Reviewed by John J. Joex

Book Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars (Highest Rating)

Audiobook Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars (Highest Rating)

Some time back I discovered that listening to audiobooks on my daily commute can make a laborious drive into an at least tolerable experience (assuming of course it’s a good book).  I first started with several of the classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy literature (and there are quite a few selections available in this format) which I was either revisiting or taking the opportunity to fill in long-standing gaps on my reading list.  I have also kept my eye open for interesting new entries in the genre and Max Brooks’ World War Z caught my attention, in part because of Sam Christopher’s favorable review of the book and also because it is very reasonably priced for an audiobook (under $15).

The setup for the book is simple: the world has survived a massive zombie outbreak and the book follows an interviewer sent by the United Nations to talk with people who made it through the holocaust.  Max Brooks (son of Mel Brooks and who has voiced characters in animated shows like Batman Beyond and Justice League) provides the vocals for the narrator and an all-star cast voices the characters interviewed which includes Alan Alda, Mark Hamill, Henry Rollins, Rob and Carl Reiner, John Turturro, and many more.

World War Z uses the genre in a way that we have seen before in that it utilizes the Zombie-apocalypse as a means of delivering social commentary on society and human nature.  But Brooks manages to take this to the next level and really deliver a riveting comment on the human condition and he makes it seem that much more authentic by delivering the message through the words of the interviewees.  Their personal connection to the very real and nightmarish events, as well as their comments on what they saw and experienced, ring true and bring the horrors described to a personal level.  And the amazing voice cast energizes the message through their well-acted performances.  Whereas an audiobook usually has a single narrator, in World War Z each character is handled here with a different voice (though sometimes the same actor) which make them distinct personalities and which separates each of their stories.

Brooks’ novel on its own is an excellent addition to vast world of Zombie tales (and I concur with Mr. Christopher’s rating for the book), yet it also delivers a story that transcends that genre and that non-zombie fans can enjoy as well.  And the audiobook manages to fully capture the spirit of the novel and perhaps even enhance it with the excellent performances that unfold the story.  It is relatively short for an audio production (5 discs at about 6 hours), so it is a fairly quick listen and definitely worth the time (also worth the money as it runs cheaper than most audio adaptations).

There are still rumors of a movie version of the book, but I have my doubts on how well it would translate to that medium.  However, J. Michael Straczynski has allegedly worked up a script for the film, so it stands a chance.

Read Sam Christopher’s Review of the Book

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Reviewed by Sam Christopher

Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars

Samuel Todd has problems. He’s a divorced father of a teenager, he sings for very little money in a band that basically does frat parties and such, and his main job is as a paper delivery guy. Oh, and he lives in a world overrun by walking dead people whose sole aim is to eat anything or anyone living. And he writes about it, first on the Web, later in a notebook he keeps constantly at his side. This is the setup for this excellent novel by TW Brown. It appears to be self-published, as Mr. Brown appears to be the sole proprietor of May-December Publications. This makes it the best self-published book I’ve read to date.

Reminiscent of Z Day is Here, this tale follows our protagonist through all sorts of travails and troubles. First, of course, he has to figure out what’s going on and then get himself to believe it. This is always, for me, the most important part of any story that shows the beginning of the “zombie plague”. It would be a difficult thing to swallow but at some point even the most hardened skeptic has to buy into it—hopefully before their disbelief gets them killed. And that would make for a short story. That’s what makes this the single toughest thing in a story like this: the reader has to see the narrator’s point of view on this changing and it has to be a natural thing, a logical consequence of the action the narrator is observing or experiencing. If it doesn’t have the right feel to it the reader just shuts it off and disbelieves virtually everything after it. Or at least I do. After Todd believes in the problem and understands the meager remedies at his disposal, the story moves on to one of pure survival, as Todd moves from place to place, from group of survivors to group of survivors, completely at the whim and mercy of both the undead and the one thing that may be worse: the living who are dead inside.

There are two things here that make this a superior work in this genre. The first is the most obvious. Brown is simply a very good writer. His plot choices are generally very good and logical, with events in the story nearly always flowing organically from what has preceded without being too obvious. Even his pseudo-Hitchcockian twist in the story (which I won’t give away here) worked well, even though I wanted to hate it. His characterizations and personality mix is likewise interesting and well-done. The second thing is that he takes a premise from Romero, that premise being that the walking dead are a problem but it’s the people still living who have allowed the situation to reveal the worst of their inner selves who are most to be feared, and ramps it up to a whole ‘nother level. The people around our hero here are generally all right but it seems that nearly everyone else in the world… wow, these are the people who got superpowers in The End League. Bad, just rotten to the core.

Luckily for readers of dark sf, the same can’t be said about this book.

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Reviewed by Sam Christopher

Rating: 5 out of Stars (Highest Rating)

I’ve never made any bones about my love for zombie fiction. I love the movies, mainly the Romero style but I can deal with virtually any set of parameters for the dead rising, ever since I snuck into a theater to see the original Dawn of the Dead. Then, years later, I ran across the paperback for Dawn of the Dead in a comics store I frequented. I never bought it but over the course of a couple weeks I read the whole thing, and would even read it again later. Then one day I came in and the book was gone and I found myself wishing I’d bought it. Within a week, though, I had found the novelization for the original Night of the Living Dead at another book store. I flipped through this one but didn’t have the money to buy it right then. When I came back a few days later it was gone. I then went for years without seeing any kind of zombie prose. I’m sure it was out there but I just didn’t see it for whatever reason. In the last few years, though, horror and fantasy aimed at the zombie-loving audience has skyrocketed. There are many, many anthologies filled with “walking dead” fiction, novels—some good, some not so good—published that might never have found an audience without an organization like Amazon.com to reach its market on a large scale. These are things that years ago would likely have been relegated to the comics and oddball shops run by someone who happened to love the genre, and nowhere else.

Thus, the genre might never have attracted someone with the talent and background of Max Brooks. Brooks, son of comedy great Mel Brooks and actress Anne Bancroft, worked as a writer for Saturday Night Live in the early 2000s. He has also appeared as an actor, from what I gather, on various shows in bit parts, and as a voice actor on episodes of Batman Beyond and Justice League (both of which I’ve watched, but never really paid attention to the actors on them). His first book, The Zombie Survival Guide, is an excellent resource for anyone trying to survive a zombie holocaust (my first rule is: always keep at least half a tank of gas in your car) and also gives a little of the history of zombie outbreaks and attacks on humanity through the ages. I’m guessing Brooks, like me, has always had a fascination with this sub-genre, and so he might have written these books anyway, but one can never know. I do know that having a family to feed can sometimes make decisions for you. Irrespective of that, there is a market for these books now and he did write them.

So let’s talk about World War Z now. This is the story of a man sent by the UN to interview various people around the world on their perspective of the latest zombie outbreak; one that very nearly ended Man’s dominance of the planet. In The Zombie Survival Guide, we were shown various zombie outbreaks from history but these were always shown to be sporadic and, while dangerous locally, never really a threat to Humanity as a whole. This book is different. Even though it is being shown to us in flashback, through the memories of those who have survived it, and we know the war is supposedly over, one never really knows where they stand in the world Brooks has created. They think they’ve beaten the Dead back and ended the threat, but then they’ve always thought that before. The book is almost entirely presented in the voices of those who fought first-hand, and gives a truly diverse account of the war from various perspectives and through the lens of different experience. Some of the interviewees are clinical and detached, some are more obviously affected—all are shown to have been marked by the events. Brooks does an excellent job of imbuing these characters with their own personalities, their own mannerisms, and does so in a very believable manner. The reader is really drawn into the story and sometimes we even feel as though we are interviewing the survivors.

For those who haven’t read this book, read it; if you have read it, read it again. One last thing, too: I’ve heard rumor for the last couple of years that this was being made into a motion picture, usually said to be on option to Brad Pitt’s studio with Joe Straczynski having already written the script. No idea. I hear that on occasion but I never see anything being done with it. I know I’d love to see it. But I guess we’ll just have to wait and see on it.

Read John J. Joex’s Review of the Audiobook Version

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