Kickass book. I guess the single most impressive aspect was the verisimilitude and details in so many different parts of the world.
Also, when I was at Conwy last year, I climbed up a watchtower (with one good leg and a crutch) and looking down, past the wall, down the rock outcropping to the street far below, I thought, You could hold out against a lot of zombies in here! Max Brooks apparently agrees.
Speaking of recognizable, but unnamed, figures – it was fun to think of Bill Maher and Ann Coulter having frantic sex on the floor in the face of imminent death.
And incidentally, the book has been optioned for a movie. (If you’ve never partaken of the message board at IMDB, take a look. You’ll come back truly grateful for the SDMB.)
Forgot to mention – if he wants to do a sequel, focussing in-depth on one story, I think we might agree it should be:The Hero City. The subject is hinted at several times in the book (that is, they seem to be referring to Manhattan as “The Hero City”. That’s also a designation that was given to twelve Soviet cities for the way they held out in WWII.)
I picked up WWZ after seeing it mentioned in a thread earlier this year. I enjoyed it enough to want to read The Zombie Survival Guide. I want to put it on my Christmas wish list, but it doesn’t seem right somehow…
I finished reading this today after receiving it for Christmas. I loved it. All the stories were good, but some of them were especially chilling. The woman recounting her family’s trip up North when she was young and the steady degradation of their living situation and the hard suit diver were especially powerful to me.
The thing I didn’t like (and I suppose this is a general criticism of the zombie genre) is that there was no explanation of how things went from the occasional outbreak that was more or less contained to rivers of the dead streaming along the highways out of major population centers. It just doesn’t seem like the housewife’s story, about pretty much ignoring the whole zombie menace until one appeared in her den, doesn’t make any sense. Similarly, the sudden run to the seas, with ghouls grabbing at everyone from the waves, seems unlikely.
I can understand how a large mob can overwhelm people, and how a slow burn would fester and spread, but it seems like once the threat is somewhat acknowledged and the kill method is known, the average person fighting zombies is going to take down at least one, which would tend to make the total number shrink over time.
Just finished this book and I thought it was awesome. I wonder which story threads the movie will follow, as there were many POV’s in the book, most of them pretty compelling.
It does. Patient Zero was a young boy who went diving in the submerged Three Gorges Dam area of China. . The implication is that there was a zombie problem there that was “dealt with” by the flooding of vast areas of China. Unfortunately, zombies don’t drown, they just wander around on the bottom and bite people who come near them. Though the Chinese government comes in and takes over the situation with PZ, other infected parties were on the loose (the boy’s father disappeared and wasn’t accounted for; incidents like PZ probably happened simultaneously in multiple locations near the Three Gorges Dam area); thus the major spread of plague began.
The message, I think, is that the Chinese government dealt with the crisis by suppressing information and going into denial, more worried what the world would think and where blame would fall rather than taking care of the problem. Brooks has the Chinese government overthrown during the Zombie War due to this horrible policy. It seems plausible, considering the way they have dealt with real life disease outbreaks.
She didn’t ignore it. She and her family were taking Phalanx, so they thought they were protected. There was also a firearm in the house for home defense. I think her story was pretty realistic; most people would like to think that they are safe, their precautions are enough, and don’t wise up until the problem is in their living room.
Brooks never explains, and acknowledges the lack of explanation, of how zombie brains do not suffer from pressure in deep seas. That is a flaw in the story.
I definitely got that the “Patient Zero” in the book was the result of the Chinese government trying to hide the problem by drowning the zombies. And the stories that recount the spread of the plague across the world are convincing.
It seemed like the book jumped relatively quickly from isolated incidents to full-on zombie mob. There should have been a more steady transition between people in San Diego living an essentially suburban existence and the interstate system becoming a mass of millions of zombies. This isn’t just a failing of WWZ. Any zombie story that posits a spreading zombie infection ought to explain how the world actually goes from isolated cases to full blown zombie apocalypse, but usually doesn’t. I was disappointed that WWZ did the same, given the incredible attention to detail Brooks paid to many other aspects of the book.
Wouldn’t it go down like that? I mean, any person wounded by Zack turns into Zack. The plague would sweep urban centers very, very quickly, I imagine. What’s surprising is that previous outbreaks had been so effectively suppressed that a World War Z had never happened before.
They do talk about how anxiety was building, the kids weren’t sleeping well, were behaving badly and medicated for ADD, everyone was tense, but they thought it would blow over. Then, blam, zombie in the living room. Probably similar to pre-1939 Germany.
I thought he did a fine job of showing how it spread. Once Asia was overrun, really, everyone was going to be on the defensive. This disease has a quick infection time, no cure, and creates more disease vectors that are very effective. If you buy his premise on the face, the rest makes sense, at least to me.
It’s in my Shopping Cart at Amazon right now… I’ll probably complete the order within the next few days (I hate just ordering 1 or 2 things at a time).
Well, this is certainly off-pissing. I bought and listened to the audiobook version, and I don’t recall any of the fascinating-sounding stories people have recounted here. Clearly the “abridgement” is worthless despite the all-star cast.
I mea, yeah, the audiobook was great, but damn, that’s irritating.
Abridgement is a bad thing in general. Unless it’s a Stephen King novel, in which case you can probably lose at least half the book without missing anything.
I agree (well, I’ve never read Stephen King, so I don’t know about that). I absolutely hate abridged versions of books. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any other audio edition of World War Z out.
I think the author is correct in his assumption that an outbreak in a major urban area will either be quickly contained, or within a week the entire population of the area will either be zombified or evacuated. The most likely outcome of a major zombie outbreak in New York City is to turn New York City into an army of 8 million zombies.
Funnily enough, I read it the exact opposite way around. As in George Romero’s work, Brooks’ zombies are a problem that can be quite easily solved at any time… assuming that humans are willing to communicate and to cooperate with each other. It is not the zombies themselves that cause the catastrophe; that is accomplished entirely by human dishonesty, greed, selfishness, irrationality, and fear.
The account of the Battle of Yonkers exemplifies this perfectly; it’s obvious that the soldiers would have been perfectly safe on the roofs of buildings, because zombies can’t climb. A simple two-story building with the stairs removed is a completely zombie-proof structure. However, the top brass have foolishly decided to place their troops in harm’s way as a concocted media event, using visually impressive but woefully inappropriate weapons and tactics, while giving no forethought to the practicality of the situation. The book isn’t really about how unstoppable zombies are, it’s about humanity’s collective knack for making bad decisions.
Zombies, the book makes clear, are glacially slow, entirely mindless, and 100 percent predictable in their behavior. There’s really no way that they could possibly present a threat to humans, unless we allow it. This is really the heart of the metaphor. Zombies are war, they are hunger, they are disease, they are the madness of crowds; they are every terrible thing that we, as a species, inflict on ourselves. They are us.
Parenthetically, I would like to know exactly what fatal mistake Iceland made that led to the entire nation being exterminated. I also suspect that Israel might not actually turn out to be the shining beacon of hope that Brooks depicts in such a situation.
The only detail that struck me as daft (which is remarkable, considering it’s a book about a global zombie epidemic) was the bit about masses of zack in the deep seas, attacking oil rigs, etc. The oceans are really, really huge and their size mitigates against zack congregating in noticable numbers unless there’s a compelling reason that wasn’t spelled out. Sound travels very well underwater, so theoretically zack could be attracted to manmade sounds (from oil rigs, say) and home in on them and call out to each other… provided they could ascertain directionality of sound underwater, which I’m not sure is a given.
:smack: I forgot the other thing that didn’t seem right, the detail that zombie moaning somehow carries much, much farther than our normal human* vocalise*. Sorry, but I’m not buying it. Unless zombiefication does transforms your pulmonary system, vocal chords, and sinus cavities, it shouldn’t change your voice per se, except to render you a lot less articulate and inhibited about the sorts of moaning and groaning noises you make in public. :dubious:
