Beth’s Books: World War Z

Yes, I’m late to the game on this one. Shame on me!

I was grabbed by this one immediately, and it is an instant personal favorite. I’ve always had a thing for zombies, whether it was the granddaddy of them all, “Night of the Living Dead,” the technicolor horror of “Dawn of the Dead,” or the laugh-out-loud camp of “Return of the Living Dead.” Now zombies have invaded our television broadcasts, and some of you may have heard that I kind of like that show “The Walking Dead.” (Just a little bit!)

One of the things I love about TWD is that it seriously considers what would happen to society and to human interaction in such an apocalyptic event. World War Z goes into depth on this aspect of it. If you take the time to think about it, it would be devastating to our society and to our social mores. This book addresses topics such as the breakdown of government, conditional ethics, mental health, and cannibalism.

It also addresses the logistics of killing zombies, the changing tactics of a military combating them, and one of the creepiest things for me, underwater zombies. Gahhh!

I loved the documentary style of the book, with the narrator interviewing people all over the world and getting their perspective on the plague and subsequent war. Soldiers, survivors, politicians, religious figures...all have their own experiences and thoughts.

I should probably point out here (although my fellow zombie aficionados already know this) that the zombie apocalypse is a metaphor for what might happen in some other sort of global apocalypse. Perhaps a nuclear war, or a lethal global pandemic. When it comes to apocalyptic events, a zombie infestation is pretty low on the probability scale.

Devastating climate change, a massive asteroid, a pandemic virus that kills lots of people without reanimating them...all more realistic than a zombie virus. But it serves to address our darkest fears of such an event. We are able to focus on fictitious threats easier than we are able to focus on realistic ones.

But deep-down, we know that we really are afraid of a devastating event. Our preoccupation with a zombie apocalypse is simply whistling past the graveyard as we make our way towards oblivion and maybe even obsolescence as a species.

On that uplifting note, here is an equally uplifting song from the Walking Dead soundtrack. This is a seriously cool and menacing song called “You Are The Wilderness” by Voxhaul Broadcast. There’s a wolf in my heart for you....