2007, Thunder's Mouth Press

David Wellington might very well go down in history as the author who made zombies interesting again. For too long now, the horror subgenre of zombie survival stories has been stale - dead, if you'll forgive the pun - from overexposure. Each story seems to take exactly the same plot trajectory - misfit survivors come together, hole up somewhere safe and then wait until the walls are breached to be picked off one by one - and, perhaps worse, each seems to play by the exact same set of worldbuilding rules. Wellington's 2006 novel Monster Island changed all that. It gave the subgenre a refreshing shot in the arm with the story of DeKalb, a UN weapons inspector, sneaking into the zombie-infested remains of New York City with a small army of Somali schoolgirl warriors bent on retrieving some much-needed medicine from the United Nations Secretariat building. But what made Monster Island so unusual, so fresh - besides the machine gun-toting schoolgirls, I suppose - was the inclusion of two unique characters: Gary, a fully conscious zombie, able to think, talk and pass for human, with the ability to control the mindless hordes around him, and Mael Mag Och, the powerful, telepathic ghost of an ancient Celt whose bog-preserved corpse is on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sentient zombies? Celtic ghosts? Now you know you're reading something different, something with boundary-breaking creativity. And I haven't even mentioned the reanimated Egyptian museum mummies.

In the second book of the trilogy, Monster Nation, also released in 2006, Wellington took readers back to the beginning of the end, the early days of the Epidemic, and introduced us to another fully conscious zombie, this time an amnesiac woman who calls herself Nilla. Like Gary, Nilla has a "superpower" - she can turn invisible. An invisible zombie may sound nutty, but Wellington is an author who knows what he's doing, and her power becomes incredibly important not just to her survival but to her understanding of the strange new world she has woken up to. Wellington is also clearly aware that the problem with prequels is that the readers already know the outcome, so here he unleashes his most innovative creation yet: the source of the Epidemic. Where most zombie stories are science-fictional in nature -reanimation being caused by everything from viruses to space gas to toxic waste - Wellington instead gives his undead world a fantastical explanation. The Epidemic is mystical in nature, part of a force that unleashes terrible, unstoppable magic into what was once a rational world. Magic is the new guiding force in a world that's doomed by still relying on science to set things right.

Which brings us to the third and final volume, Monster Planet. Set twelve years after the events of the first two novels, we follow Sarah, DeKalb's grown daughter, and Ayaan, one of the Somali schoolgirls from Monster Island , on a dangerous trip back to New York City. Characters from the previous two novels collide in a major, world-altering showdown between the undead armies of the "liches" - those who are like Gary and Nilla, dead but still intelligent, led by a powerful Russian zombie-child called the Tsarevich - and the pawns of master manipulator Mael Mag Och. At stake is nothing less than the future of the world itself, a world even the few remaining survivors think might be better off destroyed. Monster Planet may also be the closest Wellington has come to writing a pure fantasy novel, with the liches standing in for wizards (each has a unique magical power) and with the characters on a dangerous quest through a treacherous landscape to be the first to reach the treasure that is the Source.

Wellington's authorial ability to completely envelope you in his world is such that by the time you reach a scene where Egyptian mummies are shooting rocket launchers out of the side of a helicopter at an army of zombies, you don't find it over the top at all, but rather a natural and perfectly understandable progression of the plot. Of course, it also has that "Oh my God, how cool is this?" factor for the twelve-year-old in all of us, but that's just icing on the cake for what amounts to an amazingly good read as a whole. Gut-munching, shambling and headshots take a back seat to what is essentially a very human story of perseverance, reunion and redemption, done up in a m?lange of military adventure, quest fantasy and horror. As for Wellington's prose, it's clean, smooth and literate, no less than one might expect from a graduate of the Penn State MFA program. Bolstered by the author's unlimited imagination, Monster Planet is a joy from start to finish.

All three of the Monster books are excellent, and Monster Planet is the perfect end to a long, strange trip. The trilogy has quickly become one of my favorite horror series. Wellington's Laura Caxton series (13 Bullets, 99 Coffins, Vampire 0) is ongoing, not limited to a trilogy, and though Monster Planet comes to a wonderful conclusion, I'd be delighted if he would keep the Monster series ongoing as well. I would be first in line to revisit Wellington's cracked, mystical world of the living and the dead.