REVIEW – “World War Z” – Max Brookes

(Yes, I’m on a bit of a review kick at the moment, just humour me)

Now then, I like zombies. I’ve never met one personally, as you can probably tell by the fact that I have all my limbs, can string together coherent sentences (on a good day) and don’t smell like rotting flesh (no-one say “debatable”). Still, I like zombies – I like the folklore and the stories and also the funny t-shirts you can get (yes, I do have one and yes, you can see it).

(if you can’t see it properly, it says “ZOMBIE – Eat Flesh”, in the Subway font)

So yeah, we’ve ascertained that I’m a fan of zombies. Shaun Of The Dead is one of my favourite films, and I’ve watched a couple of films in Romero’s zombie series too, although I’ll admit I found those a little scary. I’ve seen 28 Days Later, which I loved, and I like shooting zombies on Call Of Duty. However, I don’t think I’d ever read a book about zombies until “World War Z – An Oral History of the Zombie War”.

As far as the zombies themselves go, it’s quite hard to picture them how I think Max Brooks intended for them to be pictured unless you’ve read his other similar book, the Zombie Survival Guide, which discusses what they look like. I think it’s pretty much standard fare with zombies though – they all smell, they all look a bit rotten and bloated and you don’t really want to get a good close-up view of one, because that’s a slippery slope to having your arm chewed off – so that’s not a fault with the book at all (by the way, I do recommend reading Zombie Survival Guide before you read World War Z, because it helped me understand what was going on a lot better).

What I love about this book is that it stays true to the quintessential zombie – the zombies can’t run or climb walls, they don’t have that tiny drop of human emotion that may allow them to decide not to eat a dear old aunt or a pet dog – they are devoid of all emotion and intelligence, they can only communicate by moaning, their method of transportation is a shuffle, and the only way to destroy them is to go for the brain. They’re made into zombies by a virus, “Solanum”, and there’s no real cure – although a vaccine was developed but rendered useless. This book shows humanity at its most terrifying – in a form that is beyond saving, beyond reasoning, beyond appealing to a better nature. You don’t have to seek them out to find them – they’re all around you, they’re your family and friends and the people you love and eventually, they’re you too. That’s what makes zombies the ultimate horror novel/film subjects – in my opinion, anyway.

The only fault I can find with the book is that because of the nature of the novel – it is a collection of anecdotes and eyewitness accounts, as opposed to an actual novel -, it can get hard to remember who said what and what exactly happened at earlier points in the timeline of the zombie war, because there are so many conflicting accounts and it takes place in a number of different countries, so unless it’s one of the main events of the war – like Yonkers, for example – it can be quite hard to remember exactly what happened and the effect it had on other situations. Still, the book is made so unique by its style that to change it would detract from it, so I suppose if you’ve got a good memory, you’ll be fine. Even with a rubbish memory like mine, the book is still a great one and I really enjoyed it.

I’d recommend the book for those who are 16+, there’s some (ok, a lot of) swearing in there, and I think under-16s may find it a bit too frightening, because it does go into very graphic detail about the zombies and what they did. If you don’t like death/gore/icky things, this is probably a book to avoid, but if you’re a fan of the whole zombie genre, I’d definitely recommend it. You can tell that Max Brookes knows his stuff, because everything – except the zombies – is real. He did thorough research into every piece of information, every military tactic and weapon, everything, and it works – we see the events of the novel as a real possibility, and the novel almost feels like a history book sent from the future, which adds to the fear factor.

Oh, and don’t worry if you haven’t heard of this book yet – by this time next year, I predict that it’ll be one of the biggest crazes out there.

Writing Update

As promised, here is the writing update. I didn’t think I’d have much time to get writing done on holiday – and I was right! – but I managed to seize some time here and there, particularly in the evenings when we were winding down, to get some work done on my new zombie novel. It’s going really well and I’m enjoying it a lot – it’s quite fun to write and I’m looking forwards to the gory descriptions of the zombies once they make their proper entrance into the story! I hope this one won’t fail miserably – the last one reached the end of the second book and stalled before I could start the third, which is further than I’ve ever got before but maybe I was aiming a bit high by trying to do a trilogy straight off the bat; this is a stand-alone story which may spawn a few spin-offs but not a series.

That was just a quick update!

More research!… not ;)

So, I haven’t gotten around to watching 28 Days Later yet, which will be very intensive research for my novel, but I did – under the guise of researching – end up watching Blair Witch Project. I’ve seen bits of it before but never the ending and never the full film, and I figured it’d give me some tips on how to convey horror. I have learned two things – the first is that whilst having a massive build up for a two second climax that is really quite disappointing in that there’s not much horror, very little gore and ends with a guy standing in a corner and a fuzzy camera clip may seem like a good idea, it really isn’t, and the second is that if my book is made into a film, don’t let them cast rubbish actors.

BWP may have been a good film if the acting wasn’t so awful. If they’d been a little more human, I may have believed that it was found footage (y’know, if I didn’t already know it was a film), but they were so obviously TRYING to act human that they were more wooden than the many trees around them (I never quite realized how monotonous 90 minutes of footage of trees can be until now), which kind of sucked all the suspense out of it. I will admit that I did find the bit where they were in the house at the end scary, but that was only because I thought something was going to jump out at them. I can deal with gore, I can deal with scary monsters but I get so scared if something jumps out – even if it’s just my little sister jumping out at me in the hallway, it scares the bejezus out of me – so jumpy-out films are a no-no.

By the time the credits started rolling, I wished something would have jumped out. I mean, what an unsatisfactory ending. We never get to see Blair Witch. We never see what happens to any of them. The first guy had his tongue cut out and yet he was still shouting them. Where was he? First he was upstairs, then he was downstairs. What was so scary about the second guy just facing the wall? I mean, I look at walls sometimes if they’re interesting, I don’t get people running at me with a camera and screaming. And then the typical cheesy “end shot of a camera upside down on the floor” was… meh. I mean, I suppose the film did start that phenomenon, so it can’t really be called cheesy, but really, it was so unsatisfactory – and yet, I found myself hoping they make a sequel (not counting the one they made which apparently had little to do with the original) to tell us what actually happened to the three main characters and how the hell the camera footage was found without the people who found it turning into screaming wall-facing tongueless shouting unsatisfactory film endings too?

Maybe I’m being too harsh on the film; maybe I don’t get it, but I don’t want to watch a film where the scariest part is watching the leading lady’s nostrils flare repeatedly and seeing her nose gunk go into her mouth. That’s not my idea of a horror movie, that’s just gross. Anyway, it hasn’t really served as great research for my novel, but it was never really intended to, I just felt like watching it. Hopefully 28 Days Later will be more successful on that front – and hopefully it’s a better film overall! I can deal with zombies much better than I can deal with an actress’s nose goo.

Writing Away!

Spurred on by my recent piece of writing (Night Of The Living Love, Actually), I’ve decided that I want to write a full-on zombie novel; without the mushy love story (I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know!). I want to write it differently though – it’s from the point of view of a girl living in the only zombie-free area in the world, and what happens when the barriers break and all the protective measures fall, and a group of zombie rights campaigners have to lead a group of people who are completely inexperienced at fighting and totally unprepared to battle zombies, in a war to save the world. All sounds very cheesy and lovely, right?

So, we have our main character, who starts off about as anti-zombie as you can get – a young American who’s managed to escape the virus ravaging the country, only to discover that the rest of the world isn’t doing too great either. She’s a blogger (I promise that’s where the similarities with me end!) and eventually discovers that she cares about the zombies and doesn’t want to fight them, but must if she wants herself – and her family – to survive.

I’m not going to divulge any more than that, because I plan on uploading it to fictionpress and posting it here for you all and I don’t want to spoil it, but if you see me jabbering on about zombies over the next few months, that’s why. I’ve already started my research – that is, I’ve read Max Brookes’ “Zombie Survival Guide” and have just started on “World War Z”, I watched some of “Dead Set” (I’m sure it would’ve been helpful if my novel was set in the Big Brother house, but alas, it isn’t) and I’m going to watch “28 Days Later” and many other zombie films, no doubt scaring myself silly in the process.

I don’t want my novel to be some ethical yarn about how even zombies have feelings and are human (no they don’t and no they’re not, otherwise they wouldn’t be zombies!)  – I want it to scare the reader and make them see this as a potential future and think about what they’d do. I’m not saying I believe that in the future there will be zombies, but we’re already starting to see the outbreaks of a possible zombie apocalypse, what with the bath salts craze… I kid, honestly. Still, I don’t think there’s anything scarier than the psychological warfare some authors utilize so well, creating the impression that however supernatural and improbable, this could happen one day – or may even be starting to happen at this very minute.

In other news, my sleep pattern is still messed up but I’m hoping that existing on about an hour of sleep in the past 24+ hours will mean that I’ll fall asleep almost instantly tonight and get back into a routine. I’m going on holiday in 5 days, which is very exciting, and I’m 18 in 9 days, which is very very exciting! There’s free Wi-Fi in some areas so I’ll try to keep you all updated, but things are going to be sporadic. I have a big weekend ahead too – especially Saturday, where it seems things are a bit non-stop – but I promised I’d keep blogging regularly now that my exams are over, and that’s what I intend to do. Particularly now that I’ve started writing again, I can start  blogging about what this was actually intended for – my writing! There’s also the good news that I’ve started reading for fun again – I was worried that studying English would ruin reading for me, and I don’t think my frayed relationship with Wuthering Heights will ever be repaired (sorry, Emily Bronte, but your ever-changing narrative perspective and use of dialect annoyed me, even more so when I had to analyze it, and it’s just not going to work out. It’s not you, it’s not me, it’s studying English A Level). However, I’ve started reading World War Z and can’t wait to read more once I’m all caught up on sleep, and after that I’m going to re-read one of my all-time favourite novels, “To Kill A Mockingbird”. That’s probably the only text I’ve studied that I haven’t ended up at least disliking, if not hating, and I think that’s because it’s written in a way that’s easy to relate to because we can remember those lazy childhood summers where the tiniest thing became the hugest adventure, and because I had a brilliant teacher who made the book come alive. Health-wise, things still aren’t great – now waiting on a specialist and a chest x-ray, which isn’t going to be fun – but it’s all progress in making me better, and if it means I’ll be able to do the half-marathon for BCH, I’m all for it.