I seem to be working my way backwards through the canon of zombie literature. I started with Zone One: A Novel, which I loved beyond reason. A friend, hearing how much I loved Zone One, loaned me his copy of World War Z a few weeks ago. I have been picking it up and nibbling on it ever since; it is a book which lends itself well to being read in bite-sized pieces. (Heh.)

 

If you crave a longer, meatier narrative, then World War Z is not the book for you. Its story is told in fractured pieces, a pastiche which creates, layer upon layer, the story of the global zombie apocalypse. As each puzzle piece is added, you begin to make connections between the bits, which forms a truly massive meta-narrative of the spread of "African rabies" (as the plague was briefly code named). 

This is a fascinating trick, and well worth the effort to obtain. But it also can feel a bit frustrating for those who just want to sit down and lose themselves in a story of surviving the zombie apocalypse.

 

The framing device is that the narrator was hired, long after the apocalypse, to travel the world and compile reports. In doing so, he interviewed people in all circumstances, in seemingly every nation, from dock workers to upper-echelon surgeons. The reporter's bosses demanded that he cut all of this extraneous detail from his United Nations report, but they allowed him to publish the "extra bits" as a stand-alone document. And here it is, in all its Studs Terkel-esque glory.

 

What the book's structure loses in narrative consistency it gains in immediacy. Each interview (most of them are only a page or two long) drops you right into the middle of the action. There is very little in the way of everyday life found in these stories. It's pretty much, "Here's what I was doing, and then the zombies came." For those who get bored or frustrated by zombie stories that are all about the other stuff (the way that AMC's "The Walking Dead" often seems to be much more about walking than about the dead) World War Z will be like a brick of uncut heroin.

 

(I am extremely amused to learn that Brad Pitt will star in the film adaptation of the book, which is scheduled to be released this December. Because he played Louis in the film adaptation of Interview With A Vampire, see? Vampires? Zombies? The interviewee becomes the interviewer? Maybe it's just me.)