You are quite welcome. Since I recently read WWZ and started talking about it here makes me realize I should go back and read it again. I read it when it first came out.
Damn I just looked it up. It was 24 years ago? From the wiki page:
I liked WWZ too, and I also found it surprisingly affecting for what I expected to be camp.
It wasn’t until a year after I read it that I discovered Max Brooks is the son of Mel Brooks. If I’d known that going in, I might not have given it a chance and just dismissed it as a kid trying to cash in on his father’s celebrity. I’m glad I didn’t know and that I was able to read Brooks’ book without any preconceptions and judge it on its own merits. I think he’s a genuinely talented and imaginative writer. He was able to bring something really new, entertaining and thought provoking to a somewhat tired genre.
You just found out about his father? I found out about it way back when I read post 23.
That twist left me with an annoying Stan Ridgway Camouflage earworm.
Count me among the disappointed. Quite the opposite of not being able to put the book down, for me it felt like a chore to keep picking it up.
Ordinarily I love post-apocalyptic fiction, but this one just didn’t grab me. Can’t quite put my finger on the reason, but I suspect it was the lack of a protagonist. Inherent to the author’s chosen structure, I suppose, but it left me cold.
Here’s the previous thread:
OK, I read the book and liked it quite a bit. The parts about the survival camp in Canada and the people swimming out to ships while being grabbed from below are things to keep you up at night.
I can’t remember the “twist” from the female pilot story though. Little help? Spoiler, if needed.
There was no one on the radio with her. Her radio was broken in the fall, and the Army had no record of anyone fitting the description/location ever broadcasting in that area. It is suggested that the woman helping her through her escape shares some qualities with the interviewee’s deceased mother.
Also, everything the sky watcher told her was stuff she would already know
Right, and at the time I thought it was a melodramatic stretch. But upon reflection – if your reality is, literally, a living nightmare, there are much worse kinds of mental breakdowns one could have. At least hers was helpful, and probably kept her alive. I think a lot of people would just off themselves or go catatonic.
Ah, yes. Thanks for the reminders folks.
I’d love it if the South African chapter makes it into the film, but how would they manage to keep the reveal hidden?
Thanks for the links, susan, RandMcnally, and Lemur866! After reading this and the other threads, a few comments:
I’m embarrassed that I missed the implication that the flooding of the villages in China before the beginning of the book was both a reaction to the first zombies and a cover up.
How do you figure the nations that voted ‘no’ to the UN proposal at the end paid for it?
At the end of the interview with the wife and mother who becomes a community designer and mayor after the war, she says that her husband tosses her the keys to the car and heads to the back with the dog’s leash. She hears a shot and her story ends. What happened? Was her husband attacked and killed by a zombie? By the dog, gone mad with fear? Did he get away with the family? (Shoot me, I always hope for a happy ending.)
The American President and VP during the war were clearly drawn to be Colin Powell and Howard Dean, but it doesn’t take much tweaking to see them as Barack Obama and John McCain.
The diver falling through the rotted floor of the ship into the grasping arms of hundreds of zombies, the French soldier recounting the fighting in the Catacombs, the Indian woman seeing the desperate swimmers pulled under … ack. Good luck getting my paranoid ass into the water ever again.
The almost universal survivor’s guilt rang true. Particularly vivid and poignant were the reactions of the soldiers who were ordered to regroup and leave civilians behind.
The image of the jammed highway was creepy as all hell, with people stuck in their cars and the zombies swarming their way up from the back of the line, especially as the people were heading from one infested area directly into another.
The early exploitation of the crisis by so many people that should have known better was too easy to believe: not just the drugmaker who produced the ineffective vaccine and the government officials who smoothed the process in the interests of damping down the panic but the refugee smugglers who helped spread the rumor that there was a cure in the West so that they could make money from the desperate people trying to get themselves and their infected loved ones out, money that became useless as the world economy crashed.
Loach, thanks for the recommendation! I’ve ordered The Good War, and I’m excited to read it.
this description just made me visit bol.com and order this book. Along with some other impuls buys I really really have been wanting to get … Anyway, I’ve been wanting to try some illegal and insanely addictive drugs and paper-based crack cocaine might just be the thing for me. This better be good, though, Rick! 
I’ve always understood it as the husband shooting himself in the head.
I hope the movie is done in straight documentary style, using a combination of interviews and various kinds of footage.
I have the book around here somewhere, I’ll have to look. From memory I thought it was illustrating how civilization was breaking down. The neighbors ate their dog. Father had to go and take care of it. I’ll check on it.
I thought the flooding was the cause not the cover up. Maybe something that was buried in that temple of the dead that was flooded got loose that wasn’t supposed too?
Now see, this is also a good possibility.
I thought of another question – what happened to North Korea? The whole country, pulling in and disappearing from the world … I have a shiver-inducing mental image of the entire population in tunnels behind huge, implacable doors locked impossibly tight, at the mercy of the zombies that start to spring up from the few infected that came in with them.