World War Z
Max Brooks

The zombie war came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid etched first hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face to face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.
Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve year old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west of the Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.
Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, "By excluding the human factor, aren't we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn't the human factor the only true difference between is and the enemy we now refer to as "the living dead"?"

This is an absolutely amazing novel. I love how even the jacket information treats it as if this is a real account of a war against zombies that happened. The entire time the fourth wall is never broken and the entire thing reads as if it were a true account from the survivors of a zombie outbreak that turned into a war between the undead and the living.

This book is not told as a story. It is told as an account of what happened to multiple people during the time of the zombie war. Each person that the author "interviews" has their own experiences, views, and personalities. For the author to give each and every interviewed character their own quirks and make them feel like a real human being that has truly been interviewed is quite an impressive feat. Not once are you pulled out of this novel with the feeling that it is a work of fiction. Never before have I read a work of fiction that truly feels like non-fiction and never before has a work of fiction had such real and vibrant first hand accounts of something that never happened in the real world.

If you're looking for your typical zombie apocalypse novel, this is not it. There is not a lot of horror and gore and it really does read like a work of non-fiction. However, if you are looking for an extremely cerebral novel that deals with zombies, then this is for you. This is not a mindless read.

All in all, I am extremely impressed by this novel and would highly recommend it.

My rating: Four and a half out of five snails.