Every day I get out of bed, which is most days, I have this thing. I’ve reached that point where, for a good half hour after I wake up I resemble nothing more than one of the Hellish brigades of the Living Dead. I have accepted this. It’s life’s way of injecting a little mortality awareness into my day. “Hey look!” I think, “That’s what I’m going to look like when I’m dead!”. The sad thing however, is that I actually look pretty bad ass as a zombie and the odds are that when I eventually do die in that sub-orbital skydiving gunfight, I won’t be slowly walking around much afterwards. Mostly because I’ll have used my bodyweight to fly out of the sky and crush Space Hitler.
So, for the last few days, I had a weird experience, I was reading a book that claims to be the “Oral history” of the oncoming war against Zombies, brought to you by Max Brooks, the gentleman who wrote the highly instructive “Zombie Survival Guide”. Now, you’d expect a book of this sort to be the regular kind of slow moving shocker horror, grabbing legs from inside a closet, story driven romance please save my child, give me the gun, I’ll go check and see if they’re still there kind of pap. Writing a book about zombies kind of doesn’t theoretically capitalise on the main strength of the zombie genre, meaning the visual queue of the shuffling bitey corpse that we all know and love. I would never have really thought that a book about zombies could actually bring anything new to the game, I’m glad to see that Brooks proved me the worst kind of goddamned liar.
What’s awesome about this book is twofold, firstly rather than focus on telling the story of one small group of people’s attempt to survive Zombpocalyse, Brooks tells the story of the whole war by telling short sharp tales from individuals who saw it. Now, usually the stories of a Zombie uprising take place in Malls, or running through woods, they’re all usually American, there’s a screaming blonde teen who gets eaten alive only after causing the death of five other people, there’s the grizzled guy who turns his emotions off in order to save his son/wife/dog or in order to accept that he wasn’t able to save his son/wife/dog. Basically, the zombie genre has standard storylines, and pandering to these storylines has become pretty much a part of the genre. It’s the reason we basically keep having to watch the same Romero film spun out over time ad nauseum, it’s the reason the whole “28 Days Later” phenomenon of running zombies was so revolutionary. Genre writers don’t tend to be the most original in their scope, so when someone does something new, it’s refreshing. Brooks acheived the literary equivalent of throwing a bathtub of perfectly cool water in my face on a boiling hot Summer’s day by actually asking simple functional questions about Zombies. Would Zombies swarm all over the ocean floors? Would the US army’s current weaponry, which are mostly focused on shooting for the center of the body mass and creating injured combatants the other side then has to look after be up to the task of a corpse that only stops trying to eat you when you destroy it’s brain?
So, rather than saying “These are the rules” or “This is how it is all the time”, Brooks centered on telling a hundred little stories of people all over the world, from the blind Japanese Samurai reborn to a new mission to the feral child who grew up in a Zombie infested suburbia. His attention to detail is phenomenal, the little insights he’s gleaned from combining an imaginary situation and practical application gives the whole book this level of realism that really makes you kind of forget that he’s telling a story about hungry dead people.
The second thing that’s awesome about this book is that because it’s not following any one character, all the stories are self contained, anything can happen in them. The assumption is that the person telling the story survived the situation, but there’s no guarantee that they weren’t an evil psychotic mess who did truly evil things to make it through. This moral flexibility in the characters make them more real, from the blase American soldier who’s glad the zombies came because it gave him something to shoot to the priest who took it upon himself to kill newly infected people, thus saving them from the mortal sin of suicide, the moral issues are what keeps you guessing. Moral standards like “Thou shalt not kill” become increasingly meaningless when the Killed come back and try to eat Thou’s brains. I really enjoyed Brooks’ examinations because they were never implausible. He managed to convey convincingly self-centered maniacs right along side traumatised heroes just trying to forget.
Inevitably, this is now being made into a movie starring Brad Pitt and I can say with some certainty, if they try to turn it into one man, one story, which they almost certainly will, cause it’s Brad Pitt, it will lack almost all of what made this book awesome.
