World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

I finally finished reading World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks. I haven’t had as much time to read lately, but I sat down earlier this morning and decided to finish it.

The book title may sound silly, and if you have read The Zombie Survival Guide by Brooks you may even be expecting some humour, but you will find very little in this book. This is a much more serious and tragic novel about a writer who is chronicling a factual book about the Zombie outbreak 10 years after it has occurred. This writer also put together the official UN reports and felt that he needed to write a more human account of the tale.

Without giving too much away, the entire book is made up of short chapters sometimes only a few pages long chronicling the lives of individuals and their experiences throughout the Zombie War. The book is fantastic, and there are plans to turn it into a motion picture. Every story is well thought out and most of them are very believable and convincing.

If you have ever watched a Zombie movie or even read Zombie books, usually they are fairly hokey or they deal with one small isolated situation like a mall or even a city. World War Z covers the entire spectrum of the planet and many different scenarios. The book delves right into the politics and how badly many governments screwed up, but it also covers many other situations. Ever wondered what would happen to the oceans during a worldwide Zombie outbreak, or the mad rush to flee cities? What about the internet addicted shut in who follows the entire outbreak from the illusional safety of his room in Tokyo right up until the Zombies knock on his door? What about someone who is blind with no one to help them during the chaos. The book covers many personal stories like these.

This is every Zombie fans must read book and most have probably already read it by now, but because it’s so different from the run of the mill Zombie genre, I think many non-Zombie fans will really enjoy this book too. I guess it’s classified as horror, but it’s really not that scary and actually far more emotionally tragic.