Reading: Wastelands and The Living Dead
Two Anthologies Ed. John Joseph Adams

Weird that I'd pick these up so close to each other. I don't know any thing about the editor, and I didn't even realize that the same guy had edited both anthologies until I sat down to write this. Especially weird since I rather enjoyed Wastelands, and I really didn't like The Living Dead at all.

There's nothing spectacular in the vicinity, of course. These are both basically just beach reads. But Wastelands (subtitle: Tales of the Apocalypse) was, I thought, fairly good for that sort of thing. It starts with a Stephen King story you've probably already read, then moves through some Mormosity by Orson Scott Card. It seems a little heavy on the women-having-a-hard-time-finding-men-after-the-apocalypse angle to me, but, hey, I only finish about 1 in 5 sci fi books that I start, and I read all the stories in this one, so that maybe says something. I like sci fi/horror/etc., but find almost all of it entirely unreadable. So anyway: me like this book pretty good.

The Living Dead I did not enjoy at all. See here's the thing: if I'm going to read a book about zombies, I want zombie stuff in it--horrible, murderous corpses rising from the grave, a Romero scenario or two with desperate survivors holed up in an old house, large-caliber firearms, that sort of thing. This anthology seemed to be composed entirely of attempts to write literary or quasi-literary zombie stories. There's one in which the dead rise to vote. There's one in which zombies rise to follow you around if you aren't green enough--figuratively, that is. It's quite an embarrassment for good yuppies. I dunno. I just didn't like it at all.

Oh--except for one story, "Deadman's Road" by Joe R. Lansdale That one was o.k., though I'm not sure it's unequivocally a zombie story per se.

So, um, anyway, there are two entirely uneducated and unsupported opinions about two bits of beachy reading you might be interested in.

Er, that is all.