World War Z

I realize I’m behind the cultural curve on this one, the book well-known to even casual readers and already out in paperback, but be that as it may—or perhaps, owing to the sensible admonition never to read a novel less than a year old, because of that—I’m totally enjoying Max Brooks’ darkly humorous and deeply chilling World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.

It’s sort of Studs Terkel meets Stephen King, a compendium of transcripts from interviews with survivors of the “greatest conflict in human history,” an all-out war that almost extinguished human life on planet earth and forever changed society around the world as billions died (many of whom then rose from the dead to prey upon the living) in the approximately ten year armagedon between the living and the undead in the not-so-distant future.

I love how the story unfolds, with scattered accounts of zombie infection (at first called “African Rabies”) followed by official denials, governmental ineptitude, media misinformation, all of which inevitably contributed to the crisis increasing in magnitude. (One can’t help see analogies here to how, on a smaller scale, the AIDS epidemic unfolded, and certainly Brooks is aware of that and plays with it, as he does with other geopolitical situations, from the Israeli occupation of Palestine to the US embargo of Cuba.)

And, although I’m troubled by the implications, I also can’t help being compelled by the dropped hints about how in many ways, the post-Zombie War world seems to be thriving, with a resurgent US economy, free universal health care, ships that are fueled by sea-water, skyscrapers that power themselves with solar panels, and Cuba emerging as a bastion of economic freedom and democracy.

I haven’t quite finished the book, so I’m not sure how it all turns out and I still don’t know how the infection originally got started, but I’m reading slowly now, trying to savor it—while still making sure I finish before dark.