April 1, 2015
When I posted the cover of this book in my classroom (I share some, not all, of the books that I read with my students), many of them were fascinated, especially since they'd seen the movie. I haven't, but based on the little that I know (mainly due to the South Park episode that spoofs it), it is very different from the book. Brad Pitts' character doesn't even exist in the book. I plan to watch it on Netflix this weekend, but I imagine that the screenwriter(s) and filmmaker(s) wanted to fix up what I felt was a flaw in the story. While I can appreciate the care that Brooks took with the details, the book got a little tedious at times.
The unnamed narrator interviewed many people in the U.S. and around the world about their experiences in the Zombie War, or World War Z. Nobody knows quite how the "virus" started, but it seemed like "Patient Zero" was some poor kid in China. People contract the virus by getting bitten directly by a zombie, and then dying and becoming reanimated as zombies themselves. The zombies are not intelligent, and are driven only by their hunger for human flesh. But their numbers are in the millions, maybe even billions worldwide, at the height of the Great Panic, and they can only be killed by destroying the brain, making most military technology worthless.
What I really liked about this book was how Brooks essentially imagines how the entire world would react to such horrors, and it seemed realistic (besides the fact that, you know, zombies aren't real). I also liked some of the stories told by the interviewees. Some of the best were: Kondo Tatsumo, the teenage "otaku" who had to escape his city on his own, eventually becoming the disciple of a blind man who'd successfully survived and fought off zombies alone in the Japanese wilderness; Jesika Hendricks, who'd been a privileged kid in Colorado who fled to northern Canada with her parents, who, in a camp of refugees, turned to cannibalism to survive the harsh winter; Christina Eliopolis, who had imagined a woman speaking to her through a radio after her supply plane crashed in a Louisiana swamp, which helped her get to a pick-up point while being chased by zombies; and Breckinridge Scott, a piece of shit who cashed in on the Panic by marketing a useless "vaccine," and is now hiding out in Antarctica to avoid prosecution. There were some other good stories, but those were the standouts for me. Unfortunately, not all of the stories were so compelling. Since the story is told interview style, it's mostly telling and not a ton of showing, which I'm not a fan of in fiction. It made some parts of the story, especially the ones talking military strategy, to drag on for me.
So again, I appreciate Brooks' ideas here, but the structure didn't always work for me as a reader. I might have liked it better if it had stuck to maybe a handful of POVs, showing these characters throughout the war and aftermath in alternating chapters. One Goodreads commenter said that with all the people in the story, the "voices" all sound the same. I wouldn't go that far, but to an extent I agree. Less main characters, and more characterization, might have made this book easier to connect with.
In the book, the world has mainly recovered from the war, but things have changed dramatically, and zombies are still a minor threat (which people are now equipped to deal with in most places). I had a classmate in grad school who legitimately believed that a zombie apocalypse was a possibility. I think she may have read and taken this book a little too seriously.
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