2012 Book Review #102: World War Z

[jethrien]

Title: World War Z
Author: Max Brooks
Genre: Horror
Thingummies: 5

Synopsis: A collection of fake first person accounts of the zombie apocalypse.

Thoughts: So I'd read Max Brooks' Zombie Survival Guide, which is fairly kitschy fun. This...is not that.

Brooks has put an incredible amount of time into thinking through how a theoretical zombie apocalypse might go down, from the pharma-profiteers' fake vaccines to Israel being the first mover on closing down borders to the logistics of how to clear beaches when all the zombies who have fallen overboard continue to emerge at random intervals from the surf. Biology, geopolitics, economics--he's thought it all out here.

Which I'd kind of expected. What I didn't expect, however, was how moving his fictional accounts would be. This rings ridiculously true--the raw emotions, coherent strategies, well-thought-out psychology all remind me of the accounts of real disasters. People doing terrible things, people doing heroic things, people doing terrible things that must nevertheless be done and then trying to find a way to live with themselves afterwards--it's amazing how well he charts the way we truly react to disasters. The fundamental premise might well be absurd, but the portrait of how humanity would respond is devastatingly accurate, yet hopeful.

Given that you almost never revisit a voice, the series of short--usually just a couple pages--interviews form a coherent narrative. Each voice feels distinct, and many of the characters stuck with me the way that the best fictional characters do.

This could have easily been schlock. By all rights, perhaps it should have been. But Brooks manages to reach down into the reason why zombies are so appealing--he grasps what they fundamentally tell us about our hopes and fears about our own true natures. And somehow what should have been a book cashing in on an internet meme became profound.

Comments

[dushai.livejournal.com]

By sheer coincidence, I just read that myself. (As in "finished it last week".)

I liked the people also. I also thought he did a great job with the structure, turning a series of couple-of-pages first-person accounts into a story. There were a few moments that totally kicked me out of the reality he was building, though -- the former cabinet member who admits far more than any politician ever would admit on the record, the Indian soldier who mentions zombies falling to their doom after it has been established that zombies basically *can't* fall to their doom. I still thought it was a solid book and I enjoyed it, but those moments left their mark on me -- I suppose my rating would've been either 3.5 or 4 thingummies. I mention this because I was surprised -- your reviews had left me thinking that you were more picky about that sort of thing than I was. Apparently that's not the whole story. :)

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I tend to rate on a gestalt level, I think--if a story really worked for me overall in the way that it was intended to, I'm willing to overlook a few flaws. While books that are technically accomplished but leave me cold will get an ok rating, but not stellar. I fully admit this is wildly subjective.