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Book of the Dead edited by John Skipp & Craig Spector
Book of the Dead Review by John Reppion
Edited by John Skipp & Craig Spector
Published by Mark V. Ziesing, 1989.
Hardcover: 334 pages / paperback: unknown
Right from the start Book of the Dead’s credentials are impressive.
Published in 1989, the anthology boasts a foreword from George A. Romero
and features sixteen short stories, supposedly set in the aftermath of
the same zombie plague seen in his original Dead trilogy (although it’s
debatable whether anyone actually stuck to that brief properly). With
authors such as Steven King, Joe R, Lansdale, Ramsey Campbell and Richard
Laymon contributing tales, this is an A-list affair, especially given
that many of the featured writers were at the peak of their popularity
at the time the book was first published.
Following Romero’s foreword, Skipp & Spector’s introduction
entitled “On Going Too Far” sets the agenda for the book and
it’s a schema enchantingly rooted in its era of origin. Talking
about Tipper Gore’s crusade against violence in film, desensitization
at the hands of video nasties, “an era of serial killers, Khmer
Rouge, drive-by shooters and day-care rapists, hijackings and knee-cappings,
death squads and body dumps”, it’s like a rough cut flashback
to the nihilistic nineteen-eighties, recorded on fourth generation pirate
VHS tape. It’s a trip down memory lane to the bad old days when
mutually assured destruction had many dreaming of a nuclear winter rather
than a white Christmas, Mrs. Thatcher and Cowboy Ronnie sending out cards
from their private underground bunkers. Truth be told, watching a Police
Academy marathon, listening to Culture Club on a Sony Walkman, wearing
roller boots, a Mr. T t-shirt and Deelie-Boppers whilst trying to solve
a Rubik’s Cube and drinking Cherry Coke could not even come close
to being as authentically eighties as this intro is. But alas, the fact
that Book of the Dead was so culturally spot on when it was first published
actually meant that some parts of the collection didn’t quite work
for me as a reader nearly twenty years later.
Anthologies by their very nature are a mixed bag and Book of the Dead
is no exception. There are some really enjoyable tales in the book: Steven
King’s Home Delivery, a gloriously gory EC comic book in short story
form, somehow packs more plot into twenty seven pages than many people
(King included) usually manage to squeeze into a hundred. Joe R. Lansdale’s
On The Far Side Of The Cadillac Desert With Dead Folks is a true to form
bad taste B-Movie romp effortlessly executed. Ramsey Campbell’s
It Helps If You Sing, the only story set in Britain so far as I can make
out, is a vision of a claustrophobic, grey-concreted place, and brought
to mind Anthony Burgess’s vision of a near future Albion from A
Clockwork Orange. Campbell goes for discomfort and creeping menace, perhaps
deliberately avoiding the no holds barred splatter which drips off the
surrounding pages and I think it really pays off.
Then there are the bad parts and these are more general, more to do with
the book as a whole and the way things sort of add up from story to story.
I’m a little freaked out to realise that I really haven’t
read much modern horror; I’m just getting into Joe Hill and I enjoy
Max Brooks’ writing, of course, but there’s not really anyone
writing horror at the moment whose books I feel I have to get hold of
as soon as they appear. When I was first getting into horror in the early
nineties James Herbert was the author whose work I was truly hungry for
and raced through as fast as I could. Returning to his work years later
I was actually quite shocked and disappointed by some of the material
in there, especially when it came to sex. Book of the Dead suffers from
the same problem; it’s gratuitously littered with sex and rape for
no real reason that I can make out. Of the sixteen stories in the book
more than half of them feature the loss of at least one penis, which is
both tragic and hilarious; these ‘masters of horror’ being
asked to contribute to an anthology and all handing in stories that feature
what is obviously the worse thing they can imagine. “Ah man, imagine
if you lost your dick! That would suck!” The general attitude to
women is pretty dodgy for the most part too but the thing that bugged
me the most was the sense of apathy that pervades much of the book. Douglas
E. Winter’s Less Than Zombie, supposedly a parody of Brett Easton
Ellis’ 1985 novel Less Than Zero but which reads more like a mere
appropriation of Ellis’ style with a zombie or two (barely) crow-barred
in, is perhaps the worst offender. There’s this underlying sense
that the zombie plague is an inevitable thing; just another fucked up
part of fucked up life in the fucked up eighties. Culturally and historically
interesting though that may be, in terms of horror storytelling it often
doesn’t really work. For me, there needs to be an ‘us’
and a ‘them’, even if those roles are swapped and re-swapped
during the course of a story. Once an author starts saying “does
any of it really matter?” and there’s no one in the story
prepared to stand up and say “yes”, the whole thing becomes
rather futile. Is there any point in reading a horror story where you’re
not supposed to care who lives and who dies? Sometimes maybe, but you’d
have to be a masterful author to pull it off.
All of that said, I really enjoyed the book generally. A real stand out
story for me was Choices by Glen Vasey, whose work I have never encountered
before. It’s an intelligent, thoughtful piece telling the tale of
a traumatised traveller, forever alone even when his journey brings him
into contact with others. Choices manages to capture the right atmosphere
and achieve a real sense of balance; lots of humanity, lots of pathos
but still plenty of horror and action. Overall, Book of the Dead is a
very enjoyable and important anthology, though you may have to take certain
stories with a pinch of salt. Certainly it is well worth tracking down
if you haven’t done so already and the paperback edition is still
pretty easy to get hold of.