by Alexandra Edwards

There isn’t a lot of gore in a Kelly Link short story.  Nor is there a lot of blockbuster style action.  And yet, for my money, no one gets closer to capturing the unmitigated eeriness of Romero’s zombie-infected world.  These stories belong to the slowly lurching black and white nightmare of Night of the Living Dead, or the bizarre and panicked newsroom and the ravished tenement building of the first act of Dawn of the Dead.

(They’re also free to read online; click each story title.)

➸ In “The Wrong Grave,” a boy tries to get back the poems he threw into his girlfriend’s coffin, but he digs up the wrong grave.  What emerges is a girl who isn’t quite a zombie, but certainly isn’t human anymore.

➸ Nobody goes without a zombie contingency plan these days — certainly not Soap, the protagonist of “Some Zombie Contingency Plans.”  At a party in the suburbs, Soap thinks about zombies.  ”Zombies weren’t complicated.  It wasn’t like werewolves or ghosts or vampires… Zombies didn’t discriminate.  Everyone tasted equally good as far as zombies were concerned.”  While no actual zombies show up at the party, Soap prepares anyway.  After all, you have to have a contingency plan.

➸ When the zombies do come, you could hide out in a mall like the Dawn of the Dead crew does.  Or, you could move into the convenience store.  That’s what Eric and Batu do in “The Hortlak.”  The zombies come from the Ausible Chasm, where Eric imagines they must have their own zombie lives, with zombie homes and zombie pets.  They’re always coming into the All-Night Convenience, but they never eat anyone:

The zombies came in, and he was polite to them, and failed to understand what they wanted, and sometimes real people came in and bought candy or cigarettes or beer. The zombies were never around when the real people were around, and Charley never showed up when the zombies were there.

Charley looked like someone from a Greek play, Electra, or Cassandra. She looked like someone had just set her favorite city on fire.

Eric and Batu live themselves into a little rut, barely leaving the All-Night.  Eric pines after Charley — she’s distant, perhaps because she’s surrounded by the ghosts of the dogs she puts to sleep for work — while Batu abolishes money as currency and tries to develop the All-Night into a store for the zombies as well as the humans.  If only he could figure out what they needed.

At least when zombies want to eat you, their motives and actions are understandable.  But these zombies become much creepier, just by their incomprehensibility.

All night the zombies came out of the Chasm, holding handfuls of snow. They carried the snow across the road, and into the parking lot, and left it there. Batu was back in the closet, sending off faxes, and Eric was glad about this, that Batu couldn’t see what the zombies were up to.

The story is a masterwork of slow dread and gradual unfolding weirdness.  As Batu prepares for the rest of his life in the All-Night, Eric searches for a way out.  Can he escape with Charley and leave the zombies behind?  Or is there nothing out there anymore but zombie town after zombie town, and no real people left at all? ✪