Book 10: The Zombie Autopsies

Written by a Harvard psychiatry professor, this book has a different spin than most in the zombie genre. It's not so much a thriller, with bands of refugees racing through the streets trying to stay alive and find a safe haven, as it is a fictional discourse on science and ethics. Told through the diaries of a neuroanatomist on an isolated research facility in the Indian Ocean, the story focuses on autopsies undertaken to determine just what pathogens are involved in the disease. Schlozman adds a dose of reality by making one of the underlying mechanisms a prion-based disease. (You want some real horror, study up on those.) Along the way we get a picture of the biological changes that one might see in zombies. But in the end, the book is about humanity: what makes us human, ethics of experimentation on humans or, in this case, humanoids (the autopsies are all performed while the subject is still "animated"), and the horrible things humans do to one another and the planet (though we never find out exactly who create the virus and set it loose, it is obvious early on to the researchers that this was a man-made pathogen). A fun book for those who like some science with their zombies.