World War Z

World War Z: An oral history of the zombie war
by Max Brooks

I first read World War Z when it came out, and re-reading it for class was a pleasure. I love this book. I loved the Zombie Survival Guide too, for that matter. I've said before in this class that zombies are a personal favorite of mine, and this book illustrates a lot of the reasons why.

Zombies can be anywhere. They're in the swamps, in the deserts, under the ocean. They're in the streets, in your house, all over the world and in every country. I'm amazed one didn't end up on the space station. The plague of zombies spread quickly, not so much because of the rate of infection, but because people refused to believe it was happening. Governments and hospitals were unprepared. The military was helpless (the battle of Yonkers is one of my favorite scenes because it seemed so very much like what would really happen). I loved how there really was no 'safe' place, not anywhere. Heck, even without a zombie on the ISS, the astronauts still came to a bad end because of the plague.

The zombies were pretty classic, George Romero types - slow moving cannibals that can only be killed by destroying the brain. The horror is two-fold: first off, the creatures attacking you used to be your friends, neighbors, and family; and secondly, once you get past them, there are like a million more waiting outside. One of my favorite details about the zombies is the different names given to them by different nationalities - zombies, ghouls, Gs, zedheads, zack. It was realistic (there's no reason to think they wouldn't get different nicknames) and a simple way to make the narrative seem more real.

Other blogs have talked about the fact that the book is more about people than it is about zombies, and I agree. But that's part of the fun, at least for me. I like this book partially because the humans actually win - which again seems realistic. Once people accepted that this was happening, they dealt with it, and that's probably what would happen. The fact that this book ended on a positive note was probably my favorite thing about it. Sure, awful things happened and lots of people died, but the world moves on. It was a hopeful message - at least, more hopeful than it could have been.

There were a lot of great characters in this book - a few favorites are Todd Waino, the 'average Joe' soldier, Darnell Hackworth and the K-9 units, the infamous Paul Redeker (side note: the version I got on my kindle had the footnotes messed up, and it wasn't until I googled Redeker to see if he was in the film version that I found out the guy who hugs him is Nelson Mandela), and Tomonaga and his shield society. Honestly, just about all the sections were exceptional in their own way. Given that he doesn't spend much time on any single character or setting, Brooks does an excellent job bringing people to life.

One last point I want to make about this book is that it is a stretch to call it just a horror book. I don't think this is a title that can be put into a single genre - too much happens, there are too many blends of ideas and concepts. I've read a lot recently in how-to books about horror genre vs. literary fiction, and this book illustrates that sometimes there's no simple distinction. You can have a horror setting and still get a "literary" novel.