Earlier this week, I finished reading World War Z, by Max Brooks. This book is a work of fiction presented as fact. The subtitle of the book says it all: An Oral History of the Zombie War.Yes, actual war with actual zombies. Classic, eat your flesh, shuffle along at a snail's pace, can't be stopped unless you destroy their brain zombies.
This book is simply outstanding.
It has a brilliant mix of fun and familiar "zombie lore" with some new concepts -- such as zombies dropped at sea who, not needing to breathe, eventually just walked their way back across the ocean floor to storm the coasts.
It has a very clever narrative conceit. The premise is that in preparing the official government report on the Zombie War, the author was asked to excise most of the personal interviews he conducted in favor of presenting only cold, hard facts. Consequently, he has published this book as a collection of those interviews, those personal tales of how individuals from all over the world and all walks of life survived the zombies.
It has dozens and dozens of very memorable characters in those interview subjects. Some interviews are presented all at one time; others are scattered in pieces throughout the book. Some are merely a few pages long; others are well over 20 pages. Particularly riveting and page-turn-inducing are accounts of a crashed airplane pilot trying to survive in the wilderness to be picked up, the stories of a ground-pounder soldier who fights in multiple skirmishes against the zombies, and a cold pragmatist with chilling solutions for the world leader that recruited his advice. (Though really, there are several other characters who are just as great.)
And as much as I recommend the book itself, I'm also eager to get my hands on the audiobook edition. Though abridged (which, I'd have to think, would be a pretty big loss), it features a cast of nearly two dozen famous voices portraying the different characters in their interviews, including Alan Alda, Mark Hamill, Henry Rollins, John Turturro, and Rob and Carl Reiner.
In any case, the book gets a very enthusiastic A. I suppose if apocalyptic fiction is not your thing, then you've got a reason not to read it. But no other excuse will suffice.
4 comments:
Glad to hear ya loved it. I listened to the audiobook version and just burned through it in one sitting on a road trip - and can't wait to read the whole book in its entirety.
The zombies walking out of the ocean and the ones still alive frozen in ice are two of the best ideas that never would have occurred to me.
Heartily recommended book.
Can't go wrong with zombies. ;)
What is the pacing like in this book? does it go into ridiculous detail about everything or is it fairly well paced in terms of moving on to the next thing?
I have to say I'm interested in possibly picking this up
The book doesn't really have a single plot -- it's a collection of perspectives, given by the interview subjects. The level of detail varies according to the nature of a given character.
Went to try to buy it tonight. Couldn't find it on the shelves, then notices a girl walking past me holding a copy.
"Excuse me, where did you find that?"
"Well, I think I got the last copy."
Turns out she had the only copy that they had in stock, and looking at the shelf space it came from, the only one they had for a while...how rotten does my karma have to be to have that kind of timing?
Blech.
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