2. "Play Dead" by Ryan Brown

Ryan Brown manages to merge zombie lore, voodoo, high school football, small-town Texas, and teenage romance in Play Dead. The result pleasantly surprised me.

Cole Logan is quarterback of the Killington Jackrabbits, who are having their first winning season ever. He's also the son of the town's loose woman, inhabitant of a trailer that stands on cinderblocks, a sometime juvenile delinquent, and the neighbor of Black Mona, a crazy cat lady with a purported gift for black magic.

Unfortunately for Cole and his teammates, they're about to face the Elmwood Heights Badgers for the district championship. The Badgers play dirty, pumping themselves up with hybrid steroids and perpetrating acts of vandalism and destruction against the Jackrabbits. First they attack Cole and cut off two of his fingers. Then their attempt to prevent the Jackrabbits from reaching a game goes horribly awry, and the entire team drowns. Only Cole and the head coach escape.

Cole joins up with the coach's football-hating daughter, Savannah Hickham, a writer for the school paper with an eye on the biggest story of the year. Together, they enlist the help of Black Mona in resurrecting the team. She manages to bring the players back as zombies, but they have only a limited window of time before they "go bad," and if they lose their final game, all their souls will be forfeit.

Before the teams can meet on the playing field, however, Cole and Savannah have some pretty major problems to solve. There are 40 flesh-eating zombies roaming around Killington. The sheriff has arrested the entire Badgers lineup and isn't about to let them out of jail for a football game. And Savannah's father, haunted by an earlier tragedy, flatly refuses to coach the high-stakes game.

Parts of the book are predictable. Of course the Jackrabbits will win the game (but what happens to them after that?), and of course Cole and Savannah will fall in love. But what makes this book fun and quirky is how it gets from its entertaining premise to those foregone conclusions.