31 Days, 31 Screams: Day 21 (World War Z)

"The important thing was, I had an onion
on my belt. Which was the style at the time."

At last, it's time to talk about a book! Yes, I know they made a movie out of this. I doubt I'll ever see it. Cry pardon, but this is the one piece of zombie apocalypse fiction to actually resonate with me to some degree. A movie can't possibly do what this book did, unless it went all out with the anthology mode of storytelling. Which, skimming the movie synopsis, it looks for all the world like a story-driven plot following Brad Pitt around the world during the zombie apocalypse. Which... that's not World War Z. Absolutely not. They got half of it right, but that's not what World War Z is. I would have covered a book sooner but... well, I technically did with It. Also my next choice would have been Mark Z. Danielewski's House Of Leaves, but I'll be goddamned if I have the ability to explain any of that shit. I'll just say that if you like conceptual horror and absolutely bonkers narrative nonlinear storytelling, you should check it out for sure, and leave it at it. Now then! World War Z! Where does it succeed where something else traditionalist, like our poor whipping boy Dawn Of The Dead, failed?

The answer is simple. Scale. World War Z is just that: a world war. Not the story of some people in a mall ambiguously watching the TV signal go out. Not even some really funny people in a pub surrounded by zombies! This is the story of how the world fell into the shit of the zombie apocalypse... but it's more than that. This is an oral history, a post-war recollection of the shit that went down by the people who were there and lived to tell the tale. Yes, there were zombies and material society as we basically knew it collapsed and a bunch of people were probably assholes in that landscape and WHO ARE THE REAL MONSTERS and all that shit, but FUCK THAT. Humanity prevailed. It was forever altered by the infected reanimated dead running around biting people and whatnot, and as of the book's fictional writing will still need a lot of work... but humanity won out. I find this far more interesting than the traditional usual approach, in case that hasn't become clear by now. Maybe the tight focus on a few survivors in a linear fashion works for a lot of people, but not for me who already finds the zombie thing dull. No, this book actually made it interesting for me. It's a series of shorter stories, told as personal recollections, that span a global scale. Still, the vignettes follow a logical progression from the first outbreaks to the usual widespread panic to the attempts of humanity to escape and eventually fight back. The key story, for me anyways, is the Battle Of Yonkers in which the US Army is totally routed by the advancing undead. Their training is in dealing with an entirely human foe that can be incapacitated and wounded and demoralized, but zombies have none of this weakness and just keep on coming. It almost feels like a condemnation of the 140 minutes of grey people getting shot in the head; a real soldier would be trained to aim for the chest, not the head, and that training is hard to overcome in a crisis like that.

The vignettes and small stories manage to do what most zombie fiction doesn't for me: it makes everything feel more human. You get a sense of the masses, how they all react, and how different people deal with the crisis outside of these little microcosms and isolated pockets of folks holed up in some shithole waiting for the end. There's even a lot of stuff that just comes as a natural result of thinking about the rules of zombie fiction but, to my knowledge, hadn't been done before. For instance, heart transplants from infected bodies. Or zombies under the ocean. Or what happened to people up in space. The list goes on. It remains the best "traditional" piece of zombie fiction I've consumed, without any odd quirk like being really funny or also actually dealing with demons and skeleton armies. I can't imagine much else that could really surpass it in the genre of undead monsters who want brains, so it's got that going for it. Give it a read if you're into the whole zombie thing. It's a ride.