Book Notes: "World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War" by Max Brooks

TWorld War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was one of the most tightly-written, compelling books I've read in a good long while. Page-turning, riveting, interesting from beginning to end.

But I'm still not sure I'm glad I read it.

"World War Z" tells the story of a zombie pandemic and my favorite part of this book is the great detail with which Brook considers how such an event would affect different, wide-spread areas of the globe. It's an "Oral History" and so you get a picture of the catastrophic events through the words of many diverse characters and the picture that's painted is both horrific and fascinating.

The only reason I can give for disliking this book (other than the fact that I now have a few more dismaying mental pictures of violent death than I had before) is how oddly depressing it was, how empty it felt.

Some of that is just because there's so much violence, but when I got to the end, and asked myself, "so what was the point?", the only answer I could come up with was that the book was written to comfort.

Weird conclusion, I know, but look at it this way: how often have you thought, "what's the worse that could happen?" as a means to reassure yourself? I do it all the time. You ask, "what's the worse that could happen?" and then you imagine how you'd get through it. If you can imagine a happy ending to that question, well, then you're comforted. You think, "Even if X happened, I'd still have Y."

Brooks' novel seems to me to be saying, "Even if an unspeakable, global disaster happened, humanity would survive. Some of us would make it."

And I get that. But . . . I'm sorry, it didn't seem that comforting to me. There wasn't any transcendent hope and, frankly, once you've gotten used to the glorious hope of Christ, anything less strikes a duller note and can't quite satisfy.

I fully realize that Brooks probably doesn't share my beliefs, so this isn't a proper criticism, really. It's more like picking up an Amish romance and complaining there weren't enough vampires. :) I realize that and I don't want to come across as trashing a really excellently-executed novel. It totally succeeds on its own terms. This is just an explanation of why the part of the book that didn't work for me didn't, well, work for me. All the imaginative, detailed, fascinating, "what if" bits? Totally worked. Really spectacular book. I just didn't like the aftertaste.

View all my reviews

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell