World War Z, by Max Brooks
The recent review of J. Michael Straczynski's script for the movie version of World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Wars (apparently due out next year) is the impetus for today's review: presuming that the review is accurate, the movie is going to be more than a little controversial, thus suggesting that a review of the original book may be in order.
If the lycanthrope was the preeminent monster of the medieval period, the vampire that of the Victorian era, and the bug-eyed monster that of the 1950s, then the zombie is almost certainly the favored boogeyman of the modern era. It's not all that unsurprising to understand why. The concept of the zombie - and here I explicitly speak of the shambling, undead human moaning about brains, not the Caribbean metaphor for alienation from the community - lends itself well to our tastes in horror (which are not so much gruesome as they are exceptionally visual), while permitting a surprising amount of social commentary to presented alongside the undead hordes. Every generation finds a suitable monster to build its scary stories around; the zombie is ours.
World War Z is presented in the form of after-the-fact personal interviews with survivors of a world-wide zombie outbreak (one which was as apocalyptic as possible without actually destroying either human civilization, or even the human race itself). The story is traced through the first cases in China, followed by the slow spread of the undead through Western Asia and South America, then Western Europe and America; step by step, the reader is led through an increasingly nightmarish scenario brought about in equal parts by bad planning, wrongheaded assumptions, shortsighted thinking, and a simple unwillingness to accept that the dead could be walking around, hungry for human flesh. The middle part of the book explores the permutations of the "Great Panic" (somewhat a self-explanatory description of the almost-collapse of civilization) and surviving governments' retreats to defensible territory; obviously, given the aforementioned conceit it shouldn't be surprising that the last part of the book is dedicated to how humanity finally was able to reclaim the Earth from the zombies.
All of this is presented as oral accounts, in a style deliberately evocative of biographers such as Studs Terkel. This method of presentation is one of the strengths of the book; Brooks' characters are all well-defined and easy to tell apart from each other. While a plurality of the interviewees are American, the book takes pains to emphasize the global aspects of the story, giving it a certain breadth not always found in horror tales. Brooks also makes a point of making it clear that, while humanity was eventually victorious over the undead, it was not done without heavy cost - and that neither the world nor the survivors would quickly recover from the disaster (it is, in fact, open to question whether the immediate survivors would ever really recover at all). This note of realism in what is after all a story of supernatural terror (and never mind the "scientific" explanations for the walking dead) improves the experience for the reader.
One legitimate criticism of the book is the politics found in it - more accurately, the fairly topical politics found in it, which are not an issue now, but will probably make the book slightly less comprehensible ten or so years down the road. It is probably safe to say that Max Brooks is a mildly left-of-center Democrat who does not approve of the War in Iraq; and while the level of resentment against the Bush administration present in the book never even approaches that of, say, Jo Walton's Farthing it is nonetheless a mild distraction from the book. Fortunately, neither that, nor the faint whiff of condescending towards the military mindset, is sufficient to make World War Z unreadable, although it would be interesting to find out whether an earlier version of the book had made things more explicit.
Overall, I would recommend this book: it's well written, internally self-consistent, and possessed of both strong characters and an easily-followed plot. Max Brooks knows his zombies, and knows how to use them to tell a killer story. Don't give this book to a twelve-year-old who can't handle the concept of gore, but there's nothing in here that won't be cheerfully visualized for him by television or the movies. World War Z is a good choice for the horror fan in your life, as is The Zombie Survival Guide. The former is in paperback now, so if you have a gift card or three it's a good choice for eating up the balance.
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