Zombies II: Inhuman

Introduction

A lot of people ask me why I write zombie stories. The simple truth is that I am a zombie fan. From the moment I first watched Dawn of the Dead, I was hooked on the zombie genre of horror. I don’t care that many feel zombie tales are cliché. I have never cared that zombie tales are often more difficult to sale than straight horror stories. When other authors ask me if I am worried about being labeled as and known only as a zombie writer, I just smile.

Writing for me isn’t about money or fame. It’s about fun and the walking, flesh-eating dead. Aside from my family, zombies and comic books are my life. I devour every zombie film and book I can get my hands on and yet my wife still lets me live in the same house as her. She’s very supportive of my career and my addiction as long as my zombies never leave my study.

After writing zombie tales for a bit over five years, I started thinking about combining my two hobbies: Superheroes and the Undead. Pretty much any zombie tale worthy of being called one is about the end of the world and the extinction of the human race. In a world where the dead walk is it therefore so unlikely that God or nature or merely evolution would grant a select few the power to survive to carry on the species? That’s the concept behind several of the tales in this collection. “Evolution like Lightning” attempts to quickly answer the question of how normal survivors of an undead plague would respond to super-humans suddenly appearing among them while the tale “Ghost” is actually the origin story of one of the characters from the title tale “Inhuman.”

“Inhuman” itself attempts to take a look at what life could be like for meta-humans who can read thoughts, bend steel with their bare hands, or channel electricity as a weapon in a world where every day is a fight to stay alive. And if super-humans aren’t your thing, well, this book contains zombies in the old west, some very hungry animals, intergalactic zombies used as weapons of war, and traditional zombie tales too. So dear reader, I hope you enjoy reading these tales as much I did writing them and that you remain a fan of the dead. I know I will be a fan of all things zombie for the rest of my days and nothing will ever change that.