ZOMBIE CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead
Citadel Press, 402 pages
Available everywhere!

I never understood the backlash against vampire novels several years ago, possibly because I just wasn't paying attention to how much shelf space they occupied in bookstores. But I'm fully aware of how much ink, paper, celluloid (and especially digital video!) are being devoted to the shambling undead these days as authors and filmmakers play (but never pay) George Romero. Frankly, I'm sick to death of zombies. Does that make me one of them?

Nevertheless, Jonathan Maberry's Zombie CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead is a genuinely fascinating book. Maberry is the author of the Bram Stoker Award winning novel Ghost Road Blues, the first installment of The Pine Deep Trilogy, which also includes Dead Man's Song and Bad Moon Rising. In recent years the busy Maberry has balanced fiction with nonfiction books like Vampire Universe and The Cryptopedia , which he co-wrote with David Kramer. This is one busy man, and Zombie CSU is an impressive achievement.

How would police detectives investigate an alleged zombie attack? How would the Crime Scene Unit collect post zombie attack evidence? How would the ME determine zombies were responsible for the half eaten corpse laying on his slab? How would police, civilians and the military actually fight the zombie infestation? To find out, turn to Maberry, who turned to the real experts in these fields with his hypothetical situations. Zombie CSU is one heavily researched book, an indispensable tool for any writer contemplating tackling a festering corpse onslaught.

I do have one complaint: Maberry has "broken the fourth wall" by overloading the book with unnecessary quotes from various zombie entertainment creators. Half the Horror Writers Association must be quoted, and the interviews feel like they belong in a book with an entirely different purpose than Zombie CSU.

Still, few readers are likely to complain because Maberry has packed too much content into this ambitious project instead of too little. The author has definitely covered all of his bases.