie mashups long before Pride and Prejudice and Zombies hit the shelves. I’d add that everything in the collection is a heck of a lot better-written and wittier than P&P&Z. Well, comparisons are odorous. These are damn fine stories.

And if you’d like to check out those “damn fine stories” for yourself, remember—now that PS Publishing has put out my collection as an ebook, you can be reading them in minutes. Here’s how.

I’d heard that my short story collection What Will Come After was going to be released as an ebook for those who prefer their zombies pixelated. But I don’t think I knew that Pete Crowther of PS Publishing had actually pulled it off until a number of people at Ad Astra last weekend told me they’d purchased it for their Kindles.

And it wasn’t until after Robert Shearman’s reading Sunday that I had proof.

Robert, who when we first met on Friday had told me he’d already bought an e-copy of the book, whipped out his Kindle and showed me what the book looked like on his screen.

I think that looks rather nice, don’t you? And if you’d like it looking rather nice on your own e-reader, you can order it from PS Publishing here.

In other electronic news, StarShipSofa 184 features a podcast of my story “A Very Private Tour of A Very Public Museum.” I think Jeff Lane has done an excellent performance of the piece, far better than I did myself the one time I read it aloud at Readercon. So if you’d like to hear one of my stories rather than have to read it, you know what to do.

What Will Come After, my zombie collection from PS Publishing, was just reviewed by Publishers Weekly, and the anonymous reviewer absolutely hated, hated, hated the book, as can see below.

I don’t present it here to argue with the opinion—those of you who attended my presentation “How to Respond to a Critique of Your Writing” at the Montreal Worldcon know I believe a writer should never do that, because after all, there’s no such thing as bad publicity—but rather in the interests of full disclosure.

After all, if I share my glowing reviews, shouldn’t I also let you know when I get slammed?

In any case, here’s PW‘s verdict:

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.

Luckily, even if I didn’t find negative reviews as interesting as positive ones, the piece appears when my spirit is at its most impervious, because I head for the airport later today for the World Horror Convention in Brighton, where I’ll a) get to hold the final book in my hands for the first time, and b) possibly win a Stoker Award.

How can anyone possibly be down when facing that?