The Bestseller That Brought Zombies Back from the Dead

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when zombies return from the dead. But the zombie mania of
the 21st century did catch me unawares.

The undead had kept a low profile since George Romero’s cult classic The Night of the Living
Dead (1968), made on a miniscule budget of $114,000 but destined for preservation in the
National Film Registry for its 'cultural' and 'aesthetic' significance. Others had tried to imitate
this phenomenon in subsequent years, but with mixed results. Peter Jackson, later to hit the
box office jackpot with Tolkein-inspired films, tried his
hand at zombie-dom with Braindead (1992), but his failure
was the mirror image of Romero's success—Braindead only
generated $243,000 in US receipts. Re-animator (1985)
based on an early H.P. Lovecraft novella, only did
marginally better, pulling in a humble $2 million at
the box office. Cemetery Man from 1994 had the biggest
success of this motley crew, but still only sold $4 million
in tickets—hardly justifying the exhumation expenses.

But anyone proclaiming the death of the zombie got a shock
in the new millennium. A series of films inspired by the
Resident Evil video game brought in close to a billion dollars.
And, soon, zombies were everywhere in pop culture, from
manga to TV series. Protestors held ‘zombie walks’ to call
attention to their causes, and past literary classics were
rewritten to make room for the undead—most notably in
Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
(2009).

But move aside Mr. Darcy, the real literary star of his
movement is Max Brooks. He boasts an unlikely lineage for horror—his parents are comedy
icon Mel Brooks and actress Anne Bancroft, best known for playing Mrs. Robinson in The
Graduate. The younger Brooks started out in his father’s footsteps, as staff writer for Saturday
Night Live, but he quickly turned his allegiance to the Saturday night undead with the
publication of his 2003 book The Zombie Survival Guide. This oddball work, which hovers
between parody and practical manual, was a surprising bestseller, and Brooks decided that
zombies were his true calling. His follow-up book World War Z spent a month on the New
York Times bestseller list, sold a million copies, and spawned a Brad Pitt movie that was the
biggest-grossing zombie film of all time.

The novel, for its part, resembles a screenplay. The action moves forward via dialogue and rapid
scene changes. Stage directions and description of setting are kept to an absolute minimum.
Brooks makes little attempt to fit these isolated scenes into a larger narrative. Each interlude
presents a separate incident, but the sequencing is haphazard—after a scene in South Africa, we
move immediately to Ireland, and then to the Ukraine, next to Canada, and so on.

We are introduced to new conflicts and characters with each geographical shift—indeed, every
chapter, and sub-section with each chapter could stand alone as a self-contained tale. This
pointillistic approach is both World War Z’s greatest virtue and also its most significant
stumbling block. Brooks deftly crafts each scene, and for a hundred pages or so, the reader
willingly accepts the disjunctive structure (or lack of structure) to the novel. But eventually the
absence of a larger arc to the narrative undermines the tension. Brooks claims he has written
the account of a war, but what he has delivered is merely a series of battles.

Even so, many of these make for memorable set pieces. The battle for Yonkers—in which
zombies deliver a crushing defeat to the US military—is presented with vivid detail, and Brooks
does justice both to the subjective psychological and objective tactical maneuvers of his theater
of action. The lengthy account of a Chinese nuclear sub that decides to pursue its own
homemade survival plan is equally riveting, as is the story of a blind Japanese man who
survives alone in the wilderness, battling zombies he can’t even see.

Occasionally Brooks aims for dark comedy, as in his account of celebrities who decide to retire
to a private fortress and wait out the zombie apocalypse—meanwhile streaming their star-
studded survivalist antics to the rest of the world over the web. But, for the most part, our
authorsopts for horror over humor, although his various narrators often find time for wry one-
liners.

Brooks is at his best when operating at a granular level. He seems to take particular delight in
describing weapons and formations—this same intense interest in the mano a mano aspects of
dealing with the undead came across in The Zombie Survival Guide. Here, again, he seems to
align his priorities with cinematic details that might translate well into action scenes on the
screen. But this also works well in print. Brooks certainly convinces us of his expertise—either
he spent a lot of time researching firearms and explosions, or he is a bit of a survivalist himself.

But for all the clever repartee and convincing accounts of various zombie lobotomizing
equipment, World War Z never quite rises to the highest rung of horror novel. I might
recommend that a fan of the genre read a few of the sections, as quasi-short stories, but over
the long haul this book runs out of momentum. Brooks’s attempt to revisit characters and wrap
up loose threads in the final pages is a case of too little, too late. We never got to know the
individuals long enough to maintain interest in their happily-ever-after days, nor do we ever get
any coherent sense of the big picture story of the war. Indeed, this whole work seems more like
a pitch for a movie deal than an attempt to match the great horror writers—King, Poe,
Lovecraft, Matheson and company.

Even so, Brooks has a better sense than any of these intrepid forerunners of how to build a
multimedia franchise. Hey, Lovecraft was cool, but did he know how to get subsidiary revenue
from an app, and sell graphic novels? Did Poe offer supplementary educational materials for
schools and license his intellectual property for video games. Give Brooks credit: his zombies
have legs, and they won’t settle for a measly book deal. So I may hesitate in lauding World War
Z as a top tier genre novel, but it is a killer of a brand.

Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from
Basic Books.

Publication Date: December 3, 2016

This is my year of horrible reading.
I am reading the classics of horror fiction
during the course of 2016, and each week will
write about a significant work in the genre.
You are invited to join me in my annus
horribilis. During the course of the year—if
we survive—we will have tackled zombies,
serial killers, ghosts, demons, vampires, and
monsters of all denominations. Check back
each week for a new title...but remember to
bring along garlic, silver bullets and a
protective amulet. Ted Gioia

My Year of Horrible Reading

Week 1:
Dracula
By Bram Stoker

Week 2:
T he Haunting of Hill House
By Shirley Jackson

Week 3:
T ales of Mystery & Imagination
By Edgar Allan Poe

Week 4:
Carrie
By Stephen King

Week 5:
The Passion According to G.H.
By Clarice Lispector

Week 6:
T ales
By H.P. Lovecraft

Week 7:
T he Exorcist
By William Peter Blatty

Week 8:
The Woman in Black
By Susan Hill

Week 9:
N ausea
By Jean-Paul Sartre

Week 10:
I Am Legend
By Richard Matheson

Week 11:
G host Stories of Henry James
By Henry James

Week 12:
Interview with the Vampire
By Anne Rice

Week 13:
A merican Psycho
By Bret Easton Ellis

Week 14:
L ast Stories and Other Stories
By William T. Vollmann

Week 15:
G host Stories of an Antiquary
By M.R. James

Week 16:
R osemary's Baby
By Ira Levin

Week 17:
T he King in Yellow
By Robert W. Chambers

Week 18:
Rebecca
By Daphne Du Maurier

Week 19
The Woman in the Dunes
by Kōbō Abe

Week 20
The Dark Eidolon
by Clark Ashton Smith

Week 21
O ff Season
by Jack Ketchum

Week 22
B ooks of Blood, Vols. 1-3
by Clive Barker

Week 23
The Silence of the Lambs
by Thomas Harris

Week 24
T he Orange Eats Creeps
by Grace Krilanovich

Week 25
S trange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson

Week 26
P sycho
by Robert Bloch

Week 27
F ledgling
by Octavia E. Butler

Week 28
D emons by Daylight
by Ramsey Campbell

Week 29
T he Complete Short Stories
by Ambrose Bierce

Week 30
P et Sematary
by Stephen King

Week 31
O ur Lady of Darkness
by Fritz Leiber

Week 32
G rendel
by John Gardner

Week 33
W hite is for Witching
by Helen Oyeyemi

Week 34
T he Wasp Factory
by Iain Banks

Week 35
K ing Kong
by Edgar Wallace

Week 36
T he Castle of Otranto
by Horace Walpole

Week 37
The J ohn Silence Stories
by Algernon Blackwood

Week 38
The M agic Toyshop
by Angela Carter

Week 39
The O ther
by Thomas Tryon

Week 40
N ever Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro

Week 41
G host Story
by Peter Straub

Week 42
J ohn Dies at the End
by David Wong

Week 43
T he Great God Pan
by Arthur Machen

Week 44
The C ipher
by Kathe Koja

Week 45
L et the Right One In
by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Week 46
T he Nameless
by Ramsey Campbell

Week 47
Horrorstör
by Grady Hendrix

Week 48
S trangers
by Taichi Yamada

Week 49
W orld War Z
by Max Brooks