Steve Reads

The world is quickly getting overrun with zombies. They bite living humans; those humans eventually die and are reanimated at zombies themselves. The only way to kill them is to separate their brains from their bodies. Cutting off all their limbs or disemboweling them won’t do it; they’ll keep dragging their bodies along, in their continual quest for warm flesh to snack on.

This is the basic problem in World War Z. Which brings up the first point of anatomical puzzlement (one of very few): if the brain is vital to keeping the zombies going, then wouldn’t severing their spine also do the trick? The book makes it a point to note that a human body is just a bunch of meat with a command-and-control unit attached, and once that c-and-c unit is gone the body is, too. But command-and-control isn’t much good without a way to get messages from the general to his troops, so to speak.

Getting hung up on that kind of detail, though, would doom this book. And in any case, Brooks is very good at tying up the loose ends. The zombifying virus changes the bodies’ chemistry somehow, so that they also don’t need food or water. For that matter they don’t need oxygen, leading to what I found one of the most effectively terrifying images throughout the book: swarms of zombies lying on the ocean floor, their undead hands glancing off nearby swimmers, or pulling unlucky ones down. By the time of the book’s writing (it’s a look back at the Zombie War, after humanity has started to win against the zombies), there are millions of zombies lurking beneath the waves, and the next generation’s children have long since learned to stay away from the water.

What are the consequences of a zombie takeover? Brooks takes us around the world to answer that question. Borders are hastily closed off to outsiders, leading to a few missile exchanges and eventually all-out nuclear war between a couple of the combatants. People get in their cars and head out into the hinterlands, quickly running out of gas and abandoning their vehicles on the side of the road. (This leads, coincidentally, to one of my moments of disbelief: as it turns out, the zombies do not have the complicated motor skills to open car doors. Hence if they die in their cars, they cannot get out. As far as I can tell, Brooks invents this constraint to motivate one particular, highly effective, scene midway through the book. But again, we set aside our disbelief and move on.) They head for the sea and take any boats they can  . . .  but the zombie virus has already infected some of them, and of course there are those murderous zombies waiting below the sea in shallow water to drag the boaters down.

Others head for the north, where the zombies freeze motionless during the winter. The refugees are trained to expect that someone will come and save them, so they act like the German army invading Russia and don’t plan for the winter; they expect the zombie problem will be licked by then. Consequently many of them freeze, and [follow your Jack London imagination].

Brooks is mostly great at visualizing where the story should go. As my friend Chris (who encouraged me in the strongest terms to read World War Z) says, Brooks could probably write a 600-page book in place of this smaller one. The longer story would expand on places where Brooks had to rush: he was forced to pack an entire world’s worth of zombie stories, spread over 10-odd years of fighting, into 340 pages. So I don’t fault him a certain economy of style, with any clunkiness that that caused.

WWZ starts as Lord of the Flies on a global scale, with governments and individuals all huddled around the same campfire. “Fighting the last war” fails: all the high-tech weapons the U.S. military has stockpiled with zest count for naught, and we have to return to shooting bad guys between the eyes with pistols or lopping off their heads at close range. Our sedentary American lifestyle fails, and those who build things with their hands for the rest of us are suddenly our superiors. Had Brooks kept this arc going throughout World War Z, it would have been perfect.

As it is, I’m afraid it degenerates into what Chris calls a “war procedural” — though Chris’s claim is that WWZ never reaches this point, whereas I claim that it does. The last half of the book is “grunts” talking about the details of which particular bit of ordnance they threw at the bad guys, and how their tactics changed, and oh my god the military acronyms. So many acronyms. Brooks has read too much Tom Clancy; I have as well, which is where the nausea of recognition came from. Had he made the single decision to not interview a single soldier in the final half of the book, the book would have been saved from disappointment. As it is, I left it feeling let down: not upset at having read it, but also not inspired to reread it.