Book #216 of 2021:
Jews Versus Zombies edited by Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene
I like this short story collection marginally better than its sister volume on extraterrestrials — my individual ratings average to 3.25 out of five stars this time, an improvement on my previous 2.5 — but it’s still a decidedly mixed bag that doesn’t live up to its full potential. Too many entries employ the walking dead as an artsy metaphor instead of a concrete issue for characters to deal with, and there’s somehow not enough Jewishness throughout.
The best titles, such as Rena Rossner’s “Rise” and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “Tractate Metim 28A” actually attempt to build a tale about reanimated corpses within an existing belief framework of (admittedly archaic) Judaism, or at least seem to adopt a Jewish perspective on the zombie apocalypse a la Adam Roberts’s “Zayinim” or Daniel Polansky’s “Ten for Sodom.” But the weaker elements are disjointed and boring, and all too often reliant on stereotypes for a cheap laugh. Although the writers are all #ownvoices storytellers, they tend to use the premise of the anthology as a punchline rather than a prompt for truly engaging fiction from our particular cultural viewpoint.
As I said before, I’m glad these publications exist in the world, but I wish the editorial process had been stricter. In addition to an abundance of typos, it feels almost as though editors Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene have published any submissions that answered their call, and that’s disappointing for such a distinctive enterprise.
[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, and gore.]
★★★☆☆
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