World War Z An oral history of the zombie war

Review by New York Times Review

Zombies, traditionally, do not move with great speed or agility. As the sheriff in George A. Romero's classic 1968 movie, "Night of the Living Dead," astutely observes, "They're dead, they're all messed up." But they're also mighty persistent, and, apparently through sheer doggedness, the reanimated deceased have managed to occupy increasingly large areas of the popular imagination in the past few years. They don't, of course, reproduce in the usual way. The Romero-type zombie, very much the dominant form these days, multiplies by contagion, like a virus: it feeds on flesh, and its bite is lethal, so even those semi-fortunate humans who aren't wholly devoured, but merely gnawed upon, die and come back as shuffling, hollow-eyed flesh-eaters themselves. It was not always thus. Time was, the mere idea that a corpse could come back to life and walk the earth (however slowly) seemed sufficiently creepy. The monster in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" did have some anger-management issues, but until "Night of the Living Dead" most resurrected cadavers had been pretty placid. The title creature of Jacques Tourneur's weirdly lyrical 1943 movie, "I Walked With a Zombie," doesn't eat flesh and is entirely unthreatening to the living beings around her; all that's horrifying is the unnatural, unassimilable fact of her existence. That's not enough anymore: nature isn't what it used to be, after all. And to be repelled by a woman just because she has returned from the dead could be considered a tad judgmental. The thing about these newly empowered 21st-century zombies is that they keep coming at you, relentlessly, wave upon wave of necrotic, mindlessly voracious semi-beings. According to the current convention, the individual reanimatee can be dispatched by shooting or stabbing it in the brain, but the strength of this inexorably advancing zombie population is in its numbers: the ambulatory dead are, you might say, a fast-growing demographic. This sort of creature is an extremely convenient monster for low-budget filmmakers like Romero, who had the wit to realize that with zombies he wouldn't have to break the bank on highly skilled professional actors. Anybody can shamble along looking vacant. In fiction, however, these alarming entities have fewer obvious attractions because, unlike vampires, werewolves, demons, witches, goblins and shape-shifters, zombies can't plausibly be endowed with rich, complex inner lives. They don't even have personalities. Christopher Golden, in the preface to his anthology of zombie Stories, THE NEW DEAD (St. Martin's Griffin, paper, $14.99), owns up to a degree of puzzlement about the current popularity of these creatures. "I have never had any trouble understanding the fascination with vampires," he writes. "But zombies? Not so much." Undeterred, Golden has put together a hefty collection of zombiana to take its place on the sagging shelf next to John Joseph Adams's anthologies THE LIVING DEAD and THE LIVING DEAD 2 (Night Shade, paper, $15.95 and $15.99); Max Brooks's WORLD WAR Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (Three Rivers, paper, $14.95); the freak best seller PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, "by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith" (Quirk, paper, $12.95); and THE WALKING DEAD: Compendium One (Image Comics, paper, $59.99), which compiles the first 48 issues of the comic, written by Robert Kirkman, that was turned into a popular cable series last fall. All these literary products are, in varying degrees, worth reading, or at least dipping into on one of those days when you're not feeling unambiguously alive yourself. But taken as a whole the recent onslaught of zombie fiction is wearying. There's a certain monotony built into the genre: in too many of these tales, the flesh-chompers advance, are repelled, advance again and are repelled again, more or less ad infinitum. Modern-day zombie stories often read like plague narratives, in which a panicky populace struggles to deal with a threat that's overwhelming, unceasing and apparently uncontrollable. (This spring the Centers for Disease Control, in a playful attempt to stimulate interest in the dull subject of emergency preparedness, issued an online "Zombie Apocalypse Survival Guide." It got so many hits, the Web site crashed.) And because the ravening dead are, by definition, not interesting and are way too numerous ever to be defeated - at least in plague chronicles there's hope for a cure - even the more inventive zombie stories tend to be static: grim annals of hard-won, provisional survival. But that may be the secret of their popularity. With every fashion in horror, it's worth asking, Why do we choose to fear this, and why now? The answers can be more unsettling than the stories themselves. In the case of zombie fiction, you have to wonder whether our 21st-century fascination with these hungry hordes has something to do with a general anxiety, particularly in the West, about the planet's dwindling resources: a sense that there are too many people out there, with too many urgent needs, and that eventually these encroaching masses, dimly understood but somehow ominous in their collective appetites, will simply consume us. At this awful, pinched moment of history we look into the future and see a tsunami of want bearing down on us, darkening the sky. The zombie is clearly the right monster for this glum mood, but it's a little disturbing to think that these nonhuman creatures, with their slack, gaping maws, might be serving as metaphors for actual people - undocumented immigrants, say, or the entire populations of developing nations - whose only offense, in most cases, is that their mouths and bellies demand to be filled. Fear is a primitive impulse, brainless as hunger, and because the aim of horror fiction is the production of the deepest kinds of fears, the genre tends to reinforce some remarkably uncivilized ideas about' self-protection. In the current crop of zombie stories, the prevailing value for the beleaguered survivors is a sort of siege mentality, a vigilance so constant and unremitting that it's indistinguishable from the purest paranoia. This is not a state of mind to bring out the best in our old, tired human nature. It's astonishing, then, to come across a zombie tale like Alden Bell's novel THE REAPERS ARE THE ANGELS (Holt, paper, $15), in which a world that "has gone to black damnation" becomes, somehow, the occasion of a young woman's spiritual redemption. The heroine, 15-year-old Temple, moves easily and violently through a Deep South landscape infested with the menacing dead, living by her wits - which are formidable - and retaining, heroically, a sense of wonder at God's creation, "all that beauty in the suffered world." The zombies are plenty scary (she calls them "meatskins" or "slugs"), and some of the hard-nosed human survivors are barely less threatening. But Temple is blessed with an unearthly composure, in part because she's a post-apocalypse child: this is the only world she's ever known. And, she says, "you gotta look at the world that is and try not to get bogged down by what it ain't." Bell (the pseudonym of a New York writer named Joshua Gaylord) isn't much interested in shocking his readers with visions of zombie inundation, in stoking their primordial fears of the unknown or in spinning lurid fantasies of brute survival. Like his tough heroine, he's too busy looking at the world that is, the one he's imagined into existence. His sentences roll and dawdle, as if moving to the rhythm of the stilled, eerie environment. "The Reapers Are the Angels" isn't in any sense a didactic novel, but there's a lesson in its leisurely manner: if you take the time to see and feel and think, the world, dire as it is, can lose some of its terrors.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 31, 2011]

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Review by Booklist Review

"The Crisis" nearly wiped out humanity. Brooks (son of Mel Brooks and author of The Zombie Survival Guide,0 2003) has taken it upon himself to document the "first hand" experiences and testimonies of those lucky to survive 10 years after the fictitious zombie war. Like a horror fan's version of Studs Terkel's The Good War0 (1984), the "historical account" format gives Brooks room to explore the zombie plague from numerous different views and characters. In a deadpan voice, Brooks exhaustively details zombie incidents from isolated attacks to full-scale military combat: "what if the enemy can't be shocked and awed? Not just won't, but biologically can't!" With the exception of a weak BAT-210 story in the second act, the "interviews" and personal accounts capture the universal fear of the collapse of society--a living nightmare in which anyone can become a mindless, insatiable predator at a moment's notice. Alas, Brad Pitt's production company has purchased the film rights to the book--while it does have a chronological element, it's more similar to a collection of short stories: it would make for an excellent 240 -style TV series or an animated serial. Regardless, horror fans won't be disappointed: like George Romero's Dead 0 trilogy, World War Z0 is another milestone in the zombie mythos. --Carlos Orellana Copyright 2006 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Brooks, the author of the determinedly straight-faced parody The Zombie Survival Guide (2003), returns in all seriousness to the zombie theme for his second outing, a future history in the style of Theodore Judson's Fitzpatrick's War. Brooks tells the story of the world's desperate battle against the zombie threat with a series of first-person accounts "as told to the author" by various characters around the world. A Chinese doctor encounters one of the earliest zombie cases at a time when the Chinese government is ruthlessly suppressing any information about the outbreak that will soon spread across the globe. The tale then follows the outbreak via testimony of smugglers, intelligence officials, military personnel and many others who struggle to defeat the zombie menace. Despite its implausible premise and choppy delivery, the novel is surprisingly hard to put down. The subtle, and not so subtle, jabs at various contemporary politicians and policies are an added bonus. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

As the author of the deadpan Zombie Survival Guide, Brooks (son of filmmaker Mel) is clearly qualified to write this globe-spanning "global history" of a war that will begin sometime soon. The book owes a debt to George Romero's Living Dead films, with their hordes of moaning ghouls, but that kind of monster-movie action is secondary to the individual stories of both major world players and front-line grunts in the war against the undead. Woven through the narrative are an undercurrent of social commentary and musings on the nature of fear and hope. This infectious and compelling book will have nervous readers watching the streets for zombies. Recommended for all public libraries. Karl G. Siewert, Tulsa City-Cty. Lib. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An "oral history" of the global war the evil brain-chewers came within a hair of winning. Zombies are among us--turn on your television if you don't believe it. But, Brooks reassures us in this all-too-realistic novel, even today, human fighters are hunting down the leftovers, and we're winning. Brooks (The Zombie Survival Guide, not reviewed) seeds his mockumentary with smart nods to the chains of cause and effect that spring from today's headlines. Like the avian flu, one CIA agent tells the interviewer, the zombie plague began in China, whose government embarked on a campaign of "health and safety" sweeps ("Instead of lying about the sweeps themselves, they just lied about what they were sweeping for") to contain the endless armies of the moaning, walking dead. It didn't work. Ear to the ground, Israel quarantined itself--it helped that it had that tall new wall. Greece, Japan, England: Every center of world civilization was overrun, with notable pockets of resistance. In England, for example, the queen stayed in Windsor Castle, the most easily defended bastion in the realm, to steel the hearts of her subjects. Who says the royal family is a relic? Finally, the zombies come to North America, where, after the disastrous Battle of Yonkers, the humans regroup and take their pound of extremely icky flesh in vengeance; even Michael Stipe, the antiwar rock singer, signs up to kick zombie butt. Brooks's iron-jaw narrative is studded with practical advice on what to do when the zombies come, as they surely will. For one thing, check to see who doesn't blink ("Maybe because they don't have as much bodily fluid they can't keep using it to coat the eyes"), aim for the head and blast away. A literate, ironic, strangely tasty treat for fans of 28 Days Later, Dawn of the Dead, The Last Man on Earth and other treasures of the zombie/counterzombie genre. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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WARNINGS GREATER CHONGQING, THE UNITED FEDERATION OF CHINA [At its prewar height, this region boasted a population of over thirty-five million people. Now, there are barely fifty thousand. Reconstruction funds have been slow to arrive in this part of the country, the government choosing to concentrate on the more densely populated coast. There is no central power grid, no running water besides the Yangtze River. But the streets are clear of rubble and the local "security council" has prevented any postwar outbreaks. The chairman of that council is Kwang Jingshu, a medical doctor who, despite his advanced age and wartime injuries, still manages to make house calls to all his patients.] The first outbreak I saw was in a remote village that officially had no name. The residents called it "New Dachang," but this was more out of nostalgia than anything else. Their former home, "Old Dachang," had stood since the period of the Three Kingdoms, with farms and houses and even trees said to be centuries old. When the Three Gorges Dam was completed, and reservoir waters began to rise, much of Dachang had been disassembled, brick by brick, then rebuilt on higher ground. This New Dachang, however, was not a town anymore, but a "national historic museum." It must have been a heartbreaking irony for those poor peasants, to see their town saved but then only being able to visit it as a tourist. Maybe that is why some of them chose to name their newly constructed hamlet "New Dachang" to preserve some connection to their heritage, even if it was only in name. I personally didn't know that this other New Dachang existed, so you can imagine how confused I was when the call came in. The hospital was quiet; it had been a slow night, even for the increasing number of drunk-driving accidents. Motorcycles were becoming very popular. We used to say that your Harley-Davidsons killed more young Chinese than all the GIs in the Korean War. That's why I was so grateful for a quiet shift. I was tired, my back and feet ached. I was on my way out to smoke a cigarette and watch the dawn when I heard my name being paged. The receptionist that night was new and couldn't quite understand the dialect. There had been an accident, or an illness. It was an emergency, that part was obvious, and could we please send help at once. What could I say? The younger doctors, the kids who think medicine is just a way to pad their bank accounts, they certainly weren't going to go help some "nongmin" just for the sake of helping. I guess I'm still an old revolutionary at heart. "Our duty is to hold ourselves responsible to the people." Those words still mean something to me . . . and I tried to remember that as my Deer bounced and banged over dirt roads the government had promised but never quite gotten around to paving. I had a devil of a time finding the place. Officially, it didn't exist and therefore wasn't on any map. I became lost several times and had to ask directions from locals who kept thinking I meant the museum town. I was in an impatient mood by the time I reached the small collection of hilltop homes. I remember thinking, This had better be damned serious. Once I saw their faces, I regretted my wish. There were seven of them, all on cots, all barely conscious. The villagers had moved them into their new communal meeting hall. The walls and floor were bare cement. The air was cold and damp. Of course they're sick, I thought. I asked the villagers who had been taking care of these people. They said no one, it wasn't "safe." I noticed that the door had been locked from the outside. The villagers were clearly terrified. They cringed and whispered; some kept their distance and prayed. Their behavior made me angry, not at them, you understand, not as individuals, but what they represented about our country. After centuries of foreign oppression, exploitation, and humiliation, we were finally reclaiming our rightful place as humanity's middle kingdom. We were the world's richest and most dynamic superpower, masters of everything from outer space to cyber space. It was the dawn of what the world was finally acknowledging as "The Chinese Century" and yet so many of us still lived like these ignorant peasants, as stagnant and superstitious as the earliest Yangshao savages. I was still lost in my grand, cultural criticism when I knelt to examine the first patient. She was running a high fever, forty degrees centigrade, and she was shivering violently. Barely coherent, she whimpered slightly when I tried to move her limbs. There was a wound in her right forearm, a bite mark. As I examined it more closely, I realized that it wasn't from an animal. The bite radius and teeth marks had to have come from a small, or possibly young, human being. Although I hypothesized this to be the source of the infection, the actual injury was surprisingly clean. I asked the villagers, again, who had been taking care of these people. Again, they told me no one. I knew this could not be true. The human mouth is packed with bacteria, even more so than the most unhygienic dog. If no one had cleaned this woman's wound, why wasn't it throbbing with infection? I examined the six other patients. All showed similar symptoms, all had similar wounds on various parts of their bodies. I asked one man, the most lucid of the group, who or what had inflicted these injuries. He told me it had happened when they had tried to subdue "him." "Who?" I asked. I found "Patient Zero" behind the locked door of an abandoned house across town. He was twelve years old. His wrists and feet were bound with plastic packing twine. Although he'd rubbed off the skin around his bonds, there was no blood. There was also no blood on his other wounds, not on the gouges on his legs or arms, or from the large dry gap where his right big toe had been. He was writhing like an animal; a gag muffled his growls. At first the villagers tried to hold me back. They warned me not to touch him, that he was "cursed." I shrugged them off and reached for my mask and gloves. The boy's skin was as cold and gray as the cement on which he lay. I could find neither his heartbeat nor his pulse. His eyes were wild, wide and sunken back in their sockets. They remained locked on me like a predatory beast. Throughout the examination he was inexplicably hostile, reaching for me with his bound hands and snapping at me through his gag. His movements were so violent I had to call for two of the largest villagers to help me hold him down. Initially they wouldn't budge, cowering in the doorway like baby rabbits. I explained that there was no risk of infection if they used gloves and masks. When they shook their heads, I made it an order, even though I had no lawful authority to do so. That was all it took. The two oxen knelt beside me. One held the boy's feet while the other grasped his hands. I tried to take a blood sample and instead extracted only brown, viscous matter. As I was withdrawing the needle, the boy began another bout of violent struggling. One of my "orderlies," the one responsible for his arms, gave up trying to hold them and thought it might safer if he just braced them against the floor with his knees. But the boy jerked again and I heard his left arm snap. Jagged ends of both radius and ulna bones stabbed through his gray flesh. Although the boy didn't cry out, didn't even seem to notice, it was enough for both assistants to leap back and run from the room. I instinctively retreated several paces myself. I am embarrassed to admit this; I have been a doctor for most of my adult life. I was trained and . . . you could even say "raised" by the People's Liberation Army. I've treated more than my share of combat injuries, faced my own death on more than one occasion, and now I was scared, truly scared, of this frail child. The boy began to twist in my direction, his arm ripped completely free. Flesh and muscle tore from one another until there was nothing except the stump. His now free right arm, still tied to the severed left hand, dragged his body across the floor. I hurried outside, locking the door behind me. I tried to compose myself, control my fear and shame. My voice still cracked as I asked the villagers how the boy had been infected. No one answered. I began to hear banging on the door, the boy's fist pounding weakly against the thin wood. It was all I could do not to jump at the sound. I prayed they would not notice the color draining from my face. I shouted, as much from fear as frustration, that I had to know what happened to this child. A young woman came forward, maybe his mother. You could tell that she had been crying for days; her eyes were dry and deeply red. She admitted that it had happened when the boy and his father were "moon fishing," a term that describes diving for treasure among the sunken ruins of the Three Gorges Reservoir. With more than eleven hundred abandoned villages, towns, and even cities, there was always the hope of recovering something valuable. It was a very common practice in those days, and also very illegal. She explained that they weren't looting, that it was their own village, Old Dachang, and they were just trying to recover some heirlooms from the remaining houses that hadn't been moved. She repeated the point, and I had to interrupt her with promises not to inform the police. She finally explained that the boy came up crying with a bite mark on his foot. He didn't know what had happened, the water had been too dark and muddy. His father was never seen again. I reached for my cell phone and dialed the number of Doctor Gu Wen Kuei, an old comrade from my army days who now worked at the Institute of Infectious Diseases at Chongqing University. We exchanged pleasantries, discussing our health, our grandchildren; it was only proper. I then told him about the outbreak and listened as he made some joke about the hygiene habits of hillbillies. I tried to chuckle along but continued that I thought the incident might be significant. Almost reluctantly he asked me what the symptoms were. I told him everything: the bites, the fever, the boy, the arm . . . his face suddenly stiffened. His smile died. He asked me to show him the infected. I went back into the meeting hall and waved the phone's camera over each of the patients. He asked me to move the camera closer to some of the wounds themselves. I did so and when I brought the screen back to my face, I saw that his video image had been cut. "Stay where you are," he said, just a distant, removed voice now. "Take the names of all who have had contact with the infected. Restrain those already infected. If any have passed into coma, vacate the room and secure the exit." His voice was flat, robotic, as if he had rehearsed this speech or was reading from something. He asked me, "Are you armed?" "Why would I be?" I asked. He told me he would get back to me, all business again. He said he had to make a few calls and that I should expect "support" within several hours. They were there in less than one, fifty men in large army Z-8A helicopters; all were wearing hazardous materials suits. They said they were from the Ministry of Health. I don't know who they thought they were kidding. With their bullying swagger, their intimidating arrogance, even these backwater bumpkins could recognize the Guoanbu. Their first priority was the meeting hall. The patients were carried out on stretchers, their limbs shackled, their mouths gagged. Next, they went for the boy. He came out in a body bag. His mother was wailing as she and the rest of the village were rounded up for "examinations." Their names were taken, their blood drawn. One by one they were stripped and photographed. The last one to be exposed was a withered old woman. She had a thin, crooked body, a face with a thousand lines and tiny feet that had to have been bound when she was a girl. She was shaking her bony fist at the "doctors." "This is your punishment!" she shouted. "This is revenge for Fengdu!" She was referring to the City of Ghosts, whose temples and shrines were dedicated to the underworld. Like Old Dachang, it had been an unlucky obstacle to China's next Great Leap Forward. It had been evacuated, then demolished, then almost entirely drowned. I've never been a superstitious person and I've never allowed myself to be hooked on the opiate of the people. I'm a doctor, a scientist. I believe only in what I can see and touch. I've never seen Fengdu as anything but a cheap, kitschy tourist trap. Of course this ancient crone's words had no effect on me, but her tone, her anger . . . she had witnessed enough calamity in her years upon the earth: the warlords, the Japanese, the insane nightmare of the Cultural Revolution . . . she knew that another storm was coming, even if she didn't have the education to understand it. My colleague Dr. Kuei had understood all too well. He'd even risked his neck to warn me, to give me enough time to call and maybe alert a few others before the "Ministry of Health" arrived. It was something he had said . . . a phrase he hadn't used in a very long time, not since those "minor" border clashes with the Soviet Union. That was back in 1969. We had been in an earthen bunker on our side of the Ussuri, less than a kilometer downriver from Chen Bao. The Russians were preparing to retake the island, their massive artillery hammering our forces. Gu and I had been trying to remove shrapnel from the belly of this soldier not much younger than us. The boy's lower intestines had been torn open, his blood and excrement were all over our gowns. Every seven seconds a round would land close by and we would have to bend over his body to shield the wound from falling earth, and every time we would be close enough to hear him whimper softly for his mother. There were other voices, too, rising from the pitch darkness just beyond the entrance to our bunker, desperate, angry voices that weren't supposed to be on our side of the river. We had two infantrymen stationed at the bunker's entrance. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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