Headshot! The 5 best zombie books

It was the 90s and on a good morning Sundays they lived together strangely the zombies of the after parties with the early risers of first mass. And nothing happened, each one continued on their way as if they could not see each other (perhaps because religious people have no brain with which to awaken the hunger of the zombies…

Joking aside, the thing is that we all know that zombies usually attack. And you have everything to lose unless you point your rifle at their fucking head so that its blackish blood explodes into the air. And perhaps these days with a hint of viral apocalypse are represented to us to a greater extent as a self-fulfilling prophecy from this type of readings, but we must have hope in medicine, like Will Smith in I Am Legend...

So raw and so fascinating. Because around the shelter of the zombie phenomenon, cinema and literature have grown for the greater glory of a term that has come directly from the most gloomy Central African beliefs. Decipher what are the best zombie books Among so many options, it carries an undeniable subjective point, but it is also about that, to shuffle opinions.

Let's take a walk through the best books or sagas of those authors whose brains seem to have been eaten by some undead being. The typical zombie determined to spread like a virus for posterity, via the feverish imagination of the narrator on duty. The best zombie stories...

Top 5 recommended zombie books…

Cell by Stephen King

I know that many of you will think that there are many great novels and even series about zombies. But you will also recognize that everything that touches Stephen King, King Midas of the darkest imagination turns it into black gold for its ability to mimic us in its plots to the bone ...

1 October day: God is in heaven, the stock market is 10.140, ​​most flights arrive on time, and Clayton Riddell, an artist from Maine, almost leaps for joy down Boylston Street in Boston. He has just signed a contract to illustrate a comic that will allow him to support his family with his art instead of having to teach. He has already bought a gift for his long-suffering wife and is clear about what he is going to give his son Johnny. Why not also something for yourself?

Clay senses that things are going to be better, but everything is suddenly upset: a massive devastation occurs, caused by a phenomenon that will later be called El Pulso, which is reproduced through the mobile phone. Of all mobile phones. Clay, along with a few desperate survivors, is thrown into a dark age, surrounded by chaos, hecatomb and a mass of human degraded to its most primitive state. This fascinating, absorbing and cruel novel not only asks the question "Can you hear me?" It also answers, and in a very, very disturbing way.

World War Z by Max Brooks

Who was going to tell good old Mel Brooks, comedian par excellence, that his son Max He was going to devote himself to the cause of narrating the "life" and work of zombies. Something like having your son leave Barça and you being a preferred season ticket holder for Real Madrid.

Nothing better than giving a twist to the typical arguments to point to that marked difference, to that revolutionary vocation. Because much had been written about zombies since time immemorial and countless movies had been recorded. The point was to innovate. Any reader of this “novel” will transmit to you that feeling of restlessness that comes with facing something as gloomy as the existence of evil beings from the journalistic notion.

This is the chronicle of the disaster, the testimonies of the survivors, the reflection of what was left of us after the worst epidemic that devastated our civilization. The thing is that neither the fact of reflecting the impressions of the survivors in the past leaves room for the tranquility. Because for sure no one knows yet if there may be new waves from out there ...

We survived the zombie apocalypse, yet how many of us are still haunted by memories of these terrible times? We have defeated the undead, but at what cost? Is it just a temporary victory? Is the species still in danger of extinction? Told through the voices of those who witnessed the horror, World War Z It is the only document that exists about the pandemic that was about to end humanity.

Apocalypse Z, by Manel Loureiro

Nothing to envy Brooks. Because its powerfully magnetic scenery between morbid, suspense and panic, make the trilogy started with this novel a whole autonomous universe of the zombie conquest of our planet from what the Romans once considered, here it is understood, as the end of the world, No terrace plus ultra in other words, Galicia ...

Somewhere in the Caucasus, a group of rebels attack a military facility and accidentally release a disease that spreads unchecked throughout the planet. Those infected by the virus die, but only in appearance, since within a few hours they come back to life and attack people free of contagion, moved by an unknown and limitless aggressiveness.

The protagonist, a young lawyer who lives in a small town, watches the news drip in amazement until that mysterious plague reaches his door. From that moment on, his only objective will be to try to survive, crossing the territory that he used to know as Galicia, but which has now been transformed into hell on earth.

I'm legend

Without talking clearly about zombies, the matter does have that same whiff of dead meat and its scenography communes with the notion of the apocalyptic (by the way I was at the very door of the building where Will Smith was confined in half a movie). So Richar Matheson's novel also enters the zombie universe for me.

Beyond a great movie as entertainment but lacking in all the development of the novel, the novel gives us much more. Because the truth is that reading the life and work of Robert Neville, the last survivor of the bacteriological catastrophe that made our civilization a mixed world of zombies and vampires, is much more disturbing when read than when viewed adapted.

The siege to which Robert is subjected night after night, his outings to that world turned into a sinister version of what it was, the confrontations to life and death, the risks and the final hope ... a book that you cannot stop reading.

Zone One, by Colson Whitehead

A good way for a zombie plot to stand out among many others is, as on many occasions, to contribute something different, to escape the typical infection - battle - extreme solution format.

In the case of this book Zone One you get that point of terror with which to season the plot with that chill of fear. But also, in the reading surprises, mysteries, twists are predicted. A kind of black premonition accompanies us as we move through Manhattan with Mark Spitz and his brigade.

In extreme cases, the value of life is very relative. It all depends on whether you are infected or not. What it is about is to eradicate the evil that yearns to take over the entire species with the blow of bacteria. So far the typical thing in these stories of infections and the living dead.

Zone One is the epicenter, the defensive bulwark of evil, the mother cell of the pandemic protected by its zombies like stubborn ants. What can be hidden there is something that Spitz and his people could never have imagined.

And that is where the story surprises and fascinates, where you are grateful for having immersed yourself in one more zombie story that becomes a unique zombie story. The breaking point with so many previous novels and films has to do with a kind of double visualization of history.

What happens on the streets of Manhattan and what the zombies, turned into symbols, can come to mean in a consumer society and largely deformed on principles and reality. It may sound transcendent, but there is something of this sociological approach between the living dead and those who are in charge of making it disappear ...