I love zombie movies — I think they are fun and weirdly campy in its horror, and the statement zombie movies are often trying to make is always so hit-you-over-the-head obvious that I enjoy the effort put into trying to diversify the message. But I’ve never read a zombie book. And World War Z is a pretty awesome beginning, I’d say, to changing the way I can appreciate how the zombie genre has evolved.
It’s essentially a series of oral accounts, put together by a government chronicler, to map out the zombie war that ate the Earth raw for about 10 years. It begins with how the zombie pandemic may have started — in China, of course — through the eyes of a Chinese doctor who saw how a young patient had been transformed after he was bitten and had to be tied down with rope to prevent him from hurting others. And then Brooks’ chronicler goes into accounts of how it could have spread — first by the Chinese government’s refusal to tell other governments about the zombie pandemic, and then with the governments’ ineptitude to secure its borders to the flood of fleeing non-bitten, and sometimes already-bitten humans. There was also a organ trade that could have spread the pandemic further. Scientists’ recommendations on how to contain the infestation are ignored, making the problem worse.
Read more at my blog.
Cannonball Read V 