Book 15 for my 2025 goal of 30 books for the year! Had a significant hiatus of reading due to life stresses, but still ahead on my goal.

Zombies are everywhere in fiction these days, from The Last of Us to 28 Years Later to The Walking Dead and more. There was a time, back in the Night of the Living Dead days, when zombie stories were somewhat of a niche subject and everyone probably thought that they’d go out of fashion and be forgotten. On the contrary, zombie stories alone have become a mainstay of horror, their own enduring subgenre.

This is why Mindy Weisberger’s recent book, Rise of the Zombie Bugs, is incredibly timely and fun. Though zombification of humans like in the movies appears (for the moment) to not be a thing, it turns out that zombification is a surprisingly common thing among the “bugs.”

Small disclaimer: I’m a longtime friend of Mindy’s, and am acknowledged in the book for providing “bookish wisdom” (though I’m not sure that I was particularly helpful). Also, because we’re friends, it will be weird for me to call her Weisberger through this post, so I’ll stick to Mindy.

Rise of the Zombie Bugs is an in depth but popularized look at the variety of ways in which evolution has used zombification to aid in the reproductive cycle. This includes fungi that infect ants and force them to move to high positions where they can more effectively spread their spores to new victims to wasps that inject their eggs into hungry caterpillars and manipulate them into staying alive but not eating the wasp babies that emerge. Flies, wasps, worms, fungus, viruses and more get in on the zombie action, and the book covers the fascinating and varied approaches by which the zombifiers take over their hosts and manipulate them. And there are SO MANY zombifiers out there — odds are, you’re near some all the time when you’re outdoors.

I was a little hesitant to read the book at first, because I find the idea of being corrupted by fungi and eaten from the inside out to be rather hard to stomach, but Mindy keeps the subject interesting and light-hearted with lots of analogies and connections to zombies and parasites in popular culture (including the chestbursters from Alien). There are a few photos highlighting the late stages of infection, but for those who are a bit squeamish like me, it is worth noting that there aren’t very many photos and they are in black and white, so it isn’t hard to steer clear of them if desired and focus on the details.

The pop culture references keep the book fun and help steer it from getting too morbid, but it is still a solid science book with lots of fascinating details not only about the zombie science but also the research being done to study them. There are a lot of unanswered questions about how these mechanisms work — as one might imagine, an infection that causes genuine mind control is hard to analyze, as it is generally difficult to look into a brain and figure out what’s going on inside.

Though humans aren’t really susceptible to zombification like insects are (or humans are in The Last of Us), the book concludes by giving examples of how humans aren’t completely exempt from a little bit of mental manipulation by microscopic organisms!

One last thought: if you’re a horror author or a horror fan, this book is also excellent research! Nature has figured out so many strange ways to make zombies that there are a lot of possible story ideas built into the book. I myself had one really weird story idea come out of reading it.

Overall, Rise of the Zombie Bugs is a fascinating and fun exploration of how zombies exist in real life — at least on the level of bugs. Mindy handles the more gruesome details with a deft and light touch that makes the story compelling and enjoyable even to the more squeamish folks like me!

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