The Book Bump

First Published:
Author: Max Brooks
Original Language: English
Reading Language: French
Genre: Fantasy/horror
My rating: 3.5/5 (rounded down to 3/5 on Goodreads)

It began with rumours—another pandemic with mysterious origins. Cases started to multiply until the planet was overrun with mindless, man-eating creatures. World War Z is based on interviews with survivors and key players in the 10-year fight against the horde.

After reading Devolution earlier this year, I wanted to explore Max Brooks’s unique narrative style more. His storytelling blurs the lines between fact and fiction, leaving you questioning the reality of what you’re reading. This was my experience with Devolution, and it’s a testament to Brooks’s storytelling prowess. Another novel that had a similar effect on me was Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux.

The premise of World War Z, a world engulfed in a zombie war and the resilience of humanity, is undeniably captivating. It’s a hook that draws you in and keeps you engaged, eager to uncover the survival strategies and the human spirit that prevailed in the face of such a catastrophic event.

The book is well-written, and I highly praise Max Brooks’s imagination in creating a whole new world dynamic after the Zombie plague.

Technically, the book is good.

But. And it’s rather a big but for me.

There are no characters, and there isn’t any suspense.

The novel is a collection of interviews. This approach to an apocalyptic fantasy novel about zombies didn’t quite work for me. While the interview style is refreshing and new and certainly adds a layer of authenticity to the work, it detracts from the dramatic tension that one expects from a survival horror-themed story. Why? Because it’s told by the people who survived. All the action is in the past.

The narrator interviews the survivors once, and then we never hear from them again, except for a few who return in the final part. The novel’s format makes it impossible to form a connection with any of the characters since we are only given a few pages to learn their life histories. I found myself largely unmoved by their plights. While I can entertain the idea that Bigfoot exists (the monster in Devolution), I don’t buy the idea that the dead come back to life to eat the living. However, I found a few almost tear-jerking interviews, but they usually involved children and what their parents had to do to protect them.

One advantage of the novel’s format is that readers can pick up where they left off, say after a few days without reading it, without losing the storyline. The story is basically about how humanity survived a war against Zombies.

Sometimes, I felt the interviews focused too much on military jargon, with too many acronyms to remember. I found myself getting bored reading soldier interviews.

I prefer to read apocalyptic fiction about people struggling to survive in real time, not being told how people survived after it was all over. I prefer character-driven novels.

Even though World War Z wasn’t for me, it’s still a great piece of fiction.