An emotionally affecting, thoughtful, and utterly terrifying read.
First, let’s put all our cards on the table. Zombies are awesome. A bad zombie movie is still a zombie movie. It’s hard to go too wrong with a shuffling army of the undead — reanimated corpses are terrifying. They just keep coming! Shoot them in the head! But you’re an office worker/suburban mom/barista on the run, what do you know about handling a shotgun? The learning curve at work in a good zombie flick is precipitous, to say the least, and half the fun is watching the survivors try to figure it all out, as the relentless mob of corpses advances.
Zombies are fairly reliable as a movie device, with their advanced state of decay and straight-up hideousness offering endless shock value. We aren’t used to seeing decomposing bodies, and the wrongness of thousands of them is horrifying. But how effective can they possibly be in a book?
When I first saw World War Z on the table at the Coop, I was fairly certainly it was a novelty follow-up to the author’s Zombie Survival Guide. The premise — “An Oral History of the Zombie War” — seemed a bit gimmicky. But when it appeared on the new books shelf at Lamont (three cheers for attending a school with a huge library budget!), zombie-crazed fan-girl that I am, I picked it up. I proceeded to spend the next several hours ignoring my thesis to read the entire book in a single sitting — at night, no less (not a wise decision).
The book presents itself as a series of first-person accounts of the Zombie War collected for, but deleted from, the U.N.’s Postwar Commission Report. As he tells us in the introduction, faced with bureaucratic disdain for his intimate, highly personal style of writing the war’s history, the author has chosen to publish his own book in the style he deems most appropriate.
And so, we get the entire story in the form of interviews. The narrator keeps to the margins, jumping in rarely. Brooks does a fabulous job of creating a wide range of voices, from Arthur Sinclair, Junior, wartime director of the US Department of Strategic Resources, to Jesika Hendricks, survivor of Canada’s frozen refugee camps. He includes government officials, military personnel from a variety of countries, regular people forced to improvise and just hang on until some kind of help arrived. This strategy of producing first-person miniatures allows Brooks to produce some genuinely emotionally affecting moments, as characters memorialize those they’ve lost or confess what they did to survive. He balances the world-historical level with the mundane, terrible basics of survival. It’s like a history of World War II that includes accounts from cabinet members and victory gardeners, but instead of fighting Hitler, they’re up against “Zack.”
Not only does Brooks bend over backwards to include different types of speakers, his thoroughness in thinking through the implications of a serious outbreak of a zombie virus is astounding. He’s got zombies floating in the world’s oceans, infesting the sewers of Paris, smuggled out of China through Tibet, trapped for eternity in deserted SUVs on crumbling interstate highways. Cuba, thanks to its island status and preexisting isolation, has survived to become the world’s economic superpower, thriving on an influx of international money and American refugee labor. No one knows what happened to North Korea, as the whole country sealed itself off in the early days of the outbreak. This all makes for a particularly brainy kind of book, even as it aims to scare the crap out of you. You’ll enjoy this best if you’ve read The Greatest Generation or The Commanding Heights or other attempts to explain huge events to inquiring (but perhaps not expert) minds, as it’s a take-off on exactly those books.
It might sound like this would produce a disorganized, jumbled narrative, but Brooks does an admirable job of keeping sight of the larger narrative. Zombies rise; governments don’t respond fast enough; untold numbers die and the outbreak escalates; humans regroup; humans triumph (for now...). Sometimes, the structure allows Brooks to run off on a bit of a political tangent, having too much fun skewering Bush administration officials or suggesting that Howard Dean would, in the event of a Zombie War, end up VP and, eventually, president. The “Grover Carlson” character, while good for a giggle as he picks up cow chips and defends the government’s lack of response, does not contribute a whole lot to the plot, and seems a tad self-indulgent.
But what works best about the set-up of the novel is that Brooks doesn’t waste time on excessive exposition, and he rarely succumbs to the temptations of the info-dump. The reader gets the sense that he knows all the details of the larger narrative, but he doesn’t subject us to all the world-building background work he’s done. Stories remain just a bit mysterious, with the suggestion of things left untold. The best example of this is the Englishman ostensibly interviewed about the role of castles in the war. As it turns out, this particular survivor was stationed at Windsor Castle during the war, and, while he’s talkative about the mechanics of defending the stronghold, he only reluctantly discusses how “she wouldn’t leave, you know,” and insisted on staying “for the duration.” It’s clear he’s talking about the Queen, and it’s equally clear that the work’s fictional audience would know exactly what happened at Windsor. But we don’t. We’re left to fill in the gaps, to guess, to assume, and this is the greatest strength of the book, and why it’s a worthy contribution to the whole zombie genre.
However, the only real question is, does it work as horror? Can a written description of a zombie terrify just as completely as the sight of a hissing, nasty, walking corpse? Maybe not while you’re reading it. But that’s the thing about a good book: it lodges in your brain worse than the Gilligan’s Island theme song. You put World War Z down, and you go to bed, and you start to wonder what that tapping noise on your fire escape is....
Armies of the undead stand no chance against Kelly Faircloth ’08 (fairclot@fas).