"Are you ready for some zombies?"

When I opened the mail and saw my copy of Brian Keene's The Rising: Selected Scenes From The End Of The World, the first thing that came to my head was Hank Williams Jr. shouting those words, just like the opening to Monday Night Football.

32 stories of in the world of The Rising. 32 stories of zombies, more rotting flesh, cannibal tendencies, and gruesome deaths than you can shake a stick at. A veritable smorgasbord for fans of the zombie genre, and Keene's zombies in particular, those demon-possessed corpses all strutting around, preparing the Earth for more of their kind.

To be honest, I was a bit hesitant about this book. Not because I don't like Brian Keene's writing - I do. And not because I don't like the world he's created in his The Rising series - I do.

No, I was worried because I couldn't imagine how 32 stories of zombies attacking could hold my attention. After all, wouldn't it be the same story over and over? According to the back cover, it's 32 stories detailing how The Rising plays out all across the globe. And that, to me, meant one story after another of people trying to escape from, or fight against, the animated corpses. And even though the cover informs us that some of the stories include characters from his other books in the series, I still had concerns that it would be too repetitive.

My other worry was that many of the stories are so short - flash fiction, really - they wouldn't be able to make that connection with the reader, that I wouldn't care about the person getting eaten. The stories would be like news bytes. Or, in this case, bites.

I'm a huge fan of Keene's, although to be honest, his books in The Rising series have been, to me, his weakest works. Not that they're bad, but I find his writing in The Conqueror Worm, Fear of Gravity, or even his non-zombie short stories to be stronger, deeper, richer. A level above.

So, all things considered, I felt more than a little trepidation.

I needn't have worried. If you're a fan of The Rising, or any of its sequels, you'll go batshit over this book.

See, Brian's a smart dude. Like me, he figured out that 32 stories of zombies killing people wouldn't be enough to capture his readers, give them something special. So although these are 32 different stories (except for a couple of two-parters), he's found a way to tie them together, by dividing the book into four distinct (although not labeled) sections.

The first section takes us through the zombie attacks and feasts in plain, no-nonsense fashion, beginning on Day One of the The Rising. The people have no idea what's going on, and are just reacting.

Then, just like in The Rising, they begin to learn about the demons possessing the corpses. Later, we even get a few stories from the demons' point of view. And finally, Keene takes us beyond any events he's previously written about and gives us hints about what's to come in the future of the The Rising's universe.

And what's to come is surely going to keep fans drooling, and Keene at his computer keyboard, for a long, long time to come. If what he says in his Afterword is true, then he's going to be tying together more current and future novels than all of F. Paul Wilson's Adversary Cycle and Repairman Jack books combined.

All the stories in this collection are fast, action-driven reads, and are sure to please anyone who enjoyed the two Rising novels that came before. They range from down and dirty to humorous to lovingly tender. There's no requirement to have read The Rising or City of the Dead, but it would help. All of them are fun to read. Are they as well-written as his non-zombie stories? No, not in my opinion. But they're well worth reading, if you can get your hands on a copy of this book - it's limited to only 500 copies, which kind of sucks for fans. I hope a trade paperback version comes out at some point, because there are a lot more than 500 people clamoring for more zombies from Keene.

And this book deserves to be read by all of them.

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JG Faherty is a writer of dark fiction. His recent credits include Cemetery Dance, www.wrongworld.com, Shroud Magazine, and the anthologies Bound For Evil and Dark Territories. He writes regular columns, book reviews, and interviews for the Horror Writers Association newsletter, FearZone, and several other online and print venues. You can visit him at JGFaherty.com.