World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

I wouldn't really have expected myself to pick up a book about zombies, but this was one of those books that I saw over and over again on the Borders "Buy One Get One 50% Off" table (once upon a time when there was such a thing as Borders). And in the wake of season one of The Walking Dead on AMC, I decided to give it a try. The Hypothetical Zombie Apocalypse is, after all, sort of the cultural phenomenon of the moment.

This isn't really a novel. It's written as a series of interviews (by the author) with politicians, ordinary citizens, soldiers, etc., in the aftermath of a zombie plague that decimates humanity in the not-terribly-distant future. Through the interviews, the story of the war unfolds but only in bits and pieces. There's no purposeful grand narrative - it's assumed that the readers themselves have lived through the war and already know the basic timeline. So since, of course, we don't, the timeline unfolds through a series of only somewhat connected anecdotes.

I almost didn't make it through the book. I was intrigued for a chapter or two, but then after 50 or 60 pages I kind of got bored and put the book down for several months before I decided to try again. I found the narrative device intriguing, but I had a hard time getting over the fact that each interview sounded like the same person (which they were, of course, because they were all Max Brooks), and the fact that no interview actually sounded the way someone would talk in real life.

But when I picked it up again several months later, it was easy enough to dive back in without rereading what had come before, and this time I got over the stylistic elements that had bothered me at first and found myself pulled in. I was impressed by the history Max Brooks created. It wasn't entirely realistic because, you know, it's about a zombie apocalypse, but it was amazingly intricate, and he managed to tell his fictional history on a grand scale through intimate and detached accounts. I was thoroughly impressed with the book. And I also wanted to know how it ended.

This feels like an uncharacteristic book for me to recommend, but it was just really interesting. So there you go. I recommend it.