World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
By Max Brooks
Three Rivers Press, paperback reprint (2007), $14.95

Zombies are big business these days. Four of the best horror flicks of the past six years have all featured the living dead: 28 Days Later (2002), Dawn of the Dead (2004 remake), Shaun of the Dead (2004), Land of the Dead(2005). And zombie novels have become so ubiquitous, they now practically constitute their own sub-genre, like vampire or werewolf novels.

Max Brooks knows a lot about zombies, in all their incarnations from Haitian voodoo myths to George A. Romero pics. He should; he’s the author of The Zombie Survival Guide.

But Brooks also knows a good deal about global politics and international quarantine policies, and about street-level culture in Malibu, Kyoto, Tel Aviv and a hundred other places. He knows about covert ops, extreme survival skills, martial arts, submarines, feral cats, and the ecology of whales. In short, Brooks knows a good deal about everything, and he brings all that to the table, imparting a sense that this is exactly how things would play out under the imagined circumstances. Brooks is an encyclopedia, but he never reads like one. All that knowledge informs the dialogue of his characters, helping the reader take them at their word.

The book is laid out as a series of interviews with survivors, people from all walks of life in numerous countries. Whether the stories are being told by a top-level government official or a small-time border smuggler, the voices ring true. Also, even though the stories are obviously being recounted by survivors, Brooks still manages to ratchet up nice levels of suspense and fear. What he achieves here, in sum, is truly staggering.

Of course, the event imagined cannot happen, but like all great speculative fiction, it sheds light on our own world and on events that can and may well occur. Much of what he projects the human response to be, from the neighborhood block right on up to the highest echelons of back-room government, is easily applied to a hypothetical worldwide outbreak of highly infectious disease. Thus, one can substitute any number of real global threats for the zombie menace, threats that would call for quarantine, deplete resources, and strain international relations. Brooks’ portrayal of citizens-on-the-street and world leaders—how they react, how they survive, how they cope in the face of catastrophe and choose between courses of action that all have ethical repercussions and potentially dire consequences—could well be prescient. The obvious homework Brooks has done never overwhelms the story, but grounds it so firmly in reality that you forget how preposterous the basic premise is.

That is the power Brooks wields, and in so doing he makes a contribution to gothic literature as powerful and as timely for the twenty first century as Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde was for the nineteenth or Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby was for the twentieth. By tapping into viable fears and present dangers, Brooks instills his imaginary bogeymen with real terror and menace. These are our worst fears given tangible form, dressed up in mythical drag: walking corpses bringing infection to our homes, invading our safe havens and reminding us viscerally with their dripping flesh and ravaged skulls that in the world we live in, there really is no such place: no haven is truly safe.

--Nicholas Ozment