How do you rebuild the world after a zombie apocalypse? How does the human race move forward when the images of an unimaginable war are imprinted on the brains of every survivor? What lengths would you go to in order to ensure your family was safe from a virus that turned people from living breathing souls into undead nightmares within minutes? All of these questions and more are raised in Max Brooks’s frighteningly realistic horror novel, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.
Set ten years after the great Zombie War almost wiped out the entire human race, Brooks, acting as the narrator, takes it upon himself to travel around the world and document numerous first person accounts from the individuals who lived through it. Some passages are hilarious while others are graphic accounts of how the undead almost decimated the entire world population. These aren’t your typical Night of the Living Dead comatose zombies – sleepwalking through life – Brooks’ zombies are hungry for flesh and will stop at nothing to get it.
However, it isn’t far into the novel that we learn its not the zombies that are the only bad guys in this epic – in these times of extreme survival the darkest sides of humanity emerge. Take for instance Paul Rekker a South African who believes our greatest flaw as humans is emotion. Hired to spearhead “Orange Eighty-Eight” he must figure out who should be taken to safety based on IQ, status, and other factors. Or there’s Jesika Hendricks, whose family went as far north in Canada as they could to outrun the undead and along the way learn how to kill potential threats (some are former friends) and eat the remains of those who don’t survive the harsh winter in order to stay alive. These are just two specific examples – over the course of the book we meet doctors, villages, government officials, children, civilians, mental patients and more who all vividly bring to life this whole new world.
With so much media attention surrounding Brad Pitt’s upcoming movie adaptation of the book it will be interesting to see how Hollywood takes all of these single vignettes and turns it into an easy-to-follow plot. In any case, do yourself a favor and read the book before hitting up the multiplex.
“World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War”]The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our hearts.”
