by Surprisingly I didn’t pick this one up because of Covid-19. Nope, this was just something that I’d heard a lot about when it first came out, and how great it was. About how it bounces around from location to location, showing all different sorts of perspectives on the zombie outbreak. When the Brad Pitt movie came out I remember that the CGI zombies were super fast but terribly unrealistic, and I remember people complaining that it was nothing like the book. So obviously it wasn’t very memorable.
I should start by saying I’m not HUGE into zombies. Night of the Living Dead scared me pretty good as a tween, and I can appreciate the artistry in 28 days later, but for being a horror fan the zombie genre has never been my go-to. In fact, my favorite zombie-themed media is probably Plants vs Zombies. Even just thinking about it now makes me want to go install that wonderful tower defense game of my youth.
The book World War Z is broken up into 5 sections that sort of flow chronologically…from First Reports, to Outbreak, to Pandemic, and finally a sort of Healing/Moving On section. Within each section is a dozen or so chapters, each told from a different character’s perspective. The author starts by saying that he is a journalist and he was commissioned to report on the zombie outbreak and these were his pieces that were too personable to be used by the government agency requesting them. So instead he made a book out of them, and that’s what us readers are seeing. You’ll have a chapter where he some interviewee in Hong Kong is talking about his experience…when they first encountered one…how people tried to cover it up…etc. Then the next chapter will be a completely unrelated person in South America talking about how as a teacher they saw a student ‘turn’, and talk about how life changed rapidly after that. This voice and perspective was unique because it read like interviews (thought not really back-and-forth), and it let you examine it from TONS of angles…scientific, religious, military, academic, and so on. Characters were sometimes wacky or easy to relate with, and many different ‘interviews’ stuck with me such as the blind man, or the one who started to train dogs to hunt out zombies.
Sadly though, I can’t say that I really liked this book as a whole. I found myself indifferent about reading more. Because of the format of it, where there is no central character, no linkage between any two stories or players, there was almost no suspense. The themes and points being made were compartmentalized. I could finish a 10 page chapter, and never once was I like “oh man I can’t wait to see what happens next”. I understand that people loved this format and how fresh it is/was but for me it lacked the draw that many great fictional stories carry. Apart from a few stand out characters with unique stories, I won’t remember anything exciting or captivating about the book. They didn’t redefine zombies for me. Zombies never felt close. You never once felt scared about what the next sentence held. There was no investment in these people who you got to know for only 2 pages before their whole story was laid out. Not everyone will agree with me on this, but this book was a bit of a ‘miss’ for me. FINAL SCORE: 3/10
