Book Review – World War Z
Author: Max Brooks
Publisher: Random House
Binding: Hardcover
Publication Date: September 12, 2006
Zombies as a genre fit overwhelmingly into a visual medium, and there have been quite a few great zombie movies, “Night of the Living Dead”, “Sean of the Dead”, “28 Days Later”, as well as some fun zombie graphic novels, “Marvel Zombies”. Zombies are simple creatures that translate well to visuals with their sole moviation of kill, eat and infect. In “World War Z” Max Brooks takes on the zombie genre in the form of an intelligent oral history from the survivors of the global epidemic. Each chapter is the story told from a different survivor and organized chronologically from the start of the infections in China , throught the rise of zombies globally, the human resistance, and eventual human triumph. How do you translate the zombie genre from their success in the visual mediums into prose form? Mr. Brooks does exceedingly well by telling the human side of the horror story.
Reading “World War Z” in kind of like flipping throught the cable news channels – getting the headlines and human interest stories. This is the story of humanity falling apart, in gritty detail. The zombies are a gimmick. The unknown horror that descends upon humanity could have easily been the avian bird flu, or some new virus, the true horror is in the human denial, lack of communication between nations, and the Great Panic that spreads like wildfire. Mr. Brooks has a keen eye for real world current events, the geopolitical, social and economic that he inserts into the novel. We’re a step into the future, experiencing something unknown and this story feels so real because it is so well anchored the real world.
The story becomes it’s most terrifying when, “The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our own hearts”. What will we do to survive? How far will we go? What would we do to save humanity from extinction, and how would we live with our actions and sacrifices? These are the diverse stories of the human resistance and courage to fight back. As with the better zombie movies, this books tells us more about ourselves than the enemy. It’s social commentary as horror-action fiction.
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