Review: World War Z by Max Brooksposted by Angie · February 16, 2009 9:24 AM
I’ve never seen a Romero film (too gory); in point of fact I think I’ve only ever seen two zombie movies end-to-end and that’s Shaun of the Dead and Resident Evil: Extinction (both still too gory for my wussy tastes). Unless, of course, watching Michael Jackson’s Thriller counts. In which case I’ve seen three.
It’s not just the gore, either. Zombies are just so… predictable. Oh look. They’re walking really slow and rotting! Oooooh. Scary. I didn’t think they’d make a very good apocalypse.
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks was my first ever zombie novel. I was a complete zombie apocalypse virgin. I have to say that the book has completely turned upside down my expectations from zombie lit. So much so that I’m faced with a dilemma:
Start reading all kinds of zombie apocalypse lit, because it’s such a great example, or never read another zombie book again… because nothing else could possibly measure up?
Max Brooks’ writing is that good.
World War Z tells the story of a zombie apocalypse from the survivors’ point of view. Structured as a series of dozens of interviews with people all around the world, this novel is hugely original in that it doesn’t really have a plot - that is, there’s no character development. Nor is there a sense of “what’s going to happen next?”, since everything bad that could have happened has already happened, and this book is telling the history of that war.
You’d think that would bore me to tears, but it didn’t. In fact, I kept reading simply because I wanted to hear more from people and how they handled the terror of millions of zombies and the horror of losing the lives they once knew.
And that’s the ticket here - that’s what makes this book work so well. Brooks found a brilliant way around one of the most challenging aspects of apocalypse lit: how to engage the reader and make them care about the characters and yet still explain what happened to the world during the apocalypse.
The other area where this book really, truly excels is in logistics. Frankly, it’s one of my favorite parts of apoco-lit (ha!); the figuring out of “well, if THIS disaster happens, how does that affect areas a, b, c, d and e of our society? How would we cope with X? What would that mean about Y?”.
In this area, the book excels frankly better than any other end of the world novel I’ve ever read. Most books are forced, due to their characters and plot, to squeeze down into a microcosm and use the small world encapsulated by those few people to describe what is happening to the world as a whole. But with this technique of storytelling, you get to read about what happens all over the world, to people of wildly different careers, personalities, lifestyles, socioeconomic statuses, belief systems, and coping abilities.
That means that this book truly covers, logistically, what happened not just here, in your home town, during the zombie apocalypse, but also what happened in Japan. In Russia. In the Middle East, India, and of course America. What happened to average joes, rich folks and military folks.
It’s a stunning degree of detail and logistical thinking - to suss out what happened militarily, politically and on more personal levels all across the globe and fit it all into a single novel. That’s one ambitious book, and World War Z carries it off without a hitch.
But what makes the book work in the end is that it never loses its human touch. Each interview, each story is an individual human story, in the end, and you always get the sense that the subjects in the book are still shell shocked from all that has happened. The horror in their voices is what binds you to them, even when they’re describing their story dispassionately.
I loved this book so much I read it twice, and will likely pick it up over and over again. I can’t recommend World War Z strongly enough. It may actually be one of my favorite apoco-lit books, ever.
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