World War Z

I think it's very appropriate that, while I was reading World War Z by Max Brooks, the Centers for Disease Control released their How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse report. If you have little to no interest in zombies, and are already tuning out because of the topic for today's blog, I highly suggest you keep reading, because World War Z is not your average zombie invasion story.

World War Z is an alternate-history narrative, told through the multiple perspectives of several (I would guess around fifty) interviewees around the globe. It falls under the category of an Epistolary Novel, each 'chapter' containing a single first-person anecdote from an interview that Brooks' narrator conducts.

When I picked up this book, I was expecting it to be a basic zombie apocalypse book, with a main character survival group running around and bashing heads. While there's definitely some head-bashing, the story Brooks tells is about how the world, as a whole, deals with the epidemic, focusing on some key players and people who were at key events.

I was surprised by how well Brooks manages to tell his story within his chosen medium. It's a complex narrative, and an unskilled writer would jumble it up along the way, confusing the reader and making the target audience disinterested. Brooks lines all his interviews up chronologically, however, with the first interviewee talking about the first hints of a 'zombie' disease, and later interviewees going over how various governments realized what was going on and started to handle the situation, and so on. Each chapter builds upon the earlier ones, introducing a fact or event which is then referenced as common history throughout the novel.

The story is extremely vast for how surprisingly straightforward it is. We start in Asia, where the zombie disease surfaces, then travel out to the Middle East and South Africa as it spreads, unbeknown to the greater population. Brooks did a ton of research to make sure his facts were as realistic as possible (save for the zombies, of course), predicting how various types of people, cultures, and governments would respond to a strange pandemic like an attack of the undead. In that manner, the story's a bit political in nature, something I usually dislike, but paired up here with this not-quite ridiculous zombie invasion, I didn't mind.

Concept art for the Battle of Yonkers, where old battle tactics failed to defeat the unexpected new threat.

I don't want to give away too many details of the plot. I can go on and on about how amazed I was with this book, which I picked up on a whim after hearing a couple people recommend it. The range of topics covered was what delighted me the most, however; one chapter is about a film-maker stuck with rudimentary tools pursuing his trade to boost human spirit, another describes how the K-9 unit of the army used dogs to track the zombies, and another gives an account of the Battle of Yonkers, the first official engagement in the war, and an unmitigated disaster. There's a chapter about one of the thousands of families traveling north where the zombies have all frozen, a chapter about an internet-addict in Japan staying in his room until the city's so overrun his power cuts out, a chapter explaining the religious resurgence in the ex-USSR (now the Holy Russian Empire), and, probably my personal favorite, a chapter describing the astronauts stuck in the International Space Station for the duration of the war.

Wouldn't that be fun, watching the world go to waste while
your bones and muscle tissue disintegrated?

The only problem I had with the story, as someone who knows me well might be able to guess, is that there was very little reference made to Antarctica. The only mention made of my favorite continent is in a chapter of the man who made millions selling a placebo drug during the 'Great Panic', now hiding out in an old Russian research station. I imagined there'd be several hundreds of people trapped in those research stations during the war, and Brooks could have written an interesting chapter on their experiences if he'd thought to do so.

All in all, however, I thought it was an amazing story. Very masterfully written, very fun to read, and highly recommended to anyone in need of a good page turner. The movie rights have already been sold and the adaptation is supposed to be coming out in the next three years or so, but no movie, dramatization or mockumentary, will be able to compare to the strength woven storyline of the book.