You know what? I love the undead. I love the poignant, disturbing questions they explore, the sense of tragedy and history they evoke, and the end-of-their-ropes characters they attract. I love the monsters (Skin kites! Rot angels! Visages!) that fray at our nerves and our moral understanding of the world. I love the haunting, dirt-encrusted, desperate, beyond-the-pale stories they inspire. I love the way you can order them around and they can't say boo about it...
Whenever I get to work on a book about the undead, I really feel like I've been handed such a treat. Like the undead anthology I'm editing right now: Realms of the Dead (due out January 2010). So. Good. With stories by Richard Lee Byers and The New York Times best-selling R.A. Salvatore, among others. And full of groovy undead. But to sate you until it comes out, check out The Haunted Lands trilogy by Richard Lee Byers (Unclean, Undead, and Unholy) and City of the Dead, by Rosemary Jones.
