GregHowley.com

I'm nearly done reading what has turned out to be the best book I've read since The Stand. Max Brooks's World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. It's fiction constructed as a series of interviews in a post zombie apocolypse world, interviewing people who've lived through the zombie war.

I've never been the hugest fan of zombie stories. I've seen the new crop of movies: Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, and Land of the Dead, and I enjoyed the original 1968 zombie movie Night of the Living Dead, but I missed all those 70s and 80s remakes, and I've never read a zombie book before.

This book is simply awesome. The amount of detail and the number of realistic-seeming things that Max Brooks covers really make for an engaging story, and the stories are so very well written. The book is essentially a collection of short stories, all telling the tale of the Zombie World War from the points of view of people from all over the world: Denver, Kyoto, Malibu, Cuba, Chile, South Korea. And the stories told by foreigners really make you believe that the speaker lived in that culture - Brooks has done his research. There are stories of the false vaccines developed early on, the catastrophic battle in Yonkers that sparked "The Great Panic", and about the Japanese otaku as he deals with the crisis, fighting siafu, as they call the zombies.

Brooks hits many angles with the zombies that to my knowledge have never been explored before. How zombies are immune to chemical weapons. How they dig for burrowing animals, creating fields of "zombie holes". And how they can traverse bodies of water by walking underwater. There is one poignant scene where thousands of refugees are trying to swim to dozens of ships offshore, being pursued by the living dead, and many are pulled under by zombies standing on the ocean floor reaching up and grabbing their ankles.

Amidst all the chaos, many of the accounts in the book discuss situations which didn't directly involve zombies. Third-world nuclear exchanges, a stolen Chinese submarine, and how Australians trapped aboard the international space station during the crisis helped by keeping our vital observation and communication satellites in orbit. The book also strongly implies (without naming any names) that Colin Powell is president, and that his VP is Howard Dean.

I've still got about 70-80 pages left before I finish the book, but I'm loving it and felt like I needed to write about it. If you read at all, this is a good one to pick up. Wikipedia has a great summary of the book's events if you don't mind some spoilers, and the book's official site has some great multimedia content, including audio files that they erroneously call podcasts, an interactive map of the world with audio clips, and a survival rate calculator. I'd have had a 30% chance to survive. Based on the audio clips on their site, the audiobook is possibly even better than the print book.

The book is set to be adapted for the screen sometime in 2008, which is pretty exciting to me. I hope they do a good job with the adaptation. Until then, I'll be practicing my mkunga lalem - that's the world's premiere anti-zombie martial art.