Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!

"Zombies ain't what they used to be. Not so long ago, they were safely ensconced on Haiti so the rest of the world could merely scoff at the bizarre myth of the living dead on one relatively small Caribbean island. Well, they have proliferated at an alarming rate, invading the rest of the world, and it seems unlikely that they have any intention of going away anytime soon. W.B. Seabrook, in his 1929 book, The Magic Island, recounted "true" tales of voodoo magic on Haiti bringing the recently dead back tolife as slow-moving, virtually brain-dead creatures who would work tirelessly in the fields without pay and without complaint. These stories introduced the zombie to much of the world, though most national folklores have similar tales and legends. A decade after Seabrook's groundbreaking volume, Zora Neale Hurston researched Haitian folklore and told similar stories of eyewitness accounts of zombies, as have subsequent anthropologists, sociologists, and others not prone to imaginative fancies. If zombie literature began with the reportage of Seabrook, it had powerful ancestral works on which to draw"--

Otto Penzler lives in New York City.