World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006) by Max Brooks

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006) by Max Brooks: Max Brooks is obsessed by zombies, especially those from the George Romero universe of zombies that first appeared in 1968's Night of the Living Dead: nearly mindless, man-eating, slow-moving hordes of the hungry dead. World War Z is a love letter to Night of the Living Dead, though Brooks' zombies have some attributes peculiar to his story.

The attribute specifically tailored to the tale of World War Z is that the virus that creates zombies (named 'Solanum') renders those zombies toxic to nearly every creature on Earth, from bacteria to vultures. Brooks thus avoids one of the problems with the idea of a zombie apocalypse: after about two weeks, the zombies should be defunct from wave after wave of attacks from every carrion eater on Earth from the microscopic level on up.

Other specific attributes include things that would later be familiar to watchers of The Walking Dead. The zombies don't swell their ranks with those buried dead who were not already infected with the zombie virus. Graveyards are relatively safe in Brooks' universe. His zombies don't digest their food. They're really, really dead. And they will eat any animal large enough for them to notice: they only PREFER humans.

Brooks has said that he got the idea for the format of World War Z from histories by Studs Terkel. Terkel's books told the stories of such events as World War Two (The Good War) by assembling first-hand accounts from people involved and then weaving them into topics arrayed within an overall arc. Brooks' frame narrator collects stories from survivors of the Great Zombie War, several years after the war is over. As World War Z seems to begin some time around 2010-2012, the frame narrative occurs somewhere around 2020.

Of course, the format of World War Z didn't originate with Terkel via Brooks. The documentary style has been with horror since its beginnings, whether in novels made up of letters and diary entries (Hello, Frankenstein!), novels that add newspaper articles to that mix (Dracula), stories that frame first-person narratives of the past within a present-day investigation ("The Colour Out Of Space"), movies that claim to be based on true events (The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre), or the now-ubiquitous variations on the found-footage movie made popular (though not originated) by the original Blair Witch Project. Brooks' addition to this long tradition is an admirable one, though, and generally pitch perfect.

Of course I have complaints. I still don't have the faintest idea of how a dead creature with no metabolism can walk around. I wouldn't quibble about this when the zombies are either supernatural in origin or at least not understood. Brooks' zombies, though, with their quasi-scientific backing, don't seem all that scientific when it comes to their locomotion. Or the fact that they don't all end up at the bottom of the Grand Canyon or some other large hole given their tendency to flock together by the millions and tens of millions and walk mindlessly in straight lines. But that's another story. Don't bother with the movie. Highly recommended.