#ramsey campbell

Anthologies of zombie horror stories, 1989 and 1992. Must-haves for any horror library!

“‘- but it’s not such a bad idea to be on nodding acquaintance with it. These days…I don’t know… no one wants to talk about it or think about it, it seems. They took it off the TV because they thought it might hurt the children some way - hurt their minds - and people want closed coffins so they don’t have to look at the remains or say goodbye… it just seems like people want to forget it.’

‘And at the same time they brought in the cable TV with all those movies showing people - ‘ Jud looked at Norma and cleared his throat, ‘- showing people doing what people usually do with their shades pulled down,’ he finished. ‘Queer how things change from one generation to the next, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Louis said. 'I suppose it is.’

‘Well, we come from a different time,’ Jud said, sounding almost apologetic. ‘We was on closer terms with death. We saw the flu epidemic after the Great War, and mothers dying with child, and children dying of infection and fevers that it seems like doctors just wave a magic wand over these days. In the time when me and Norma was young, if you got cancer, why, that was your death-warrant, right there. No radiation treatments back in the 1920s! Two wars, murders, suicides…’

He fell silent for a moment.

‘We knew it as a friend and as an enemy,’ he said finally.

'My brother Pete died of a burst appendix in 1912, back when Taft was President. He was just fourteen and he could hit a baseball farther than any kid in town. In those days you didn’t need to take a course in college to study death, hot-spice or whatever they call it. In those days it came into the house and said howdy and sometimes it took supper with you and sometimes you could feel it bite your ass.’”