Plight of the Living Dead

What Real-Life Zombies Reveal About Our World--and Ourselves

By: Matt Simon

Narrated by: Holter Graham

A brain-bending exploration of real-life zombies and mind controllers, and what they reveal to us about nature—and ourselves

Zombieism isn’t just the stuff of movies and TV shows like The Walking Dead. It’s real, and it’s happening in the world around us, from wasps and worms to dogs and moose—and even humans.

In Plight of the Living Dead, science journalist Matt Simon documents his journey through the bizarre evolutionary history of mind control. Along the way, he visits a lab where scientists infect ants with zombifying fungi, joins the search for kamikaze crickets in the hills of New Mexico, and travels to Israel to meet the wasp that stings cockroaches in the brain before leading them to their doom.

Nothing Hollywood dreams up can match the brilliant, horrific zombies that natural selection has produced time and time again. Plight of the Living Dead is a surreal dive into a world that would be totally unbelievable if very smart scientists didn’t happen to be proving it’s real, and most troublingly—or maybe intriguingly—of all: how even we humans are affected.

“Fantastic . . . You'll be thinking about this book long after you're done reading it.” —Kelly Weinersmith, New York Times bestselling coauthor of Soonish

Real Life is Terrifying - Brilliant Book

Zombies are real and this book is full of them. No joke, we're talking the takeover of the brain by creatures of another species. It also completely negates the idea of free will. So, don't blame me when you can't sleep after reading this. I love science. This is a brilliant science text. Entertaining, terrifying and genuinely compelling. If they taught science like this in school, nobody would become an artist. Yes, buy this. Then buy it again and give it to a friend, whom you wish sleepless nights on.