Zombie book recommendations?

[Kodos]

For a while, I was reading nothing but zombie novel after zombie novel (probably 20 in a row). Eventually, the quality seemed to be getting pretty low, so I stopped reading them. It's been a few years. Perhaps there are some new books that are good. Any recommendations?

[Honolulu_Blue]

Given your vast zombie novel readings, what would you consider your top five (not including "World War Z", if you'd include it, since I've read that one).

I also bought "Day to Day Armageddon", I believe it's called, and started it, but didn't get very far.

[ColtCrazy]

I'm actually in the midst of writing a zombie novel. I spent years unsuccessfully trying to write a series I had thought about in college when I got this idea. Finding it much easier to write a stand alone piece. Spend much of the summer in research and now writing, though that comes in short spurts thanks to work. About 10K words in.

[Edward64]

I'm a zombie and apocalypse fan. There's not any authors that I would consider on the level of my favorite authors in fantasy, sci-fi nor are there any zombie books that I feel I have to re-read in the next couple years.

I typically go to amazon, search on zombie and look at the reader ratings.

[Shkspr]

Nothing has really picked up the ball in the last couple of years and run with it as far as zombie fiction goes. You've got WWZ, Walking Dead, Jon Maberry, and David Moody as "established" serious zombie fiction, plus the Day by Day Armageddon stuff and David Wellington, who are a little off the radar, but have a certain cachet.

Then you've got the parody stuff, which is...pretty much everything else.

The bigger issue is that you had all of this a few years ago, too. In the last year or two, there's not a lot of good stuff. Rhiannon Frater's "As the World Dies" trilogy just seems a little...low stakes, maybe? I just never felt any dread reading it. Anyway, the last couple of years zombiewise seem to have been more about the gravy train of merchanising rather than exploring the subgenre. At least that's what it says on the bottom of my "Zombies Do It Deader" pint glass.

I haven't read it yet, but Joe R. Lansdale's "Deadman's Road" might be worth checking out. Lansdale's got solid work in both the Western genre and horror genre, and his work on Jonah Hex melded the two beautifully.