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It’s probably the most novel premise we’ve seen this year, if not all century: After humanity fights back from near-annihilation at the hands of a zombie epidemic, the United Nations charges Max Brooks with the task of telling the official story. He travels all over the world, interviewing survivors—politicians, criminals, families, soldiers, artists—about their experience with the “Walking Plague.” After the U.N., in typically bureaucratic fashion, rejects the resulting document as “too intimate,” Brooks decides to publish the oral history itself as World War Z.
The accounts begin in China: A doctor has been summoned to a remote village to tend to a young boy, “Patient Zero,” who comes home a little green around the gills after looting an ancient holy site. Specifically, he’s dead and it’s making him hungry for human flesh. From there, the story is, in many ways, nothing new: All hell breaks loose, and before long most of humanity is laid to waste. But the form and, more important, the details make Z an inventive and timely contribution to the zombie genre. The epidemic doesn’t just spread inevitably. Through many perspectives, the reader sees how Armageddon will be hastened by media irresponsibility, mass denial, greed and governmental incompetence. The zombies themselves might be the only implausibility in the entire book.
The mock oral history is the perfect form for getting at the sweeping perspective of Z, even if it does limit some of the genre’s more traditional pleasures. A few chapters are genuinely scary, but they’re in the minority. Bending horror to the form of alternative history would have been novel in and of itself. Doing so in the mode of Studs Terkel might constitute brilliance.
