Steve Berman's Lair
Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages
It’s a wonder humanity ever survived into the twenty-first century. Even Neanderthals knew to bury the dead beneath stones to prevent corpses from rising. Ancient civilizations feared slain warriors would return from battlefields, medieval physicians worried that bodies would rise from plague pits, many cultures buried the dead at crossroads to prevent the dead from walking. In Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages, I have collected stories that reveal the threat of revenants and the living dead is far from recent. From the Bronze Age to World War II, this anthology guides us through millennia of thrills, chills, kills, carnage, horror, and havoc wreaked throughout history by the walking dead.
Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages
And here’s the table of contents:
Before Lazarus“Blood Marker” by Victoria Janssen
“Selected Sources for the Babylonian Plague of the Dead (572-571 BCE)” by Alex Dally MacFarlane
“Immortals” by Nathan Southard
“The Cost of Moving the Dead” by E. L. Kemper
“Hauntings and Hungers on the Banks of the Vipasa” by Rajan KhannAfter Lazarus
Antiquity
“A Frenzy of Ravens” by Christopher M. Cevasco
“The Wedding of Osiris” by Adam MorrowThe Middle Ages
“The Hyena’s Blessing” by Alex Jeffers
“The Good Shepherdess” by S. J. Chambers
“The Fledglings of Time” by Carrie Laben16th and 17th Centuries
“Hung from a Hairy Tree” by Samantha Henderson
“Good Deaths” by Paul Berger
“Dead Reckoning” by Elaine Pascale
“Grit in a Diseased Eye” by Lee Thomas
“Theater is Dead” by Raoul Wainscoting18th Century
“Deathless” by Ed Kurtz
“Tantivy” by Molly Tanzer
“Cinereous” by Livia Llewellyn19th Century
“The Wailing Hills” by L. Lark
“As the Crow Flies” by Rita Oakes
“Seneca Falls: First Recorded Outbreak of Strain Z” by Dayna Ingram
“Pegleg and Paddy Save the World” by Jonathan Maberry
“Dead in the Water” by Richard Larson
“Starvation Army” by Joe McKinney
“Lonegan’s Luck” by Stephen Graham Jones
“The Rickshaw Pusher ” by Mercurio D. Rivera
“The Revenge of Oscar Wilde” by Sean EadsEarly 20th Century
“The Gringo” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
“The End of the Caroll A. Deering” by Bob Hole
“Tell Me Like You Done Before” by Scott Edelman
“Promised Land (Wineville 1928)” by Richard E. Gropp
“The Fated Sky” by Aimee Payne
“The Crocodiles” by Steven PopkesThe Suspected Deaths of Henry Every
Henry Every, the "King of Pirates," used many aliases in his storied career in the late 17th century. It is strange that, for such an infamous figure, no reports describe his final days.
But the truth is stranger than fiction.
Every was the most notorious pirate of his time; he earned his infamy by becoming one of the few major pirate captains to retire with his loot without being arrested or killed in battle, and also for being the perpetrator of what has been called the most profitable pirate raid in history. He plundered a Mughal ship, the Ganj-i-sawai.
So the Mughals were famous for sending ghul assassins...Or perhaps the common pirate practice of burying a crewman with a chest of treasure went awry...
Or an old friend might be to blame...
