Book Review: World War Z

I used to think I was going slightly mad when I'd hear my friends at university start conversations with remarks like "well my plan for the Zombie Apocalypse is.....". Everyone I knew seemed to have some sort of contingency plan, not for a nuclear attack, terrorist outrage or natural disaster, but in case corpses started to get up and devour the living. 
What, I thought to myself, would possibly motivate people to enjoy thinking up such macabre and strange scenarios?. It was some time later that I picked up Max Brooks' "World War Z" (actually I saw it in a friend's coat pocket and nabbed it) and began to read. 
The tacky, cheap, pop-fiction horror romp I expected was in reality a carefully constructed, cleverly presented, poignant, enthralling and outright frightening book. Set out as a series of interview transcripts recorded some years after the events they refer to this "oral history of the Zombie War" recounts the beginnings of infection in China, the spread and global panic to world-wide pandemic and human counter-strike that came to known as "World War Z". 
You would think (as I did) that such a fanciful tale could never take root in your rational mind as a serious possibility, but as you read each interview, all realistic to a phenomenal degree, you begin to let yourself believe it could, indeed may, happen. 
Realism is the cornerstone of Brooks' work. The attention to detail and brutal (in)humanity entrenched in the pages of every section bring a stable horror scenario out of make-believe land and very much into our own real world. 
The responses of individuals, organisations and governments to the problem of walking, hungry corpses are probably as close as we will ever come to how we all might actually react to a zombie plague. Each interview is long enough to be engrossing and short enough to hold your attention and in some cases leave you wanting to know more. At times I was actually rueful an account didn't go on longer and into more detail, I felt an urge to know more about a situation or the fate of an individual in that grey, bleak and moan-haunted world Brooks' forces you to visualise.
As a backdrop to his other work The Zombie Survival Guide (which I have not yet read in full) World War Z is an fantastic devise, even tying the two books together into a canon universe that's ripe for further expansion. Any zombie horror fan will enjoy this book, I myself am not a devotee of the zombie genre but I cannot recommend World War Z highly enough to anyone who is fairly open minded literature-wise and wants a gripping read. 
Now I fully understand what my friends were thinking when they were planning escape routes and weapon acquisition. Maybe I'll keep a sharp instrument closer to by bed and make sure all the windows are locked....you know...in case of....burglars... 


Justification Score: 5/5