Reviewed by Ambrea
As
the greatest conflict in history, the “Zombie War” changed the world and
everyone in it—and one man is intent on retelling the memories of those days,
preserving history that may one day be forgotten. He begins his interviews at the start what
history now knows as “The Crisis” and follows the narrative thread from one
country to the next (China, America, South Africa, England, Israel, and even
Antarctica), until the present day when humanity is no longer faced with
extinction from the walking dead.
Admittedly,
I’m not much of a fan of zombie lore. I
rarely read books about the walking, shuffling creatures that haunt so much of primetime
television, but I became absorbed into World
War Z for the simple fact it isn’t your typical zombie horror story. The author, Max Brooks, creates a series of
interweaving interviews, providing a narrative that stretches across all of human
existence and experience. Not only
do readers have the opportunity to witness different stories, we have the
chance to see what happens in different parts of the world and how various
countries encounter the same threat.
World War Z is fascinating
and inventive. I mean, the novel answers
questions I didn’t even know I might have about a zombie apocalypse. For instances, what happens to astronauts
trapped on a space station? Do zombies
float—or do the sink and walk on the ocean floor? Can a person fool a zombie and get away with
walking in their midst? And what happens
to the global economy after everything goes kaput?
Brooks
answers all these questions and more, providing an amazing breadth and depth to
his novel that, confidentially, I didn’t expect. Although I never did receive a complete
explanation as to how zombies were first created or where the apocalypse really
begins (there’s plenty of supposition between characters, so I wasn’t
completely left in the dark), World War Z
is so fully comprehensive in its examination of the Zombie War that I never
noticed it lacking.
Truth
be told, World War Z is probably one
of my favorite books. There is, of
course, the requisite amount of gore and human desperation—murder, cannibalism,
suicide, genocide, zombie carnage and so forth—but it tells a story of survival,
recovery from a wound that’s incredibly deep.
It shares a dystopian future guaranteed to give a reader chills, but it
manages to weave a story that’s intricate, extraordinary, and vaguely hopeful.
