Max Brooks, author of the darkly humorous "The Zombie Survival Guide," returns to the undead milieu with "World War Z," a collection of interviews with those who lived through the long, nasty tiff between the living world and a horde of feasting, festering zombies.
As the author explains in the introduction, the United Nations had commissioned a report from Brooks detailing the facts and figures of the war, and the interviews deemed too superfluous and subjective — that is, too human — for the official report are cobbled together here in "World War Z."
It's clear from the beginning that Brooks is taking his zombies very seriously; the book is ostensibly nonfiction. The straight-faced approach can work, too, but the author treads dangerous water. If the story and characters aren't totally convincing, the book flounders in implausibility or, worst of all, sinks to the realm of silliness. "WWZ," unfortunately, lands with an irrelevant thud. While an anthology of interviews is an interesting idea, the book's unique form ends up being its biggest flaw, preventing the full terrifying realization of the main attractions: the zombies.
Of all the monsters that stalk us in the darkness of our sleep, the zombie has always been the most horrifying. While the vampire is plying you with wine at his sprawling country estate and the mummy is comically unraveling into a pile of toilet paper, the zombie is chewing on your mother's face. What's more, unlike the rather unfamiliar werewolf and company, the zombie could be the reanimated corpse of your best friend. You're presented with the choice of either smashing the head of a loved one or becoming undead yourself.
Such dilemmas are the stuff of nightmares, but Brooks leaves these horrifying situations completely untapped. Because the book is broken into dozens of unrelated interviews, the reader never comes to know a well-rounded, likable character; and, well, it's hard to care about someone you met two pages ago, zombies or not.
Besides, since these characters are alive and giving interviews, it's never really a question of who comes out on top.
That's not to say "WWZ" is a complete waste. There are some humorous scenes where thinly disguised celebrities — Jon Stewart and Ann Coulter, for example — wildly copulate in the middle of an apocalyptic zombie bloodbath. And there are a few genuinely interesting stories scattered throughout the book.
On the whole, however, most of the characters and situations are too underdeveloped to elicit the hopes and fears of the reader. The longest chapter of the book is dedicated to a truly boring numeration of weapons developed by the United States to fight the zombies, which allows Brooks to indulge in his obvious gun fetish — which is sad in the way it's always sad realizing someone is a gun freak.
Mix in a prose style more awkward than Gerald Ford's reanimated corpse, and you have one tepid literary offering. Considering the glut of zombie media to come out in the last few years, look somewhere else for your undead fix. Much to the chagrin of readers and zombies alike, this book has no brains.
Grade: 1 out of 5
