EDITOR’S NOTE

I had no idea what to expect when I saw that title, “Zombie Horror,” in the submission queue. Yes, I confess to a fondness for the strange. Flying men, pirates, robot ballerinas, ghost babies? Sure. Why not. But zombies? Then one of our fiction readers voted yes and commented on the strong writing, the integration of moral questioning with narrative development, and the clear and compelling characters. Another mentioned the big questions about life and God and death. Another mentioned “the issues too richly complicated and perfectly rendered to let go.” We have a narrator who was a chaplain before taking a job as reanimation rehabilitation specialist: a man who was married once and had felt, then, that life made sense; a man who has wrestled with faith in God’s grace; and a man who can’t help wondering if he, too, could rise from the dead someday. Yes, there are the light touches. The risen dead can, of course, be quite a shock to the living and are, frankly, a drain on the economy. But this story raises the zombie question to new levels. This is not what I’d call a science fiction story. Don’t get me wrong—I grew up on science fiction stories. I love the science fiction greats. But I have no hesitation in placing this on the literary fiction shelf.

Barbara Westwood Diehl, senior editor

The Baltimore Review