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.
The Zombie Survival Guide (2003) by Max Brooks: This oddity predated Brooks' World War Z by a full three years. It's basically a set-up for that novel, a guide to surviving the zombie apocalypse written before the zombie apocalypse described in World War Z actually occurs by someone who seems to exist in the same universe as that of World War Z.
The key thing in the volume is an explanation of the zombie virus (dubbed 'Solanum'). There have been zombie outbreaks throughout history, our nameless guide-writer tells us, all caused by that mysterious virus.
Brooks differentiates his zombies from most others with one of the effects of this virus: the living dead are rendered poisonous to virtually anything that might regard them as carrion, from almost all bacteria to bears. Zombies who truly are edible carrion would, as many zombie nitpickers have noted, be pretty much neutralized as a threat in a couple of weeks.
With Solanum comes a couple of other effects: zombies don't digest the people and animals they eat, and zombies can only be killed with a head-shot. The former has been implied from time to time in some zombie movies; the latter has been a staple of zombie movies since at least George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.
I'd guess that this book would be pretty useful if one actually lived in Brooks' fictional universe. There's one glaring problem with Brooks' world both here and in World War Z: he drastically over-rates a silencer/suppressor's ability to muffle the noise of a handgun or rifle.
This wouldn't be such a problem if the book didn't exhaustively detail all the 'noisy' things one shouldn't do (drive a car, yell, walk through tall grass) while nonetheless espousing the worth of silenced guns. Go look up silenced/suppressed decibel levels some time. They're definitely louder than walking through tall grass, cars (even cars without mufflers!) and pretty much everything else.
Brooks' unnamed writer also waxes eloquent about the efficacy of the Japanese samurai sword (or 'katana'). An entire Internet argument sprang up around this topic (and Michonne's use of the katana in The Walking Dead). The general consensus was that the katana is extremely difficult to wield and, wielded by a novice, has an alarming tendency to break. Oops.
There are long, tedious stretches throughout, the boredom and page-flipping arising from those sections which consist of check-lists for what one needs for certain zombie-apocalypse scenarios. Brooks really goes all-in on the idea that this guide is 'real.' And oh so boring in its details.
The most enjoyable parts consist of the entries on zombie attacks throughout history. Brooks apparently thought so too, as a subsequent book and graphic novel series described some of these millennia-spanning attacks in greater detail. Brooks goes back to Ancient Egypt in terms of recorded encounters and even further back with cave paintings and other prehistoric artifacts suggesting that zombies have been around as long as Homo sapiens. The Zombie Survival Guide works best in concert with World War Z. Lightly recommended.
