A couple of years ago, I reached zombie saturation. This manifested when I stopped watching and reading The Walking Dead. The humans are the real monster, I get it. And so my everlasting thanks goes out to everyone who told me that World War Z is almost too good, and that the audiobook is a masterpiece even though it's abridged. You brought me back to the world of the undead. I split Christmas break reading time between Bleak House (I WILL FINISH SOON), Dead Mountain, and World War Z and oh my goodness, what a successful round of reading.
We all know that the best horror stories aren't about the scary thing, they are about what the scary thing does to the people who are scared. Max Brooks takes that concept and RUNS with it and instead of following small bands of survivors we get a global overview of the sociopolitical, economic, technological, and psychological (and many other "-ical"s) ramifications of a zombie apocalypse and recovery from a zombie apocalypse. This isn't even really horror.
This is so well written and so well organized and I forgive Max Brooks for being pretty focused on the U.S.A. because this book is just so good. I'm listening to the audiobooks at this very moment. UGH FOLKS JUST READ IT. I was expecting this to be good but I wasn't expecting it to be this good. I might be back to zombies. I might start reading The Walking Dead again. I am newly motivated to finish reading The Girl With All The Gifts even though it was spooking me more than I like to be spooked (holla at you, nightmares)(I will wait until spring, I think).
I thought Max Brooks impressively didn't focus as much on the US as nearly all disaster books seem to. BUT I was frustrated that nearly all of his narrators were dudes. There were, I don't know, four women? And my recollection is that most of them were fairly passive, which I also didn't love. Apart from that, I thought it was a truly excellent book, though.
ReplyDeleteMostly I was just annoyed by the "it's cold in Canada and they need the States to help them" treatment that Canada always gets in disaster stories.
DeleteI concur about the narrators, more women would have been a huge improvement. I am willing to forgive a lot for this book though, it is indeed truly excellent.
I LOVE IT SO MUCH I told Max Brooks at C2E2 that I usually do like, Victorian lit, but this is in my top 5 books of all time, and he was NOTHING BUT NICE ABOUT IT. What a great guy. What a great book.
ReplyDeleteI LOVE THIS SO MUCH!! Though I don't disagree with Jenny's frustration at lack of lady narrators.
ReplyDeleteAlso did you know that they made an unabridged version of the audiobook cos they did that. That was super swell of them.