To everything there is a time - a time to reap and a time to plant, a time to listen to Schoenberg and a time to listen to Lady Ga-Ga, a time to read Marcel Proust and a time to read about zombie apocalypses. That time, for me, passed some years ago. I shouldn't've picked up this novel but I was seduced by shedloads of great reviews on this very site.
Although my copy has a front-cover blurb by Simon Pegg, it's his very own great little zom-romcom Shaun of the Dead, plus George Romero's splendid zombie trilogy which Shaun beautifully parodies, plus other movies like 28 Days Later and I Am Legend, and a thousand other post-apocalypse novels and B-movies, which cumulatively undermine the not inconsiderable energy and sociopolitical insight of Max Brooks' own version of The War Against the People You Really Hoped You'd Never See Again. Every scene in this book we've seen or read several times before, and alas, mostly by less truthful writers. This is really an excellent novel, but for younger readers who haven't already slogged, as I have, through a lifetime of pulp. Brooks's imagination is tough and unflinching, but you have to concede that zombie apocalypses bring out the macho in pretty much everybody. This really is a war book, chock full of pumped-up acronym-heavy military jargon. World War Z is mainly fought with TESTOSTERONE!!!
This book wanted to be for zombies what THE WIRE is for Baltimore, and for that I give it a crisp military salute and a bag of red tops.
I think my 15 year old self would have rated this one four fat ones but that guy didn't have the best taste really.