World War Z

Continuing with the feeling of Halloween, what could represent Halloween better than zombies?

If you’ve see the movie, forget the movie. It has almost no similarity to the book aside from the locations and not even then does it follow book. Now if they’d called the movie something else it would have been hailed as brilliant but fans of the book who saw it were outraged and made that known with good reason.  Instead of concentrating on individual survival, the novel concentrates on governments and groups as a whole.  The solution to the plague wasn’t even similar. The main character didn’t mention a family or work with Navy. The American government was barely involved since most of the East Coast was lost fairly early. The book didn’t even technically take place during the apocalypse.

The book starts with an introduction from the “author” who is a reporter. This intro explains the whole purpose was to document the years of the zombie war so that the history wasn’t lost or worse repeated. The book is a series of a cross between personal interviews and military reports about the plague years. It starts with the idea of this book and follows current government figures and survivors their survival stories back to Patient Zero. Once we figure out how the plague starts, there’s a small afterward from various interviewees that hint at what various governments are preparing next.

I don’t know how Max Brooks managed to write such a moving story about zombies but the realism of this book blows the stereotypical zombie movie out of the water. It’s easily imaginable that people would cope with a zombie invasion the same way the people in the book did. I can see something like the Reddecker plan being put into action and the consequences to the people involved would likely be the same. People talk about the “politics” being left out of the movie, but it’s not what I would typically think of as politics. There’s no voting or long winded speech making to groups of people. The political aspect is more the cause and effects of the government actions. All of the characters make decisions they regret and lose people to the virus. If you are a fan of zombies but you want a more realistic approach to the storytelling, this is nice change of pace from the action-packed, gore fest zombie movies tend to be.