Giving World War Z (the book) a Second Chance

Years ago, I attempted to read the book World War Z.

I had previously read The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks and loved it. I assumed I would also love his other book.  (** Read Chris' interview with Max Brooks HERE.)

I didn’t hate it, exactly, but I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as the other.

I loved the movie. But as you can imagine, the book and the movie are two very different things.

One day at work, I got into a discussion about zombies with a coworker and commented about how I didn’t really enjoy the book World War Z. I read about half to three-fourths of the book before putting it down. He recommended I check out the audiobook. He told me there is a whole cast of characters that really bring the story to life.

I was slightly skeptical, but I was going to be driving for a ridiculous amount of time, so I decided to check it out.

I have no regrets about my decision. I didn’t finish the entire book while in the car, but I’m still engaged and still listening. It’s my unwind before I go to bed story at the moment. The different character voices really add to the story, and I think the audio version was the way the story was intended to be told.

Max Brooks does an amazing job of showing the human side of the zombie outbreak. Most films touch on this in their narrative and try to show how humans fight to survive the undead and how there is a thin line between us and them, but Brooks takes it to a degree of realism. He shows us how policies, laws, and a new way of life can be created with the rising of the dead. He does this through personal stories that range from politicians to soldiers to random survivors and shows us how they’ve changed and how the world has changed.

I feel like when I first read the story, I wasn’t aware of what Brooks was attempting to do. I get it now, and it’s brilliant. The book still has its fair share of zombie carnage and gore, but the realism of surviving is just amazing. He constructed his story well.

If you haven’t checked it out, I highly recommend listening to the World War Z audiobook.

Has anyone else read or listened to the book? What are you thoughts?

Before I go, because it’s still May, I’m giving away another zombie book. This one is my nonfiction book, Undead Obsessed. Enter now for your chance to win!

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The Evolution of Zombies

Last weekend, my husband and I watched Extinction (2015).

It wasn’t terrible, but it had some issues. The biggest was that it drove my husband nuts that the zombies evolved to survive in a winter wonderland without hair. There were a few other problems too—mainly with the characters not being the sharpest tools in the shed—but on the whole it was a good movie. I enjoyed it. And since zombies are fictional, anyone can make up anything they want about them.

It got me thinking about the evolution of zombies through time and how they’ve changed to be scarier. The first change they went through was from slow, shambling zombies in Night of the Living Dead to fast in 28 Days Later.

This totally changed the genre. Not only did zombies have numbers on their side, but now they had speed. They had been difficult to deal with when they were slow, now they were ridiculous scary and hard to take down.

In World War Z, not only were they fast but they exhibited some intelligence. They were able to sense when a host was infected with a life-threatening disease and view them an unviable for passing on whatever made them zombies.

This isn’t the first time zombies have shown intelligence. In Day of the Dead, Bub is able to remember certain aspects of his human life and by the end of the film, he remembers how to use a gun to get revenge.

Extinction proposes another step in the evolutionary chain. It’s not a perfect step, but it’s a start. And it makes me wonder where the zombie genre is going to go. Will zombies become even more intelligent? Will they become faster? Will they gain strength and become superzombies?

In the next zombie book I’m working on (not actually at the moment, but soon), I have some evolved zombies. It’s really fun to explore the possibilities. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

How World War Z Should Have Ended

Love The Walking Dead and World War Z? Check out this video by  - How It Should Have Ended.

Containing the Zombie Outbreak

(A reminder: Today begins the Coffin Hop Blog Tour. 

 Comment through Oct. 31 to win a copy of the new DEATH BY DRIVE-IN Anthology & buy a copy to benefit literacy! ) New posts here daily to 10/31!

COFFIN HOP runs October 24-31 at WWW.COFFINHOP.COM with more than 75 artists and authors, partying it up, bringing the treats and the tricks to an online audience of thousands.

Most zombie movies and books nowadays assume the zombie outbreak will happen so fast, we won't really have time to adapt and will thus be relegated to a defensive role of the double-tap and decap. (As if Joe Public could decapitate someone with one fell swoop of the sword.)  However, never in the history of Man have we had a contagion that moved that moved so suddenly. Even the Black Death, which was spread by fleas, didn't spread as quickly or thoroughly as did Zombieism in World War Z  (World War Flea, anyone?)  In fact, Cracked Magazine recently posted an article on the scientific reasons why a zombie apocalypse would fail--and quickly, too.  (I've loved Cracked since I was a kid, and now find they are both funny and the bastion of common sense.)

So what would happen if zombieism did follow a more realistic disease vector, even taking into account the propensity of the sick to die, rise quickly, and go out for a bite or twelve?  I approached Neeta Lyffe, Zombie Exterminator with this assumption.  Health organizations and governments across the world galvanized into action, not just with police and military skilled at shooting for hte head, but also procedures for identifying and avoiding zombies, reporting them, protecting yourself against them, etc.  I think, though, the singlemost effective procedure put in place was mandatory spinal severing upon death of anyone.  Essentially, decapitation, but subtle enough that Aunt Eadie doesn't faint at the sight of Uncle Gordon's head sitting half an inch off his body.

If you were in charge during the zombie outbreak and could take preventative measures, what would you do?

World War Z Movie Review

Finally got the chance to see the World War Z movie...

Verdict? Yes!

While it did have some slow parts in the beginning, was an obvious vehicle for Brad Pitt, and has nothing to do with the Max Brooks book except in name, (who didn't seem to like it at first), it was nevertheless a decent movie.

Lately, there's been a slew of movies that must've been made for either 1. the actress's/actor's ego 2. or just for a paycheck. You know, those movies that look good in clips and ads on TV and then are BO-RING or just really suck when you watch them at home.

This isn't one of those.

The story isn't bad and there's a couple questionable parts like why all those people are singing in Israel when the zombies are milling outside,(?) but it has some good parts, too. The zombies, in this case, are freaky-creepy-scary and super lightning fast! I definitely will take the traditional, slow, shambling zombie any day!

Most surprising was the "cure" they came up with. I won't say what if you didn't see it yet. Could it work? Maybe, but it still was a different idea to stop, or at least stall, the infection rate.

* Your thoughts? What did you think of the movie?

World War Z: Max Brooks Talks Zombies

(Max Brooks, author of zombie books, World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide. C. Verstraete photo)

(Note: this is a two-part story. See part 2 at Zombie Pop)

Max Brooks Still Talks - and Fears - Zombies

By Christine Verstraete

Max Brooks is a man of two natures.

   There is the serious Brooks, the man who talks about zombies and links them with real life issues. Then there is the entertainer who gets his point across with wry and often hysterical humor.

  But in whatever persona he is, to this author of the still popular zombie books, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War and The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead, zombies are more than just scary monsters. They are real life--just in another form and body. And that real stuff is what actually has kept him interested in the whole zombie thing for the past decade.

   "It's fear," he said in a phone interview Friday prior to his lecture appearance at Harper College in Palatine, Ill. "For me, they're a global threat."

   Global meaning real life disasters - the floods, the earthquakes, the Katrinas, that can turn life into an apocalypse at any moment. That is the underlying message of his books, Brooks says: "I like writing about stuff from a real perspective. The only part of a zombie story that should be unreal should be the zombies."

   That message is what he tries to share in the countless lectures he's done across the country since his first book, The Zombie Survival Guide, was published in 2003. He does not take ideas of an apocalypse or natural disaster lightly and says neither should we. Those zombie preppers you read about? Extreme, maybe, but not as crazy as you might think. Being prepared is the one thing they do have right, Brooks says. He can relate.

   "The nice thing is zombie peppers have a kit ready for natural disasters," he says. "...I had an earthquake prep kit as a kid. A student journalist asked me, 'what if you have it wrong?' What's wrong about if you don't know how to purify water, you will die...? Zombies are Katrina. It's all how you look at it."

   How Brooks looks at it is with humor, natural for a guy who was a writer with Saturday Night Live (SNL) from 2001 to 2003. And being the son of legendary actor Mel Brooks must have rubbed off, too. Such credentials certainly helped him make the jump to author, right?

   Wrong.

   Brooks wrote the first book, The Zombie Survival Guide, thinking it would fail - and it almost did. "I thought it was a book that would get stuck in a drawer," he says. "Who would want to buy a real survival guide on something that wasn't real?"

   Being linked to SNL actually made it worse, he adds: "That hurt me. It haunted me the first years of publication. I was at a big disadvantage. (Bookstores) put it (the book) in the humor section. The hardcore (zombie) fans thought I was pissing on them. The humor fans expected a joke book and didn't get it."

   The solution? Brooks began his lectures as a way to promote the book and thanks to a genius suggestion by wife Michelle Kholos, things turned around.

   "I started the lectures to hand-sell the books," he says. "She suggested I go directly to the Better Homes and Gardens of Horror, Fangoria, and ask to plead my case. They did an interview."

   These days he's been doing so many lectures, "I don't know how many," that he says he and his wife had a serious talk. "It was getting to the point, I was afraid to be away from my family (for too long). My son is eight-years-old. He needs a dad more than we need a zombie author."

   So, he may begin cutting down on the lectures, but he hasn't stopped writing or working on other projects. Nor has he left the zombies behind. Just out is a new comic based on his short story, The Extinction Parade.

    The first of a 12-part series tells the story of a zombie plague through the eyes of vampires. Or as he says, again relating back to his preparedness theme, "vampires have always been at the top of the food chain so they never developed survival skills. With zombies, they realize, what are they going to eat? It's an exploration of the downside of privilege, people who don't know how to work, don't know how to struggle, don't know how to (survive). You can apply this to an actual disaster. There is nothing cool or sexy about it. Zombies are just the catalyst."

 * Read more about Max Brooks' Lecture: Zombie Facts, but Funny:

   Zombies and preparing for that zombie apocalypse were never so funny, not unless you are Max Brooks, former Saturday Night Live (SNL) writer and author of the popular zombie books, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War and The Zombie Survival Guide.

  **  Read the rest at ZombiePop.

Student "zombies" added some "reality" to the lecture event. (Photos: C.Verstraete)

Zombie Author Max Brooks Coming to Chicago area!

  Max Brooks, author of New York Times best-selling zombie books  WORLD WAR Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (inspiration for the new Brad Pitt movie, World War Z) and The Zombie Survival Guide will be appearing at 7 p.m., July 12 at Harper College,  1200 W. Algonquin Rd., Palatine, IL

Tickets: $5 general admission, free to Harper summer students (with valid ID) - ticket required; $3 staff/faculty, seniors, and other students with ID.

Box office: 1-847-925-6100

A to Z Blog Challenge - M is for Zombie (and scary) Movies

*** This month we are participating in the A to Z Blog Challenge. Check it out! ***  

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Today is the Letter M so what better topic than Movies! 

Given the name of our blog, I'll be concentrating on new zombie and scary movies. 

The latest was Warm Bodies which seemed  cute and got good reviews.  (Trailer at link)

 World War Z - which really looks good is coming in June, but... is it merely a vehicle for Brad Pitt? 

** And if you don't like scary stuff - M is also for miniatures - which I'm sharing at my other blog, Candid Canine for the A to Z Challenge.... ** 

Here is the latest trailer -

Coming up sooner: Evil Dead - which really looks scary! (But... my first thought is no... not the cabin... and running in the woods.... See trailer. 


**  Please share if you've seen or plan to see any of these!

Sabrina's Word Wednesday: Zombie Apocalypse

Sabrina's Word Wednesday: Zombie Apocalypse

So it pretty much speaks for itself. Zombie apocalypse. Also known as zompocalypse or necropocalypse, the zombie apocalypse is essentially the end of the world as we know it due to an outbreak of zombies.

Sick zombie art by GarthFT Source

We've seen it many times, in games, movies, books, and even TV shows. (Including my favorite, The Loki Variation) The general premise is that a zombie-causing virus or other means of transmission is released into the general public, creating a situation in which more people are infected than not, and exponentially the rate of transmission gets higher and higher. In a short time, there are few survivors, fighting or hiding to protect themselves from the zombies, and their world as they knew it is gone.

One of the most anticipated movies of 2013, World War Z, is a zombie apocalypse movie (very, very) loosely based on the book of the same name by Maxwell Brooks.  

Brad Pitt and the zombie apocalypse? I'll be seeing that one the day it comes out...

Anyway, that just goes to show you how obsessed we are with the zombie apocalypse.

Of course, we all know, that every zombie apocalypse story is complete fiction. Because the zombie apocalypse hasn't happened. Yet. But some people have begun preparing for the zombie apocalypse, you know, just in case. They're called zombie preppers, and I am dedicating a whole other blog post just to those fine people. 

What is your favorite zombie apocalypse scenario? It can be from a book, movie, game, whatever. Leave it in the comments!