Item Seed: The New Zombie Cookbook: Simple Recipes For Busy Lives.

The New Zombie Cookbook: Simple Recipes For Busy Lives

Physical description: The New Zombie Cookbook is a 300 page book, profusely illustrated – very profusely illustrated – that offers a few chapters on ingredients (zombies), utensils (cleavers feature prominently), and, most importantly ,recipes. Needless to say, the author (Elizabeth Riley), publisher/editor (Vyhle Publishers, Pittsburgh), and illustrator/photographer (R.U. Pickman) are unknown to the American publishing industry – despite the fact that the book was supposedly written in 1982.

Fair warning: the pictures in The New Zombie Cookbook are not for the squeamish. It is, indeed, a cookbook that features zombies as the main course, as it were.  The photographs are from life – that’s a quote from some testimonial on the back cover – and they graphically show half-rotten human remains being cleaned, prepared, filleted, poached, steamed, fried, baked, broiled, blanched, sauteed, and in one particularly gorge-rising sequence, jellied.  The worst part is that the emotional undertones of the photos are not camp, satire, arch, sardonic, or ironic: it’s all shown very matter-of-factly, and the text is equally straightforward and without subtext.  This is self-evidently a cookbook for cooking zombie flesh. It’s not written as a joke at all.

All of which would not preclude it as being a hoax, of course, if it were not for the crate of freeze-dried human kidneys that was found with the book.  The CDC grabbed both of these items a week ago, and have been putting them under ever-increasing levels of security ever since.  It’s now so classified that your team has been chosen to sort all of this out!  How lucky for you.