I enjoy survival and apocalyptic fiction, and I recognize that this book is not the high-minded literature that "The Woman in White" or "Romeo and Juliet" is. But it is loads of fun. So there you have it.
The author takes both his idea and the method of telling it from Max Brooks' World War Z, a book that terrified me 15 years ago. At first, I thought this was a rip-off, but it's really an homage. As Taylor explains in his introduction, he loved World War Z and kept waiting for a sequel, or a prequel, or some other follow-up. When none was forthcoming, he wrote his own. And did a very good job.
As with World War Z, what makes this book riveting is the gritty realism with which it is told. A worldwide zombie apocalypse is told from various viewpoints, like the app developer who got rich creating an app to help people spread the word that zombies are in the area, and ends up living on a cruise ship at a remote island. Or the Chinese scientist who discovered how to beat the zombies with a certain low-frequency strobe light, and fund out years later that the Chinese government did not share the discovery with the rest of the world. Or the bankrupt magazine staff who began putting out small batches of survival tips that went old-school viral and saved more lives than they could ever know.
Taking a horrifying story and telling it in very personal terms is what makes this book (and its predecessor) compelling. Taylor looks at a zombie apocalypse situation from both a macro and micro level, examining it from a military, political, economic, scientific, and social perspective. This book moves quickly and has characters that are real, flawed, scared, brilliant, selfish, compassionate, and visionary.
Comments
Post a Comment