An anthology of 15 short stories, EYE WITNESS ZOMBIE offers a surprisingly strong variety of first-hand accounts of the zombie apocalypse. This is May December Publications’ first undead omnibus, edited by TW Brown (pictured); after devouring it, readers will be hungry for more.

EYE WITNESS ZOMBIE is not about big-name writers—it’s about well-written horror fiction. With a few exceptions, the short stories in this collection are engaging, nervewracking and delightfully scary. With a nice variety of tones ranging from the campy and funny to the ultra realistic, the element stringing the stories together is the first-person perspective, which helps to create an almost cinematic experience without the filter of a removed narrator. The tales are told from the points of view of a variety of characters: a hillbilly husband, a military man, the star of a children’s TV program, various journalists, a teenaged girl, a psychiatric patient…average people.

Among the standout stories are “A Soldier’s Lament,” “Childish Things” and “Dredge.” “Lament,” by Patrick D’Orazio, is about a soldier on a rescue mission in the midst of an undead crisis. He and his squad enter an apartment building to retrieve the daughter of a military higher-up; things go horribly wrong for the team, and even worse for our hero. William Wood’s “Childish Things” is told from the perspective of a man who works as a talking whale on a children’s show—and becomes trapped in the suit he needs assistance getting in and out of when some of his co-workers turn into ghouls. “Dredge,” by Nikki Sedlock, follows a lonely man as he encounters and then accepts the reality of zombies and makes his way to his fallback refuge of choice: Walmart. He experiences significant loss and wonders why he continues to live at all when there is no one left.

Cumulatively, the works in EYE WITNESS ZOMBIE accomplish what should be the goals of any good undead story: exploring human behavior under extreme duress; forcing readers to ask themselves how they would react to similar situations; and inspiring dreams of armageddon.

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