Weird Tales Books-Stories of the Walking Dead-Part One

If you want to build a zombographical library, you might start with a hardbound collection from 1986 called Stories of the Walking Dead. Edited by Peter Haining, it includes many seminal stories and articles on zombies. Almost all are of the Seabrook-type zombie, the version that has come down to us as one of the walking corporeal dead. (As you'll remember, the original zombi is a spirit.) First the contents, then, beginning in part two, the stories and their authors. Two of these stories first appeared in Weird Tales.

Art by Nigel Hills.

Stories of the Walking Dead edited by Peter Haining (London, UK: Severn House Publishers, 1986) 224 pp.; also called Zombie! Stories of the Walking Dead

• Introduction by Peter Haining
• "Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields" by W.B. Seabrook (Originally in newspaper syndication, Mar. 1928; subsequently in The Magic Island, 1929)
• "Salt Is Not for Slaves" by G.W. Hutter (Ghost Stories, Aug. 1931)
• "The Country of the Comers-Back" by Lafcadio Hearn (Harper's New Monthly Magazine, ca. 1888-1890; reprinted as "La Guiablesse" in Two Years in the French West Indies, 1890)
• "Jumbee" by Henry S. Whitehead (Weird Tales, Sept. 1926; reprinted Feb. 1938)
• "White Zombie" by Vivian Meik (Devil's Drums by Vivian Meik, 1933)
• "I Walked with a Zombie" by Inez Wallace (The American Weekly, May 3, 1942)
• "American Zombie" by Dr. Gordon Leigh Bromley (From an unknown magazine, possibly Occult Review, ca. 1936?)
• "While Zombies Walked" by Thorp McCluskey (Weird Tales, Sept. 1939)
• "The House in the Magnolias" by August Derleth (Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, June 1932)
• "The Zombie of Alto Parana" by W. Stanley Moss (London Mystery #6, 1950; reprinted in A Book of Strange Stories, 1954)
• "Ballet Nègre" by Charles Birkin (The Smell of Evil, 1964)
• "The Hollow Man" by Thomas Burke (The Evening Standard Book of Strange Stories, 1934)

To be continued . . .

Text copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley