World War Z
Max Brooks
I started this book with the preconception gathered from both its title and that of its companion volume (The Zombie Survival Guide) that it would be a tongue and cheek affair, a textual Shaun of the Dead. It took about ten pages before I realized that World War Z had anything but a tongue and cheek approach. This bad boy is horror: dark, grim and bloody.
The most striking aspect of the novel is its structural approach. It's presented as a collection of oral histories gathered after the titular zombie apocalypse. The histories range in length from one to several pages, never returning to the same point of view. These vignettes (they aren't numbered, per se, but there are probably around a hundred total in the book) are arrayed chronologically from the first stirrings of a zombie plague, through the near collapse of civilization, the rousing and difficult process of starting to push back, all the way to a sort of victory. It's an approach generally found in histories, especially collections of primary documents. I've never seen it used in fiction, but it is incredibly successful in World War Z.
Think of the best Stephen King books, or any horror for that matter. There are probably a half dozen brilliant and gripping scenes from any of the books that sucker punch you and stay with you. World War Z is a novel composed entirely of those sucker punch scenes. Because there are no main characters specifically, the book can continuously change perspective and skip to new characters in different situations. In twenty pages, you might see the breakdown of society from the point of view of a teenage recluse living in a high rise in Japan, to Chinese sailors smuggling their families aboard and stealing a nuclear submarine once they decide the government has lost control, to a soccer mom who fleeing north out of the infested suburbs with her kids into the Dakotas because of rumors that the zombies freeze in the bitter winter.
What makes this approach work is the fundamental realization that in certain horror stories, the human characters are incidental. The true main character is the monster. So instead of feeling like a shallow story skipping from vignette to vignette without gaining traction with any one set of characters, the reader settles on the zombies themselves as the main character. We watch the growth and spread of the zombie plague, explore the aspects and permutations of zombie infection with a variety and breadth that would be impossible or at the very least eye-rollingly ludicrous if focused on one particular set of characters. But it's not just a freak show, it is a systematic and focused telling of a story from start to finish. It just isn't a story in which the human characters are constant fixtures from start to finish.
The end result is one of the most horrific and gripping horror novels that I have ever read.
Max Brooks
I started this book with the preconception gathered from both its title and that of its companion volume (The Zombie Survival Guide) that it would be a tongue and cheek affair, a textual Shaun of the Dead. It took about ten pages before I realized that World War Z had anything but a tongue and cheek approach. This bad boy is horror: dark, grim and bloody.
The most striking aspect of the novel is its structural approach. It's presented as a collection of oral histories gathered after the titular zombie apocalypse. The histories range in length from one to several pages, never returning to the same point of view. These vignettes (they aren't numbered, per se, but there are probably around a hundred total in the book) are arrayed chronologically from the first stirrings of a zombie plague, through the near collapse of civilization, the rousing and difficult process of starting to push back, all the way to a sort of victory. It's an approach generally found in histories, especially collections of primary documents. I've never seen it used in fiction, but it is incredibly successful in World War Z.
Think of the best Stephen King books, or any horror for that matter. There are probably a half dozen brilliant and gripping scenes from any of the books that sucker punch you and stay with you. World War Z is a novel composed entirely of those sucker punch scenes. Because there are no main characters specifically, the book can continuously change perspective and skip to new characters in different situations. In twenty pages, you might see the breakdown of society from the point of view of a teenage recluse living in a high rise in Japan, to Chinese sailors smuggling their families aboard and stealing a nuclear submarine once they decide the government has lost control, to a soccer mom who fleeing north out of the infested suburbs with her kids into the Dakotas because of rumors that the zombies freeze in the bitter winter.
What makes this approach work is the fundamental realization that in certain horror stories, the human characters are incidental. The true main character is the monster. So instead of feeling like a shallow story skipping from vignette to vignette without gaining traction with any one set of characters, the reader settles on the zombies themselves as the main character. We watch the growth and spread of the zombie plague, explore the aspects and permutations of zombie infection with a variety and breadth that would be impossible or at the very least eye-rollingly ludicrous if focused on one particular set of characters. But it's not just a freak show, it is a systematic and focused telling of a story from start to finish. It just isn't a story in which the human characters are constant fixtures from start to finish.
The end result is one of the most horrific and gripping horror novels that I have ever read.
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