Grade: A
Editor’s note: I realize I’m way late on this one as this book came out years ago, but with the movie coming out soon, I thought it would be fun to compare the two.
One of the most primal fears that the concept of zombies preys upon is the idea that our world, as it exists today and without being destroyed by something like a bomb or meteor, can become a hostile, dangerous and even uninhabitable place. The cities themselves become our enemies, our own homes death traps. The limit of the genre, historically speaking, is in the desire to give us a consistent protagonist or protagonists, and therefore reducing the danger to an immediate survival story. The world wide apocalypse, while recognized, is more of an abstract thing that doesn’t necessarily feel real. Max Brooks throws all that away in his novel World War Z. By not having a main character to latch onto, except a nameless man conducting interviews and providing the through line, it allows the action to take on a fully global scale.
Since it is written as an oral history, there isn’t necessarily a plot, but there is a clear narrative that runs throughout. The individual stories, with a few exceptions, are completely engaging and capable of standing on their own, but all remarkably add up to something bigger and complete. The basic story, told from just about every point of view you could want, is that the zombies rise, slowly at first with isolated outbreaks. The government scrambles to contain them and keep them quiet. This obviously fails and pretty soon The Great Panic sets in, which is exactly what it sounds like. The people of the world lose their collective shit and society explodes into a fury of chaos and zombie snacks. Our first attempts at fighting back go embarrassingly bad and soon enough the world as we know it is over, Israel has quarantined itself, nuclear war breaks out between two countries, and not any of the two you’re thinking, and general anarchy begins to reign. In desperation, the leaders of the world turn to a South African man known for having plans for catastrophic plans like these but are hard to stomach due to their sheer coldness in terms of loss of human life. They follow his plan, basically willingly sacrificing a good chunk of the world’s population in order to save the rest and soon begin to see the tide of the war turning.
This is not a scary book, though it is frightening. What I mean by that is World War Z is not going to give the reader nightmares of face-eating, gross-looking zombies, but it does serve as a reminder of how fragile everything we rely on really is. The walking dead are merely a pop-culture vehicle used to demonstrate just how easily our governments, societies, cultures, and morals can be torn down. At the end of the day, human beings will do what is necessary in order to continue the species. That sounds pretty bleak and whereas this is no breezy beach read of a novel, Brooks isn’t only interested in bleak. He makes sure to give us a spark of hope at all times and does seem to say that humankind’s resiliency is a good thing, a powerful and unbreakable thing.
In addition to bringing a fresh trope to the zombie fiction genre, Max Brooks proves that he’s truly his father’s son (little known filmmaker named Mel) and brings wit and a sense of satire throughout the novel. He seems to know that zombies are really a pretty ridiculous thing and this kind of book has to laugh at itself before the reader starts laughing at it. Gags go from big picture odd, like millions of zombies swarming the oceans, to low-brow gut laughs like a monkey peeing on a lone survivor of a zombie attack/bridge explosion. It’s these aspects that make this story stand out and transcend an otherwise pretty tired genre. If this book took itself completely seriously it would be a long forgotten, perfectly serviceable, horror novel.
Some Damn Fool's Thoughts 