The 10 Best Zombie Books

Forget the Brad Pitt movie going into World War Z: An Oral History (around $9). Told in a diary-style narrative, it recounts a long and costly fight against the undead from the first-person accounts of those who survived the apocalypse. It may not be high art, but it's tons of fun.

If you're interested in deep reflections on the nature of humanity, then The Girl With All The Gifts (about $7) should be perfect. It's a tale about an undead girl who forms a strong bond with one of the living, rendering her an outcast among both the animated and the reanimated.

Fans of the show will love The Walking Dead: Compendium One (around $27), but it's great, gory entertainment even if you've never seen the TV series. Covering the first 48 issues of the comic, it offers artwork that's both brutal and beautiful — over 1,000 pages of it, in fact.

While the living dead are obsessed with brains, sometimes it feels good to turn yours off, and Extinction Horizon (about $10) can help with its mindless fun. The action is constant and unrelenting, so don't start it at bedtime (unless you want to be a zombie at work, that is).

Patient Zero (appx. $6) starts with Detective Joe Ledger killing a terrorist. Then he has to kill that same terrorist again. By this point, he's beginning to think something may be amiss, and the novel never stops throwing curveballs at both him and the reader.

You might think using an undead narrator would be a bad idea, but Zombie, Ohio (appx. $22) proves you wrong on every page. Following the adventures of a recently-reanimated college professor, it charts his transformation while he examines the circumstances surrounding his death.

Raising Stony Mayhall (about $9) follows a young boy who's quite different from other kids his age. A loving family gets him to adolescence, but the little corpse soon finds out that the rest of the world isn't so hospitable, and that his fellow undead might be the most human of all.

Fans of the author will enjoy Stephen King's Cell (about $18), the deftly told story of an undead future delivered via mobile phone. It isn't quite as long-winded and richly detailed as some of his works, but impatient readers may still find that it moves a bit on the slow side.

A zombie book by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author? Zone One (around $30) is post-apocalyptic high literature, and possibly the most polarizing selection on this list. It's masterfully crafted, but may be too slow-paced and introspective for hardcore fans of the genre.

Newsflesh: Feed (about $6) involves a world that has cured cancer, but also inadvertently unleashed a plague of walking corpses. Two intrepid reporters attempt to reveal the conspiracy behind the apocalypse, and they manage to have lots of campy, bloodcurdling fun along the way.