Plight of the living dead : what the animal kingdom's real-life zombies reveal about nature--and ourselves / Matt Simon.

Subtitle on cover varies: What real-life zombies reveal about nature--and ourselves.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-237).

The first rule of zombification : you do not want to be a zombie -- Nothing brings the world together like unsolicited mind control -- When life gets complicated, life gets zombified -- No creature lives in a vacuum, not even a zombie -- How to succeed in parasitism without really dying -- Dawn of the sexually undead -- The great escape from the umwelt -- The great hacking of the umwelt -- The brain-hacked mouse that wore a funny hat and destroyed the notion of free will -- You, the undead -- End times.

Zombification isn't just the stuff of movies and TV shows like The Walking Dead. It's real, and it's happening all around us, from wasps and crickets to dogs and moose--and even humans. In Plight of the Living Dead, science journalist Matt Simon documents his journey through the bizarre science of real-life mind control. Along the way, he visits a lab littered with the corpses of zombie ants, 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. A madcap, brain-bending journey into an exhilarating new frontier of neuroscience, Plight of the Living Dead shows us that nothing Hollywood dreams up can match the horrific zombies that evolution has produced time and time again.