The living dead have come a long way from the shambling corpses depicted by George A. Romero. While traditional zombie monsters continue to flourish—thanks in part to the ongoing popularity of The Walking Dead universe—the global community now features reanimated zombies, resurrected zombies, protagonist zombies, robotic zombies, romantic zombies, fake zombies, zombie-adjacent monsters, and post-zombie zombies.

This collection of scholarly essays considers recent and contemporary examples of zombies in fiction, literature, popular culture, and politics from around the world and makes the case that, because of the evolution of the undead, the zombie remains an important allegorical feature of horror fiction, satire, and ideological perspectives.