World War Z (2006)

A very clever companion to the Zombie Survival Guide. I just wish this didn't read like a High School creative writing project. Maybe the author should take some college level writing classes! ( )

Interesting style: story told through interviews of the people who participated, fought, endured, etc. ( )

The full cast recording salvaged what would have been an otherwise mundane book. ( )

This wasn’t what I expected. Maybe the subtitle should have clued me in, but I was expecting something a little more along the lines of The Handmaid’s Tale. Not in subject matter of course, but in the sense that The Handmaid’s Tale is written in such a way as to make it sound like the main character is recounting her story orally. I figured World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War would be told in a similar style, by one character, or maybe a handful of characters, “talking” about what happened.

Instead, this book is a collection of interviews that the author conducted with a huge number of people after the zombie war was over. Um, I mean that in a fictional sense of course. We “hear” from each person for a few pages, learn about what they saw or did or learned during some aspect of the war, and then we move on to a new person. I like to go into books blind, and mostly I think that enhances my reading experiences, but occasionally it doesn’t serve me well and this was one of those cases. It’s been a while since I’ve managed to get really engrossed in a book, and I was hoping this might be one I could really sink my teeth into. In a non-zombie-like way. If I’d known about (or remembered, since I know I’ve read other people’s reviews for it over the years) the style of the book, I probably would have saved it for another time.

It was moderately interesting, and it does tell a pretty coherent story. The interviews are grouped in chronological order, so the early interviews show us the beginning of things and the final interviews show us more of the aftermath after things started to calm down. There are usually only a few short comments or questions from the author, so it’s mostly the interviewees who are doing the talking. Some of their stories were pretty interesting, and sometimes I got caught up in them, especially the longer passages in which the person was telling about things that had happened to them personally as opposed to just talking in general about the impact of events and what people were thinking and deciding.

The problem was, there was no suspense whatsoever. The very nature of the book implied from the beginning that things would be more-or-less handled by the end, and of course you knew each person telling their story would survive because they were still there at the end to be interviewed. I also never felt any investment in the characters since we spent so little time with each one before moving on to new people.

One thing I did appreciate was that we saw what happened in many different parts the world. As I read, I was contrasting that to Stephen King’s The Stand which I read earlier this year. The Stand was originally published in the late 1970’s and dealt with a flu epidemic exclusively from the perspective of the US, with very little hint as to what if anything might have been happening elsewhere. It felt weird, reading that in the year 2022, especially after recent events, and feeling so confined to one country. This book, published in 2006, felt much more realistic in that regard. We not only learned what happened in a variety of countries, but most of the people were, as one would expect, aware of what was going on in other countries and often commented on it.

Overall though, this was another average read for me. Interesting, but not gripping. ( )

Now that I've read this book, I must have a lobo. ( )