World War Z
September 26th, 2006
Zombies are fun. They’ve been a necessary part of the horror genre almost since Day One…but, oddly enough, zombies haven’t fared all that well in print. Anyone can name a plethora of zombie films, starting with The Mummy (a particularly dry and past-his-prime zombie, yes, but an example of the walking dead nonetheless!) and ending with Shaun of the Dead. But how many zombie novels, or even short stories, can you name? Hell, I only know of these because I’m a horror scholar, and it’s literally my job to keep track of this stuff! There were the landmark living dead anthologies Book of the Dead and Still Dead, both edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector, and more recently James Lowder’s collection The Book of All Flesh and its sequel The Book of More Flesh. And as far as novel-length works go, you’ve got new horror author Brian Keene’s The Rising and City of the Dead, and David Wellington’s Monster Island*, which first garnered acclaim when it was first released as a serial on the author’s blog. None of these novels are as familiar to horror aficionados as any of the zombie films, and for two good reasons:
1) the zombie subgenre is naturally better-suited to film due to the subgenre’s reliance on gore and very visceral horror, elements which just don’t come across as effectively in black-and-white print as they do on the full-color, blood-soaked screen; and
2) all of these novels suffer from being completely derivative of the raw visuals and survival-horror surface elements of Romero’s and Fulci’s definitive films without also dealing in the political and social satire of the films. This leaves those books as little more than one-trick ponies: Let’s just see how a varied bunch of people survive in a world overrun by the walking dead. Reading them is like reading someone’s notes on playing a survival-horror videogame. It’s just…dull.
The fascination with zombie apocalypses does not stem, ultimately, from how people survive the plague of biting, moaning undead - it’s who survives. The zombie subgenre is the most sociologically interesting category of horror because it doesn’t deal with just a family being haunted by a pesky poltergeist, say, or with a small group of knowledgeable people fighting off some Threat from Beyond - it deals with humanity itself being threatened with extinction by our own dead. In a certain light, zombie outbreaks are no different than plague outbreaks, but there’s a major difference: when someone dies from Captain Trips or the 12 Monkeys virus, that person doesn’t stand back up, gather together a posse of fellow reanimates, and go hunting living flesh to consume! Zombie films and novels are always about small groups of people - a microcosm of Society At Large, if you will - banding together to survive the onslaught of the Undead Masses. My god, the symbolism is ridiculously obvious! As is the potential for satire…and that’s exactly what you find in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Simon Pegg’s wonderful send-up Shaun of the Dead.
Watching zombie films or reading zombie stories is fun - and educational - because you not only get to watch the dynamic activities of a group of survivors battling the stumbling hordes, you also get to watch the social dynamics among that group of survivors. You get to see heads being blown off, brains and intestines being gnawed on, and living people acting out all manner of stereotypical situations, characteristics, and so forth. Without that extra dimension of social insight, all you have is a shoot-’em-up that ends when either the Last Surviving Human gets bit or the Intrepid Survivors make it to safety. There are thousands of bad direct-to-video zombie productions Out There that are just like that, and though they may be shallow, repetitive, and completely unmemorable, at least they’re somewhat amusing to watch because of the mindless gore and the action. But who wants to read three hundred pages of just that?
Zombie literature has to take a slightly different tack than zombie films. Zombie lit simply cannot emphasize the action, or the gore, or the mere mechanics of the survival-horror plot–that stuff just doesn’t do so well in print. Instead, if you’re going to write about zombies, you have to emphasize the sociological, the satire, the emphasis on the “human condition” as opposed to the slam-whizz-bang furor of popping maggot-infested crania. And I don’t think I’ve ever read a zombie novel that does that.
That is, until I picked up Max Brooks’ phenomenal new work, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (official Random House site here)!
Max Brooks - son of Mel Brooks (yes, that Mel Brooks, the comic genius behind History of the World: Part 1 and Spaceballs) - first ventured into the realm of zombie lit with The Zombie Survival Guide (official site here), a tongue-in-cheek, yet still practical, handbook to surviving the inevitable zombie apocalypse. “Organize before they rise!” is the book’s slogan, and it is at once dead serious (ha ha ha!) and completely hysterical. Why? Brook’s guide is not a silly, over-the-top comic farce, but a completely sober, serious piece of satire that examines contemporary American civilization and its various weaknesses by showing what could happen should the dead begin to rise and completely destabilize our individualist, technocentric civilization. It’s a proud example of that sophisticated kind of satire best exemplified by Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, which took the piss from Eighteenth Century Britain’s highminded social critics by expertly pointing out that the Irish famine could be eliminated if only the Irish would consent to eat their children. For all zombie aficionados, the practical, down-to-earth advice of The Zombie Survival Guide was a Major Publication, because it scraped together all the ideas about zombie uprisings presented over the years by Romero, Fulci, Savini, and the like and distilled them into a hands-on guide explaining just what could happen to YOU - and what you could do to survive it - when the apocalypse begins.
But World War Z one-ups not only The Zombie Survival Guide, but - quite literally - every other zombie novel and movie ever made. You heard me. But, you reply, them’s some tough words, there, Pegritz. How does a novel by a famous funny-man’s kid trump Night of the Living Dead, or Dawn of the Dead (original and remake), or even The Evil Dead?! It’s simple: World War Z takes the social satire and survival-horror basics of Romero, combines them with the pervasive sense of Total Apocalypse of 28 Days Later and Land of the Dead, then blends them together with an extremely sharp perspective on the current state of world affairs to produce a “nonfiction” account of the entire Zombie War all around the planet. The novel is truly global in scope, not only because of its international characters and settings, but because it examines virtually everything that is Human in light of the Dead: foreign relations, domestic policies, cultural conflicts, technological issues, labor issues, psychological issues, public-health issues…hell, even pet issues!
Simply put: World War Z is the first of its kind - a worldwide zombie omnibus that doesn’t just restrict its POV to, say, a tiny sampling of Americans holed up in the Monroeville Mall. That approach is fine for something with the limited scope of a feature film, but a novel demands More Details. Brooks handles this by presenting readers with a wide range of perspectives: folks from around the world, ordinary people to governmental movers-and-shakers, military skullbreakers to abandoned children gone feral. He shows you the Zombie War from nearly every angle imaginable.
This book is exactly what zombie literature has been waiting for: its definitive text. Max Brooks has clearly eaten the brains of Studs Terkel, whom he thanks for the neural donation in the book’s credits-reel. In an interview with Ain’t It Cool News, Brooks notes that Terkel’s amazing oral history of World War II, The Good War, was an obvious influence on his own work. World War Z is not a “novel”, per se, in that it does not present a unified narrative propelled by the interactions of a limited number of characters: rather, like The Good War, World War Z is a collection of interviews in which the characters speak of their own experiences before, during, and after the Zombie War.
The interviews are collected in a number of chronological “chapters” detailing various stages in the Zombie War: the early stages of the initial outbreak in China, the spread of the undead plague throughout the world, the Great Panic, the following harrowing years of attempting to stabilize the situation, the final “sanitization” sweeps, and the first few post-war years.
To begin with, Brooks does an amazing job at defining the epidemiology of the zombie plague (in fact, he defined it earlier in The Zombie Survival Guide, and World War Z can easily be seen as a dramatization of the Survival Guide’s ideas). He leaves no stone unturned when illustrating how the worldwide outbreak occurred, spreading like wildfire due to many governments’ snide unwillingness to even believe (and, later, acknowledge) that the dead could possibly be coming back to life. The author never goes into the biology of the zombie plague, of course - that information is just not necessary to the story - but he does pay close attention to its consequences, painting a VERY frightening picture of just how fast a virulent new disease could spread throughout the entire world thanks to our global transportation networks and the inevitable governmental bungling of public health crises. But that’s just the beginning of the horror.
There are moments of action in the various characters’ narratives (some of the first survivors’ tales deal specifically with their initial encounters with, and bloody, brain-smashing escapes from, the walking dead), but the true horror of World War Z comes from the atmosphere of mounting dread that pervades the early chapters. As the governments of the United States, Russia, China, and the EU attempt to deal with the outbreaks in secret to prevent widespread panic, Israel and South Africa - sites of some of the earliest outbreaks - close their borders and begin taking aggressive steps toward dealing with the contagion. In the US, an opportunistic biotech tycoon rushes a useless vaccine through the FDA and makes a fortune selling a defense against the “African rabies” epidemic, while China and Russia attempt to cover up the crisis completely under stories of “insurgents” and “civil unrest”. By the time the First World governments wake up and decide to take any kind of reasonable action, the contagion has hit the unstoppable point of exponential expansion. Cities have become seething wounds filled with zombies and terror. The Great Panic has begun…and as people desperately try to flee the contagion, they find themselves trapped in hundred-mile-long traffic jams, easy pickings for the shambling, biting undead.
The most interesting aspect of the zombie plague is that Brooks does not present his zombies as the quick-moving, furious cannibals of the Dawn of the Dead remake or 28 Days Later. No, his zombies are your traditional stumbling, moaning, hands-held-out-in-front-of-them Romero zombies. They’re slow, they’re stupid…they can’t really climb stairs or figure out how to open doors. So why are they so deadly? Simple: numbers. They might be slow, but how are you going to fight an enemy whose numbers grow with every bite? Who can take ten bullets to the chest, have his arms and legs blown off, and still keeps coming relentlessly? The United States military attempts a “Shock and Awe” standoff with the tide of the undead outside New York City, in Yonkers, and despite the soldiers’ high-tech gear, they are quickly overrun and butchered by the walking dead…who just keep coming, and coming, and coming, pouring out of the city like a tsunami of hungry ants. The soldiers empty all their ammo into wave after wave of zombies, and when they run out…there’s still another hundred waves of undead coming.
Brooks is particularly sharp at illustrating how high-tech is not always a guarantee for survival or military success. We in the U.S. have a major love affair with technology, and often believe that if we can “out-tech” an enemy we can beat them easily. But Brooks points out clearly that high-tech solutions aren’t always the best solutions. Later in the novel, for instance, when the U.S. finally begins to rally and the tide starts to turn against the zombie hordes, the primary weapon issued to soldiers is a modified trenching tool now called a “Lobo”, or Lobotomizer. A shot to the head is still the most effective way to take a zombie out, naturally, but what happens when you run out of bullets? The Lobo is incredibly low-tech, but works every time. It needs no reloading, no maintenance, and is very cheap to produce in bulk. Now, consider the combat laser weapons also mentioned in the novel: they can fry zombies, sure, but they cost millions to produce, are extremely fragile, and can easily malfunction. Why use a multimillion-dollar laser weapon to zap a handful of zombies when you can equip a number of soldiers with $10 Lobos that only need a little muscle-power to work? While that laser cannon’s recharging, a couple of guys with glorified sharpened shovels can take off ten times as many heads!
Brooks’ descriptions of how our advanced civilization could be brought down almost overnight by something as “simple” as a plague of the undead is particularly harrowing - especially if you are, like me, a citizen in a country like the U.S. Furthermore, Brooks gives us glimpses of the world after the Zombie War: a world in which many buildings are built on stilts with retractable staircases and ladders, United Nations patrols scour the northern countries after winter looking for frozen zombies that might thaw and cause trouble, and many people once again carry swords. Low-tech, but consistently effective, solutions to a low-tech problems. The lesson of the novel is quite clear: technology is only as good as the people using it, and if they’re not prepared to use it properly against a special type of enemy, it’s more a hindrance than a help.
This is a novel with many lessons - and many of them are political. Make no mistake: this is a politically-charged novel. Brooks wear his politics on his sleeve, and they are most definitely not the kind of politics our current administration, or the current administrations of China, Iran, Pakistan, India, and Russia want to hear. Brooks is unconditionally and unapologetically critical of China and Russia in particular - but he is not looking down on them from a high-and-might First World stance. The author clearly has sympathy for individual people, and flatout recognizes that the two most dynamic economies of the immediately pre-Zombie era were not the US and the EU, but China and India. These nations’ governments, however, are not to be credited for these economic strengths: it was the average people who made up the rank-and-file of these countries who kept them going. Brooks even shows how, after the collapse of Castro’s regime in Cuba, the Cuban nation becomes one of the greatest economic powers in the world thanks to the stability of the powerful capitalist system that emerges there when mainland banks flee to the safety of that little well-defended, offshore paradise.
But don’t take Brooks’ for a bleeding-heart liberal. He clearly - but not explicitly - points out that the great mistakes the U.S. government made in the early days of the zombie outbreaks were committed by a Democratic administration that made its way into power on a strict anti-war stance after the collapse of our involvement in “the last brushfire conflict” (Iraq? No…really?). Liberals of all stripes will no doubt be appalled by the “Redekker Plan”, developed in South Africa and implemented, eventually, under a variety of other names around the world, to save governmental and military systems by abandoning strategic population regions so they can serve as “zombie magnets”. These zones would draw the ravenous zombie hordes while governmental and military systems could mobilize, concentrate, and eventually strike back. But in a true total war like this one…sacrifices must be made. Individuals don’t matter as much as long-term stability.
Nonetheless, Brooks’ zombie politics are, ultimately, about as anti-conservative as you can get. One can easily read World War Z as a scathing critique of our present world situation, with extra emphasis placed on the repressive governments of Russia and China, and no little scorn for the United States’ love of spectacle over responsibility. One of the best means of pointing out a nation’s problems are by setting up fictional situations that exacerbate them and make them obvious. Sinclair Lewis did so with It Can’t Happen Here, and throughout the first pages of World War Z that mantra, “It can’t happen here!” is repeated over and over by officials and civilians all over the world. But it can. The undead can and will find you. They are as inevitable and overwhelming as any force of nature.
And that’s what the zombie apocalypse, ultimately, is. A natural disaster for the entire planet, a worldwide Hurricane Katrina. Though clearly aimed at American audiences, I have no doubt that readers in other countries will be able to see the significance, because the rest of the world is much more familiar with natural disasters than the U.S. is.
In conclusion, this is the zombie novel of all time. No kidding. If you’re looking for vivid descriptions of arms being gnawed off or intestines being yanked out, then go and read one of those inferior other zombie novels. If you want to see the Full Picture of the Zombie War that Romero’s films only hinted at; if you want to read a masterful piece of satire; if you just want to enjoy a novel with a truly epic scope…then World War Z is what you’ve been waiting for your entire life! God knows, I have been waiting long enough to read something like this.
Also, the audiobook version is well worth checking out. it features the author himself as the interviewer, and such Hollywood greats as Mark Hammill, Jurgen Prochnow, and many others reading various characters’ stories! It is an abridged version, comprising only the lengthiest narratives from the book, but a wonderful companion piece to the novel.
And, yes…there will be a movie. Paramount Pictures bought the movie rights before the novel was even published! Now, this could be good news, or execrable news. If the film is designed to mimic the book’s “nonfiction” delivery and is presented as a documentary featuring actual footage from the Zombie War, interviews, and maybe recreated scenes, then it will be awesome. However, if it becomes “Hollywoodized” and turned into Yet Another Zombie Action movie like Resident Evil, then I fully expect to see a zombie horde marching on Hollywood to kill, maim, and eat the morons involved. Let’s hope the former prevails.
*Which also has sequels: Monster Nation and Monster Planet. Apparently zombie novels, like zombies themselves, travel in smelly packs.
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