by Matt Cardin
The malleability of the zombie and the continued popularity of its use as a figure of social critique ensures that the zombie will continue to function in narratives that explore the sociopolitical concerns of contemporary humanity.
Kelly Gardner
See also: Ajvide Lindqvist, John; Frankenstein; I Am Legend; Keene, Brian.
Further Reading
Bishop, Kyle William. 2010. American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Browning, John Edgar. 2010. “Survival Horrors, Survival Spaces: Tracing the Modern Zombie (cine)myth.” Horror Studies 2, no. 1: 41–59.
Christie, Deborah, and Sarah Lauro Juliet, eds. 2011. Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human. New York: Fordham University Press.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2015. Zombies: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion Books.
Select Bibliography
Backer, Ron. 2015. Classic Horror Films and the Literature That Inspired Them. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Barron, Neil. 1990. Horror Literature: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Garland.
Birkhead, Edith. 1921. The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance. London: Constable.
Bleiler, E. F. 1983. The Guide to Supernatural Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.
Bleiler, E. F., ed. 1985. Supernatural Fiction Writers. 2 vols. New York: Scribner’s.
Bleiler, Richard, ed. 2002. Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror. New York: Scribner’s.
Bloom, Clive. 2010. Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present. London and New York: Continuum.
Briggs, Julia. 1977. Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story. London: Faber & Faber.
Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror; or Paradoxes of the Heart. London and New York: Routledge.
Cavaliero, Glen. 1995. The Supernatural in English Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Colavito, Jason, ed. 2008. “A Hideous Bit of Morbidity”: An Anthology of Horror Criticism from the Enlightenment to World War I. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland.
Colavito, Jason. 2008. Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Crow, Charles L., ed. 2014. A Companion to American Gothic. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Daniels, Les. 1975. Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Docherty, Brian. 1990. American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King. New York: St. Martin’s.
Fisher, Mark. 2017. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater.
Fonseca, Anthony J., and June Michele Pulliam. 2003. Hooked on Horror: A Guide to Reading Interests in Horror Fiction. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited.
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Joshi, S. T. 2004. The Evolution of the Weird Tale. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Joshi, S. T., ed. 2007. Icons of Horror and the Supernatural. Westport: Greenwood Press.
Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Joshi, S. T., and Stefan Dziemianowicz, eds. 2005. Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia. 3 vols. Westport: Greenwood Press.
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About the Editor and Contributors
The Editor
Matt Cardin is a writer, editor, college administrator, and college instructor specializing in the intersection of horror, religion, creativity, consciousness, and culture. In addition to teaching English and religion at Ranger College in Stephenville, Texas, he is the editor of ABC-CLIO’s Mummies around the World: An Encyclopedia of Mummies in History, Religion, and Popular Culture (2014) and Ghosts, Spirits, and Psychics: The Paranormal from Alchemy to Zombies (2015). He also edited Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti (2014), for which he received a World Fantasy Award nomination. He is also the author of the horror collections Divinations of the Deep, Dark Awakenings, and To Rouse Leviathan. He blogs at The Teeming Brain.
The Contributors
Stacey Abbott is a Reader in Film and Television Studies at the University of Roehampton. A genre specialist, she writes extensively about cult television and has also written about vampires, science fiction, romantic comedies, and the horror genre. She is the author of, among others, Undead Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the 21st Century (2016).
Aalya Ahmad holds a doctorate in Comparative Literary Studies, specializing in horror fiction. She teaches across several different disciplines on horror literature and film, and publishes work on various aspects of horror, including the pedagogy of horror, race, class, gender and horror, zombies, indigenization, and Canadian horror film. Her first love was Edgar Allan Poe.
Xavier Aldana Reyes is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Film and a founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. He specialises in Gothic and Horror Studies, and his publications include Spanish Gothic (2017), Horror: A Literary History (editor, 2016), Horror Film and Affect (2016), Digital Horror (co-editor, 2015), and Body Gothic (2014).
Melanie R. Anderson is an Assistant Professor of English at Glenville State College. She is the author of Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison (2013) and co-editor of The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities (2013) and Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences (2016).
Eleanor Beal is Associate Lecturer in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her forthcoming publications include entries in the edited collections Transmedia Creatures: Connecting Frankenstein’s Afterlives and Divine Horror: The Cinematic Battle Between the Sacred and the Supernatural. She is the author of the book Postsecular Gothic (forthcoming) for the Palgrave Gothic series.
Steve Behrends edited Clark Ashton Smith’s fugitive fictions (Strange Shadows, 1989) and other Smith titles; contributed to the literary criticism of Smith, Donald Wandrei, and Darrell Schweitzer; and is an avid reader of the British New Wave. He trained in the field of particle physics and is currently employed as a technical analyst in the Boston area.
Richard Bleiler is collections librarian at the University of Connecticut. His most recent book, The Strange Case of ‘The Angels of Mons’ (McFarland 2015), describes the controversy following the September 30, 1914 publication of Arthur Machen’s “The Bowmen” and collects for the first time many of the primary documents written to argue that angelic forces assisted the English troops.
Clive Bloom is an academic and author who has written widely on areas as diverse as popular culture, the Gothic, and political protest. He is the author of Gothic Histories and the editor in chief of Palgrave Gothic. His latest book, Thatcher’s Secret War: Coercion, Secrecy and Government, 1974–1990, was listed for “Radical Book of the Year 2016.”
Naomi Simone Borwein is a polymath disguised as a PhD candidate in English literature at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research interests include the Gothic, theory, and modern American literature, with a specialization in Southern literature. She engages with cultural and literary history, and quantitative methodologies.
Jason V Brock is an award-winning writer, editor, filmmaker, composer, and artist. He is the author of Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy (2014), and he was art director/managing editor for Dark Discoveries magazine for more than four years. He also runs the biannual digest [NAMEL3SS], devoted to the macabre, weird, uncanny, and esoteric.
Simon Brown is Associate Professor of Film and Television at Kingston University and has written on various aspects of film and TV horror. He is currently completing a monograph entitled Screening Stephen King: King Adaptations and the Horror Genre on Film and Television, which is due for publication in 2018.
John Edgar Browning is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is internationally recognized for his horror, Dracula, and vampire scholarship, with over fourteen published or forthcoming books and over sixty-five shorter works. He is also widely regarded as a chief expert on real vampirism in the United States and abroad.
Chloé Germaine Buckley is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She has a PhD in literature with a focus on contemporary Gothic fiction. She has published numerous articles and chapters on Gothic and horror literature and film, and is co-editor of Telling It Slant: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi.
Elsa Charléty is a PhD candidate in American literature at the Sorbonne University and in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. Her areas of interest include the representation of gendered bodies and voices in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature of the American South and the Caribbean, and the literary history of Gothic and horror narratives.
Michael Cisco is the author of various books, including The Divinity Student, The Great Lover, and ANIMAL MONEY. His scholarly work has appeared in Iranian Studies, Lovecraft and Influence, Thinking Horror, and elsewhere. He lives and teaches in New York City.
Carys Crossen was awarded her PhD in English and American Studies from the University of Manchester in 2012. Since then she has spent her time alternately studying to become a librarian, and researching and writing. Her favorite topics of study are vampires, gender, the Gothic, and, most particularly, werewolves.
Stephen Curtis has a PhD in English literature and specializes in the darker aspects of early modern literature, in particular the significance of blood in the period and the connections between tragedy and horror. He has written and presented on various aspects of early modern drama, contemporary Gothic literature, horror movies, and video games.
Dara Downey is a Lecturer in English Literature at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. She is editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, and Vice-Chair of the Irish Association for American Studies. She is author of American Women’s Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age (Palgrave 2014) and is currently working on a monograph on slaves and servants in American Gothic fiction.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz has edited many horror fiction anthologies and written many articles and reviews for The Washington Post Book World, Publishers Weekly, Lovecraft Studies, and other journals. He is a senior editor at Barnes & Noble and has contributed to numerous reference works. He co-edited, with S. T. Joshi, Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia (2005).
Benjamin F. Fisher, Emeritus Professor, English, University of Mississippi, has published much about horror and related topics, notably on topics abut Poe. He is a past president of the Poe Studies association and Chairman of the Speaker Series for the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore.
Matt Foley is a Lecturer in English at University of Stirling. He writes on the Gothic, transgression, and modernism. His most recent publication is an article on the acoustics of the Gothic romance for the journal Horror Studies. Current projects include writing a book on haunting modernisms and being the main academic contact for the Patrick McGrath archive at Stirling.
Kaja Franck’s thesis at the University of Herfordshire looks at the werewolf in literature as an ecoGothic monster, concentrating on the relationship betw
een wilderness, wolves, and werewolves, and how language is used to demarcate animal alterity. She co-organized the Company of Wolves conference in September 2015.
Kelly Gardner is an early career researcher and teaching fellow at the University of Stirling, Scotland. Her PhD thesis explored the emergence and development of the sentient zombie. Her research interests include Gothic literature, posthumanism, transhumanism, and speculative fiction. Her recent publications have focused on the historical zombie, apocalypse, and the use of sound in zombie-themed media.
Richard Gavin is an acclaimed Canadian author of horror fiction and esotericism. He has published seven books, including Sylvan Dread: Tales of Pastoral Darkness (Three Hands Press) and The Benighted Path: Primeval Gnosis and the Monstrous Soul (Theion Publishing). He welcomes readers at www.richardgavin.net.
Jon Greenaway is a PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University researching theology, Gothic literature, and imaginative apologetics. He is also behind the popular online account @thelitcritguy, popularizing literary and critical theory.
Bob Hodges is a PhD candidate in literature and critical theory at University of Washington. His dissertation covers nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transatlantic detective fiction vis-à-vis political liberalism. He is co-editor of the forthcoming The Weird and the Southern Imaginary. He has contributed to Critical Survey of Graphic Novels, ESQ, Poe Review, and Clues.
Jerrold E. Hogle (PhD, Harvard) is University Distinguished Professor in English at the University of Arizona; past President of the International Gothic Association; author of, among other books, The Undergrounds of The Phantom of the Opera (2002); and editor of the Cambridge Companions to Gothic Fiction (2002) and The Modern Gothic (2014).
