Overall I would have to rate this book as an OK look at horror films through the years. But several things stop this volume from being a good look at Zombie films.
1st of all, the book is riddled with mistakes, nothing major but enough to make the average horror fanboy (like myself) cringe while reading it. At one point while referring to the career of the late Lucio Fulci, the author mentions the thrillers of his seventies career, siting "Don't Torture a Duckling", "A Lizard in a Woman's Skin", and "Schizoid" as examples. Lizard and Schizoid are the same movie, Schizoid being the American title and Lizard being the European one.
At another point he mentions that Dawn of the Dead was called Zombie in its American release, and because of this Fulci's Zombie was released in the US as Zombie 2. This again is incorrect, as Dario Argento made his own edit of Dawn of the Dead for the European market, that Romero thought he would have a better grasp of. It was in this foreign market that the film was known as Zombie, and this same market that Fulci's film was called Zombie 2.
Those are just a couple of examples of this. My other major beef with the book is it strays pretty far from its intended subject matter. Now the while the ideas of society turning us into zombies in a figurative sense may be an interesting one for discussion, and definitely one that is often touched upon in film, I don't think that it falls into the parameters of this book. Movies like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and "A Clockwork Orange" are discussed at great length, while great Zombie films such as "Dead Alive" "Afterdeath" and "Burial Ground" are hardly, if at all even mentioned.
I believe that the cause for this is in the book (or author's, I'm not sure) country of origin. This appears to be a British novel, and while the UK is known for many great and dazzling horror films (hammer, amicus), they are not known for their horror films. But the author keeps stretching the definition of zombie films to come back to British works again and again, spending no more than a few pages on the Italian film industry which created more great Zombie material in the late 70's and early to mid 80's than any other country out there. An entire chapter is dedicated to Britain's one great true Zombie film, hammer's "The Plague of the Zombie's", and discussion of other hammer non-zombie films abound, particularly the Quartermass series.
The result is an interesting read, but one that leaves the viewer wondering where all the zombies in this book about zombie's are.