The Curse of the Zombie

by Ray Cluley

Louisa is in Algeria to cover a celebrity wedding for the BBC, but an encounter with a strange American in a hotel bar reveals there are far more interesting stories out there, in the Sahara, waiting to be unearthed. Stories about the lost ones, the tenere medden, desert men cursed with an undying thirst…

The fourth in a series of six novelettes reviving the golden age of the monster, from Hersham Horror Books.

60 pages, Paperback

First published April 23, 2015

About the author

Ray Cluley is a British Fantasy Award winner with stories published in various magazines and anthologies. Some of these have been republished in ‘best of’ volumes, including Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year series and Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror, as well as Steve Berman’s Wilde Stories: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, and Benoît Domis’s Ténèbres. He has been translated into French, Polish, and Hungarian, and Chinese.

Reviews

[jenny✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

The desert is jealous and its men are strong.

I'm always on the hunt for zombie stories—films, novels, comics, you name it. Most of the time, they read like variations on the same undead theme.

This, though... I've never read ANYTHING like this.

Louisa is a journalist who's been sent to Algiers to cover a Kardashian-esque celebrity wedding. At the bar that night, she encounters a strange, scarred man who tells her a foreboding tale about the Sahara—and the desiccated men who roam its dunes, thirsting for more than just water.

The writing is atmospheric and immersive. It sketches out the desert's harsh majesty alongside its conflicted relationship with the people (indigenous and expat alike) inhabiting its terrain. Cluley touches on oil industries and the diversity of Algerian culture, weaving real-world politics with lore and gore alike.

And though she has a wedding to attend, Louisa can't help but hang off the man's every grotesque word—and I was just as spellbound. Ray Cluley calls it “that curse to tell and retell a story, as well as the compulsion to hear it through to the bitter end, however fantastical the details.”

That was ABSOLUTELY the case with this propulsive and macabre short story.

[Ross Warren · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the latest installment to this series Ray Cluley tackles the Zombie and manages the hard task of bringing a fresh spin to the well-explored trope. A brilliantly depicted desert setting practically leaves you with a dry throat and the author's extensive research is evident without overwhelming the story. The framing narrative is well handled, if a little familiar, but the action set-pieces hold the attention and the monsters genuinely monstrous. I did find the use of the names of the other authors from the series a little distracting and it did threaten to pull me out of the story. All in all a great spin on Zombies and on a par with the best entries in this series.