This book is actually Bryan's. It sits on a shelf in my room because most books live there, but it's really his book. For some occasion or another early in our courtship, I bought him The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks, primarily because he had shown an interest in it during some trip to Borders. He bought this one some time after for himself. I'm being vague because neither of us can remember when this shit happened. The first time I remember that it was in his possession was when we went to the Fourth of July thing in Summerlin back in... I think it was 2008, when the Las Vegas Philharmonic still performed there during fireworks instead of at the Springs Preserve, those assholes. It was the first time Bryan and I had gone to a Fourth of July thing together that wasn't just on base with my parents. We parked in a church parking lot and ate baked barbecue chips. On the way home we listened to Mega Man songs, songs from Paint the Line, and also from FLCL and Hellboy.
Yeah, it had to have been 2008. We had just seen the Phil a month before at Video Games Live, and we initially saw the ad for that in the new student lounge at school, and we graduated that year.
Sorry, I kind of got caught up in that. Anyway.
I had been intending on reading Bryan's books eventually, but the deed didn't actually happen until now, when we live together. Well, that's not true. I tried to read a Tom Clancy book of his, and I hated it so much that he actually threw it away, because he didn't really like it either. I know. It stung me to see it happen, trust me.
Anyway. World War Z.
I may have been spoiled by other zombie novels I have read, but I think that the key to a good zombie story is not just the fear of the creatures and the emotion of having friends and family become zombies. Those might be successful in movies or even video games, but there is a lot more involved in a book, I think. But, then again, what do I have to compare World War Z to? Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Feed. Both had a certain aspect to them that World War Z only brushes on, that I really liked. Please bear with me, I'm going to compare them all, high-school-essay style.
I have a confession: I never read Pride and Prejudice. We didn't read it in school, and if it was a classic, I probably didn't read it as a young person. I was more into the horror and mystery, then the fantasy, and then the fantastical horror that actually did introduce me to a nonacademic interest in classic literature. (What? I consider Lovecraft classic literature. Bite me.) By the time I was an adult, I was having to play catchup. I still haven't read Pride and Prejudice without the added zombie element. I'm more interested in doing so now, mostly because I want to see how certain parts work out without the undead threat and the martial arts scenes. But Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was not about the zombie apocalypse; it was about how society could still uphold itself even with a constant supernatural threat. Basically, how do well-to-do human beings adapt, or not adapt, to their new world? It was interesting to think that it would really only change the standards on marriageable women and when people could travel, as if the undead were just a bout of bad weather. (If you must know some background, that book is also Bryan's, but it was given to him for Christmas '09 by my family.)
Feed blew my goddamn mind away. It was suggested to me by a friend of Bryan, who had read it and wanted someone else to read it so that he could talk to someone about it. I actually went out with him and his now-fiancee to dinner and stuff while Bryan was out of town last summer. One of the places we went was a B&N, and I picked it up then because why not? Now, to be fair, I thought the characters were shit. They were stock characters out of any movie: the cynical reporter, the daredevil survivalist, the ditsy technologist. But the greatest thing to come out of it, and it is pretty great, is the world-building. A zombie book could easily just fighting off the undead menace, or running away in fear. This zombie book was about how an infection present in nearly all mammals changed the way the world worked, but still continued on in some aspects, as if nothing ever happened. For instance, they go to a restaurant and then expound on how beef can no longer be eaten because of the infection. But their journey in the book revolves around a presidential campaign. I loved Feed, even with shit characters, because the world-building was so rich and satisfying.
What I'm getting at is that, after two seemingly ridiculous undead romps in fiction, I actually had pretty high standards for this book.
World War Z also brought with it a lot of the neat world-building that I loved in Feed. The part about the "preventative drug" Phalanx and the part at the end about whales was in particular interesting and enriching.
But there were some reasons for me to put this book down in favor of a DVD series of shows I had already seen before. One of them was built into the structure of the book itself. Since the whole thing was put together as if the war was real, it had no real climbing structure and climax, no real reveal. You know the war is over before the book even begins. Instead of an actual story you want to indulge yourself in, you get details of many people's stories about an event that already took place.
And then the book is filled to the brim with characters. Most of which you only hear from once. There are a select few that, at the end, you get to hear from again, and there is one character that you get to hear from an amazing three times. As a result, you can't build any real emotion for them, have any real stake in how things turn out for them. I understand that the point was to explore a broad range of subjects from all sides, but it ends up being stretched thin, character-wise.
The last gripe I have is more personal than the rest. I get that it was a war. I get that you have to fight zombies, and that's why there are so many games dedicated to it. But the sections talking about various battles and fighting off the zombies and stuff? I actually was turned off by that. That isn't to say that the imagery at the end of the Yonkers section isn't great. Who wouldn't want to see a zombie with his respiratory system hanging out of his mouth? But it was not interesting to me. The most interesting parts were the parts about how they responded to the threat. The K9 squads. The undersea divers. The holy assassins of Russia. That stuff was great. The generic, seen-it-in-a-million-movies battlefield scenes? Yawn.
All in all, it wasn't the greatest zombie book I've read, but it was interesting. I would recommend it.
8/10
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