I took October as an excuse to get into the vast array of horror works that I’ve never been exposed to, which is quite a bit. I love the genre, but never really knew anyone else who was that interested in it outside of slumber parties, so there’s a lot I missed during my formative years.
Although this consisted primarily of a complete rehaul of my Netflix queue, I’ve also had fun going through what literature has to offer.
And from what I’ve read, I think I prefer literary horror to film horror (although I’ll always love the former for slumber parties).
The medium demands it be complex and often a bit more open-ended, and it’s really hard for a novel to induce cheap screams the way horror movies do with their fancy lighting, music and effects.
Horror writers are forced to be more creative.
The book I’ve read most recently is “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War” by Max Brooks, the author of the “Zombie Survival Guide.” I have found “World War Z” to be one of the most enjoyable works I’ve read in a really long time.
“World War Z” begins with a brief introduction regarding the “greatest conflict in human history,” the attack on human life by reanimated corpses that are commonly referred to as “zombies.”
The fictional author discusses his work on the United Nations Postwar Commission Report, for which he gathered subjective data in a series of interviews with people from all over the world who had varying experiences in the war.
His material was not included in the report since it was so personal, emotional and involved, so he decided to publish his material as a book. What follows are many chapters worth of interviews and oral reports of the war.
And it’s chilling. Brooks really bridges the small divide between horror and science fiction, and in doing so creates a phenomenal read that puts the zombie genre in the most realistic stage possible and comments on the nature of humanity while doing so.
Although “World War Z” won’t make you jump out of your seat the way a film will, I found myself reading something else right before bedtime because the material is extremely intense.
Brooks seems to draw much inspiration from real-world disaster events, and catalogues how selfish people struggling to survive often become; how the rich will seize this sort of opportunity to make even more profit and the bureaucratic mess of governments poorly equipped to deal with things like the walking dead.
“World War Z” scared me because at times it became so real.
In fact, there are accounts of this novel being placed in the nonfiction sections in libraries. This book is truly as much “Dawn of the Dead” as it is “Lord of the Flies.”
“World War Z” came out rather recently, and I have full confidence that it has what it takes to be considered a classic in the years to come. It is ingeniously clever, has a good deal to say about who we are as a species and, most importantly, is extremely readable.
It’s very easy to get lost in “World War Z,” so much that I had to be careful about putting the novel down because if I left it alone for too long, my boyfriend would snatch it up and it’d be hours before I got to read it again.
So don’t just take my word for it, “World War Z” is absolutely worth your time and I recommend it to any lovers of the apocalypse theme.
Better Read: Undead apocalypse tops haunted genre
Published: Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Updated: Wednesday, October 28, 2009
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