For me, it was the story of the radio relay ship, I think.
Transmitting information, and hearing those incoming calls of distress and not being able to help? I don’t even know what the Buenos Ares lullaby sounded like, but it’s haunting.
Didn’t they say that everyone who worked there committed suicide eventually?
Yes. The narrator interviews the last living radio operator who then killed himself after being interviewed.
All of the people who listened to incoming transmissions.
To me some of the most chilling stuff was early on - those people fleeing with their relatives in crates with air holes. People interveiwed in the book rarely talk about the experience of seeing their loved ones rise as zombies, or about killing “humans”. One assumes it is a major conversational taboo and we all act like it didn’t happen.
That, and what happened in Canada. There weren’t even really any zombies in that one.
That was fucked up. I put the book down for a whole day after reading that chapter.
and yet, as horrific as the initial attack was, it made things like Japan all the more uplifting later on.
Does anyone else ponder on a daily basis what the heck happened to North Korea? I know it isn’t the type of book that lends itself to a sequal, but damn it I want to know!
I always thought it was ritual suicide. The Living God Leader whatever he calls himself called his people into mountain to deliver them into Heaven or whatever afterlife and they end up drinking the Kool-Aid. Oh, and there were Zs in there, and they all got eaten.
I think that should be the final shot of the movie:
Battle of Yonkers survivor narrator:
[shots of empty North Korean cities - tattered flags flying, faded portraits of the Dear Leader]
Nobody hade heard a peep out of the North Koreans since the fighting started. Satellite imagery from before the breakdown suggested that they were withdrawing their entire population into huge cave systems in the mountains.
[camera pans over multinational force preparing for battle - all are shown to be playing their ‘pump up/draw out’ music - bagpipes, hard rock, asgai banging]
The UN waffled on what to do about the situation for a long time: had the Kim Jong Il just used this as an excuse to further solidfy his hold on his people, or were there millions upon millions of zombies looking for a way out.
[close up of demolition engineers finalizing placement of charges on a massive steel door - they break off and get to cover]
Nobody knew what we would find there.
[A general thumbs a detonator (Raj Singh is dead, do we know any others) explosions blast specific points of the door and they slowly collapse with a groan]
But we went in anyway.
[what might be a zombie groan is heard over the echoes from the destruction as the camera zooms into the darkness and the credits]
That made me think of the people clearing the catacombs of Paris - that has to have been as scary as hell.
Yes, I have always wondered.
One thing that was frustrating but ultimately satisfying about World War Z is how seriously it took the conceit of “this is a Studs Terkel book written after the war” - it doesn’t explain stuff you’re supposed to know, it isn’t comprehensive, it isn’t a history, it has no maps, there is little exposition except the kind you’d find in that kind of book anyway. It’s just what it purports to be. It doesn’t tell you about Iceland because you know what happened in Iceland. It doesn’t say any more about Israel because you know that too.
Even the selection of the people is precisely correct for that kind of book - the interviews of the people who wrote that report that ended up being absolutely useless, but it’s the kind of thing that you’d include in a retrospective of the zombie war as you tracked early events - it’s a smoking gun report.
I do seriously doubt that six year olds survived as feral children when no adults around them did, but I’ll give the book the benefit of the doubt.
Are you kidding? i’ve had nightmares about the part in WWZ where paniced refugees are swimming towards boats in water described as deep enough to drown in but shallow enough so reanimated corpses can reach up for prey. shudder
I loved World War Z. I thought the format was brilliant, and the fragmentary nature of the book let you fill in so much with your imagination. In terms of how mankind dealt with the zombie war, I thought it hit just the right tone about how we as a society DO deal with our biggest problems – ignoring it as long as our own lives remain comfortable, panicking when the risk and consequences become too big to ignore, then eventually getting our act together and confronting it.
I also really enjoyed so many of the characters: the brilliance and heartlessness, and ultimate pathos of Paul Redecker; the earthy everyman grunt who seems to have been at every major battle of the war; the shy Brit who studies the role of castles in the war; the Japanese nerdy teenager who didn’t even know what was happening until his internet service went down. All well characterized and showing a different facet of how the crisis impacted the world.
That being said, I’m very trepidatious about the movie. I just don’t see how a book with as many characters, locations and story lines as World War Z can translate on the screen. I suppose they could frame the film around one of the chapters (the Air Force pilot shot down over zombie territory?), but you would lose so much context and larger sense of this being a truly global catastrophe.
Bits and pieces of the script have leaked on the internet.
It looks like JMS is keeping the epistolary format of the novel. A researcher traveling around the world, but the interviews will morph into flashbacks.
Count me in with the people who are skeptical about this translating to the silver screen. What, show the narrator beginning interviews and then go to a SNL “Diddly-doo” and wavy lines, then show the chapter? Focus on one story (probably the grunt in every battle from Yonkers to the end)? You’d miss so much of the impact and sense of global devastation.
I actually suspect that there will be a sequel of some kind. Max Brooks clearly has too much fun writing about zombies to quit now. There are a few things that could be filled in (Iceland, Israel, Australia, more of the sieges, Hawaii, most of Africa) but he’ll need to come up with more interesting bits to think about, like underwater zombies, cleanup of frozen zombies, quislings, and political secession. There’s a lot of room for other sieges to discuss, at least in my mind (what, like VMI and The Citadel are going to go without a fight?) but beyond that, he’s going to have to come up with more of the thought-provoking bits to have any success.
Brooks has a real fixation on Japanese martial arts prowess, too. One story, sure, but two? I enjoyed them but I also rolled my eyes a little.
As to zombie longevity mechanics- it’s not unbelievable that the body could consume itself for a long time, eating up unnecessary bits like a spleen, kidneys (they do say that zombie flesh tends to be toxic) and eventually excess muscle mass, but years? Nah. Days? Absolutely. Weeks? Probably. Months? Maybe. If they gained some kind of strength from eating, then sure. And we know that they eat any animals that they catch and flesh they can scavenge. But we also know that partial zombies that are missing their digestive tracts live for years. And while the body could consume itself for a while in theory, it would still need a circulatory system to get the raw materials it cannibalizes from itself to the muscles that need it. And of course, none of that could work underwater, because muscles need oxygen to move, which they couldn’t get. So basically, to my (limited) medical understanding, a zombie could consume itself for a long time, though probably not as long as Brooks assumes or under as unfriendly conditions.
They also talk about “draggers”, zombies that have lost their legs and drag themselves along with their hands. Sure, that would work for a while, but it would quickly grind the zombie to pieces, especially when on concrete or other rough surfaces.
You could make a whole movie just from the submarine story. Unfortunately, I don’t see anybody making a good movie out of the whole book.
I really wanted to hear more about the hero city, i kept expecting an interview with someone from New York near the end of the book and felt pretty let down when they stopped right before.
My stomach flipped over when I read that! Oh man, I want the book now! Looks like I won’t be getting it until the weekend though. Humph.
Did they ever explicitly name New York as the Hero City? I was never sure.
That reminds me of the part that really freaked ME out, where the Chinese nuclear submarine
is hiding on the bottom of the ocean, trying to avoid being killed by their own countrymen, and they’re hiding in a tense silence as the sonar operators listen for any sounds that they might have been detected, and suddenly they begin to hear faint noises all around them, and when they finally decide to look out with the periscope, they see hundreds of zombies climbing, hitting, biting, tearing, scraping on the hull, mindlessly trying to find a way inside so they can get at the living humans they have somehow detected in there…
Man, that whole Chinese sub story was an awesome part of the book.
My favorite portion of The Zombie Survival Guide, which thrilled me endlessely, was the “Solanum Outbreaks Throughout History” section. It’s quite scary in places despite being written in a “history book” style, and my bet is that writing that is what gave Max Brooks the idea for World War Z – after writing about all of those historical outbreaks, he probably realized he just had to expand on that idea.
Oh, if only someone had mentioned that part before!
(hello, is this thing on? tap tap tap)
Heh heh … sorry, somehow I missed what was in your spoiler box. <hang head in shame>