World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

I don’t normally read horror, but this book has a fascinating format: it’s a fictional “oral history” of a war against a zombies virus that took place about a decade prior. The main character is an unnamed reporter or journalist or documentarian who compiles a set of interviews with people who survived the war in various places and circumstances.

The “zombies” are humans infected by a mysterious virus who become crazed, unstoppable monsters, driven solely to consume human or animal flesh. Anyone infected by a zombie attack eventually re-animates as a zombie themselves. They can only be killed by directly destroying the brain, and will otherwise continue to pursue humans however they can, no matter how much damage is done to the rest of their bodies.

Through hundreds of individual stories, the history of the war is revealed. Some stories are just isolated anecdotes, while others mention and corroborate shared elements that keep popping up. The larger story of the war slowly threads itself together.

Some of the stories are very direct and personal –

• An American pilot crashes somewhere in Lousiana and has to evade zombies for days until she is rescued, aided by a mysterious voice over the radio, in perhaps just in her head.

• A Chinese submarine crew absconds with a nuclear sub and hides out under the oceans for months. Eventually, their own Navy comes looking for them.

• A young social outcast in Japan only leaves his bedroom when he loses his internet connection. He finds chaos and spends days trying to escape from his hi-rise condominium building.

Other stories flesh out major events, concepts, and societal shifts from a distance –

• Zombies freeze in the cold of winter, only to thaw in the spring. Millions of Mexicans and Central Americans die trying to cross through the United States to get to the relative safety of Canada before winter sets in. But the ones who made it were woefully unprepared and lots of them died anyway.

• A military K-9 handler explains how the dogs were key to detecting and tricking the zombies

• A soldier details how the military had to change tactics because their traditional weapons and tactics were mostly ineffective against an enemy of so many numbers that never got tired, increased in size with every kill (and subsequent re-animation), and could only be “killed” by destroying the brain directly.

• Humans sometimes worked against each other – some pre-zombie conflicts simply wouldn’t go away. For example, the Israeli government tries to set aside the Palestinian conflict and withdraw from the Occupied Territories in order to focus on the zombie war. This enrages the Jewish far right and sparks a civil war between human factions, while both sides are also trying to fight off the zombies.

• Soldiers struggle with LaMOEs (“Last Man on Earth”) types – survivalists who set up little fiefdoms in zombie territory and then fight the humans who arrive to liberate them. Some people go insane and start emulating the zombies, some people become feral cannibals, and other people simply die in their sleep of acute psychological trauma and despair.

• Being deep underwater doesn’t affect the zombies and they can’t swim, which means there are tens of millions of them moving around on the ocean floor. Every once in a while, some of them find a path to shore and come lumbering out of the surf.

And all throughout, there are mysteries in the form of dangling narrative threads that are mentioned but never followed up on or resolved –

• Something very bad happened to “Flight 575,” but it’s never explained, just mentioned a few times in the same way we talk of “9/11”

• The first case of the virus was a young boy in China, but there’s no explanation of how he got it. There are some allusions to some cause related to the construction of the Three Gorges Dam.

• The entire population of North Korea disappeared overnight. No one knows what happened to them. There are some suspicions that they moved into an underground complex, where they might be safe, or might have succumbed to the infection and have become a massive, subterreanean zombie hoard.

• Iceland was isolated and had no military, so the virus ran wild through it. It’s assumed to be completely over-run, though no one has been there in years, so no one really knows.

The book jumps between harrowing first-person accounts, and larger descriptions of geo-political machinations as the entire world struggles to control the outbreak spreading out of control.

I absolutely loved the format. It’s an overhead view of a supposed historical episode, and that makes it unique among any fiction I’ve read. It doesn’t have a traditional, defined climax. You simply hear recollections about how the events unfolded, as acute memories, or as trends over time.

I couldn’t put it down. I tore through it in two days.

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