World War Z + The Zombie Survival Guide

Of the classic Universal Monsters five are associated with a respected work of literature (Drac, Frank, Hunch, Phantom, Invisible Man) and three were cooked up by harried screenwriters on assignment (Mummy, Wolf Man, Gill-man). The latter trio, as we know them today, are original creations of the cinema.

Not that they are without some important literary precedents. The creature from the black lagoon was inspired by the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale, the werewolf is an archetype owed to Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and as for the mummy, well...there is Bram Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars, which is the basis for several scarifying Hammer ventures of the 70s, but it's doubtful whether the creators of the 1932 Boris Karloff stiff were familiar with the novel. Instead, the international press is largely responsible for the notion of the mummy as monster, having invented a "curse of the pharaohs" to drum up Egyptomania following the 1922 discovery of King Tut; such hoopla proved enough to pad out a hasty script.

The modern zombie is also an original spawn of the silver screen. I have mentioned that the zombie epidemic has progenitors in 50s sci-fi lit, which makes for a fine pedigree if you're willing to connect the two, but as far as most genteel folk are concerned (with reason) Zed has staggered through his forty years of life an unlettered wretch. After all, who wants to read about giving a ghoul the ol' claw hammer-to-the-forehead when you can watch it or play it? Try out this excerpt from my unpublished zombie novel: And then he killed one with a rake, and then he killed one with this old Tandy 1000 monitor, and then his girlfriend got bit so he had to stab her with an apple corer, and then he killed like three at once... It goes on, but I'm afraid there's not much in the way of romance or nuance for you lovers of vampire fiction (you might prefer my unpublished piece of Twilight fan fiction). I guess when you take away the visual splendor of the rancid neck wound a zombie does not make a very compelling character. The most "sophisticated" usage of Zed in the movies is as dummy target for satire, but even then the lurid humor tends to rely on sight gags, and the stories have always been limited to one very restrictive premise.

George Romero did the zombie a great service by creating the genre with a vein of social commentary, but also a great disservice by establishing the almost unbroken tradition of the zombie story as the story of a small band of survivors isolated from broader events. It is a perfect formula as far as low-budget horror filmmaking is concerned; by design it avoids the complex and far-reaching social, political and economic implications that a widespread plague of living death would have on the present-day global community. That is, every zombie movie avoids the most interesting implications of its subject because it is a really hard problem to figure out, and one not at all suitable for treatment on film. Someone was going to have to be brave enough to write the definitive literary treatment of the zombie epidemic, and it would necessarily be a work not of horror so much as social science fiction.

That person turned out to be the son of the guy who gave us Frankenstein's monster in tails singing Puttin' on the Ritz. If your dad spent every night at the dinner table humping himself and butchering show tunes I suppose, yes, you'd give a great deal of thought to the end of human civilization. In 2003 Max Brooks published a utilitarian-looking field handbook entitled The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From The Living Dead. The cover is adorned by an understated coat-of-arms: crossed machete and M1 carbine. Contents are direct, matter-of-fact and thorough in dispelling common myths about zombies and zombie attacks, detailing the pathology of the virus that causes zombification and the physical attributes of the infected, outlining proven tactics for defense and combat against the four classes of zombie outbreak, listing suggested weaponry and gear for individuals and groups, and instructing where and how to attempt to rebuild civilization from scratch in the event of Class 4. Included as a lengthy appendix is a record of all known or alleged zombie outbreaks in human history, summarizing archaeological evidence from every inhabited continent dating back as far as 60,000 BC and written accounts from the time of the Punic Wars to a series of documented incidents in Los Angeles in 1993 and 1994.

A strain of well-educated madness was required for the compiling of such a meticulously fabricated and utterly convincing document. For Brooks it was merely a warm-up. In 2006 we learned the true depths of his (it must be said) genius. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War should be commonly referred to as "Max Brooks' World War Z", the way we now say "Bram Stoker's Dracula" and "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein". The Gothic flavor of those novels could not be more different from the sober journalism of WWZ, despite the structural similarities between the epistolary novel and Brooks' collection of transcribed and annotated interviews, which highlights once again my assertion that the zombie is the product of a more modern era of disenchantment and all-too-real postwar horrors (of which the television and internet media make us painfully aware, every day) that eclipse credulous Christian frettings about spooks and devils.

The book is modeled after Studs Terkel's oral history of World War II, The Good War; a collection of accounts of survivors from around the world and all walks of life that, taken together, relate the events of twenty-some years that span the initial outbreak in central China in the spring of 2011, the total collapse of global order by the autumn of 2012, the decade-long campaign waged by the re-marshaled US Army to reconquer North America from two hundred million zombies, and a further decade of rebuilding and reckoning in a shattered post-apocalypse. The Zombie Survival Guide appears as an in-world prewar publication, like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Brooks covers the foresight and readiness of Israel (allow some author bias), the ironic boon of the institutions of apartheid in South Africa, the reversal of economic fortunes between Cuba and the US with the flow of white-collar refugees into the well-defended island and Castro's expedient embrace of capitalism, the evacuation of slow-to-respond Japan to frigid Kamchatka (zombies freeze solid in subzero conditions), the mysterious disappearance of the entire population of North Korea, the nuclear saber-rattling between Pakistan and India brought to a head (but not how you expect), the observation of global ecologic catastrophe by the stranded crew of the International Space Station, the deluge of refugees from the world's two most populous countries up onto the defensible Tibetan plateau (humanitarian crisis is too polite a phrase), the resurgence of the democratic Chinese government-in-exile in Taiwan, the religious revival and restoration of a theocratic tsar in Russia, the reoccupation and siege of Europe's castles, the specter of German guilt in the face of mass death policy-making, the lunatic resolve of the French to reclaim Parisian sewers, the plausible appearance of a Waterworld of flotilla nations and the total autonomy and might of sovereign nuclear submarines. That's not even half the ideas sketched in this volume of bewildering creativity. I finished reading the book six months ago and still I don't have the stamina to try to fully convey its scope.

Let me reiterate that each of these events is conveyed by a different person's oral account of his or her personal story of survival, so rather than reading like a think tank's report on a hypothetical scenario every section is invested with deep and universal human drama. As comedy and tragedy go hand-in-hand, and as Brooks is inescapably his father's son, he does not leave us without the occasional moment of sublime levity, such as when Paris Hilton's latest reality show — Totally Zombie-Proof Celeb Party Compound in the Hamptons! — fails to live up to its name.

Max Brooks' World War Z reads like a symphony of commentary — a hundred individually humble voices, simple observations, many commonplace and a few profound, that when played in the context of one another gather into an immense and haunting emotional force. The book's most powerful passage reflects this analogy; talk to me after you've read it.


A Major Motion Picture is in the works... Well, if Watchmen turned out OK contrary to all my doomsaying, then just maybe there is hope for the cinema's first zombie epic.