World War Z by Max Brooks

5 stars -- I love it!

First of all, sorry it's been a while. It's been busy at work, so even though I haven't been blogging much, I haven't been reading much either.

What I have read, though, is World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, which is just amazing.

It's also horrifying, but not in a bloody, violent, gory way. More in a "Now I know I won't survive the zombie apocalypse way." Which I won't. No way.

World War Z is written as a series of interviews. Fictionally, Max Brooks is a reporter who, after WWZ, documents the events of the war for the government. The government takes the cold, hard facts and leaves the interviews that are "too personal," so Max Brooks turns them into this book.

The book never breaks character, and it's terrifying. Set up in loose chronological order, the reader reads interviews with doctors, scientists, military, lay people, and even feral children from around the world.

The first interview takes place in China with the doctor who discovered Patient 0. There are interviews about how different countries did or did not survive. There's an interview with an entrepreneur who developed a completely useless "rabies vaccines" and became a millionaire while supposedly vaccinated people died (and the arose again). A feral child tells, in her childlike speech, how she survived when her mother tried to kill her in order to save her from becoming a zombie. We follow workers in Canada who walk through after the Spring thaw and kill any re-animating zombies.

The picture Brooks paints is bleak. Too little is done too late, and massive amounts of the population are lost. Some countries are entirely overcome (like Japan) or just disappear (North Korea), while some countries not only survive but prosper (Cuba).

And the odd thing is that humans win the war. There's an incredible coming-together of people and countries to beat back this foe, and there's an enormous amount of invention and re-learning. If the future and the past weren't so bleak, this would be one of the most heartwarming tales imagined as countries and peoples unite in one combined force with one combined purpose, working together to regain lost territory.

But the scope of what happened, which I believe was incredibly underplayed in the book, is enormous and almost unimaginable. The book gives the barest glimpse of how horrible things truly were, barely touching on some subjects that made me, at least, recoil.

World War Z is amazing, and Brooks did a wonderful job. The way he was able to write technically or creatively depending on the character, his acclimation of actual historic events, the scope of his imagined world--it's breathtaking.

I really, really recommend that everyone reads this as there's a little bit of something for everyone, yet as a whole, it pulls together as a strong and well-written horror novel. But it's not bloody or gory or offputting in any way.

So read it, be horrified and completely fascinated at the same time, and then do what I plan on doing and invest in some bullets... :)