Heather J. (LadyCrymsyn) reviewed on 5/19/2009 + 28 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 1

I'm not usually a fan of most zombie books or movies - they usually seemed a bit too self-contained. You have a zombie outbreak in a city, and that's really creepy, but what about the rest of the world? How are governments responding (or how did they fail to respond)? These issues are usually overlooked in favor of telling the immediate story. Well, World War Z seeks to answer these questions. Told as a series of survivor interviews, and set 10 years after the end of a world-wide zombie outbreak, it chronicles both personal responses to events and the overreaching governmental responses. It clearly shows how such a thing *could* happen, were there ever such a disease vector as could turn people into walking corpses.
This book is not a horror novel in the traditional sense. There isn't that much suspense - after all, these interviews are with the survivors, so we know who lived through it. Nor is this some fairy-tale world - evil people survived as well as good, and most of humanity fell somewhere in the grey area between. Moreover, this book has moments that are far more emotionally moving than any book about zombies has a right to be.
And there is the crux. This isn't really a book about zombies. Oh, it has zombies in it, enough to please most horror fans. But, ultimately, it's a book about humans, their ingenuity, and their will to survive. This is a book about hope. The hope that, no matter what we humans, as a race, do to ourselves, we can still band together and overcome.
So, if you like zombies, read this book. If you hate zombies, read this book.

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