[tecweston]

Another vote for World War Z here, but I bought the audiobook. I think I enjoyed it more than I would have in print, because they hired different actors (like Mark Hamill and Henry Rollins) to read each story, which ended up making it sound like a radio documentary about a zombie apocalypse.

The Passage is great, but it's a vampire novel, not zombies. They're mindless, zombie-esque vampires, but not zombies in the Romero sense.

But as long as we're including vampires, I might recommend the novella "I Am Legend" by Richard Matheson. There's a story (dunno if it's true or not) that Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" actually started as an adaptation of "I Am Legend" but they couldn't get the rights to the book. Most of the conventions of zombie movies owe a great deal to "I Am Legend," just as much if not more than Romero's movies.