Extremely funny for it to have the reputation of like realistic zombie fiction and then theres a whole chapter in japan with a samurai otaku and blind shaolin warrior monk travelling the lands.
Not so funny is all the racism in it.
All of the DPRK disappears into mountain bunker complexes for no reason and the book acts like its some mystery whats up now, like they wouldnt just all starve to death like that cause theres no agriculture going on.
There's one chapter where a government bigwig (iirc) is happy now because they spend all their time growing crops. That's all I got
And iirc it's said that Kim Jong-Il (at the time the book was written) ordered the removal of every citizen's teeth so that they couldn't bite anyone if they turned into a zombie
Pure
The catacombs and the nuclear sub chapters are mostly what I remember and they were rad.
The story of the pilot who gets downed in a dark forest and helped by a voice on the radio called Mets Fan is a great little horror short too
Yeah, it's not great, but the faux documentary format is legitimately kinda cool
The politics are dogshit liberalism, but I think the overall story and presentation is very solid.
The first time I read it, I was like 14 or something, and everyone talked about how realistic the geopolitics were and being 14 I believed them. It wasn't for a few years that I revisited it and saw that it was the most liberal bullshit.
The only part about DPRK that I remember was it being mentioned that during, or maybe even before, the initial outbreak, they went dark, stopped communicating with the entire world, and nobody knew what happened to them - if they shut themselves off to stay alive, or if an infection broke out and killed everyone
This guy did an AMA on reddit when covid hit because he thought his zombie novel gave him expertise.
Did he ever suggest that "Chinese black market organs" spread Covid just like in his book?
Yeah, but have you considered that this scene from the movie
Show
Is just like chuds losing their shit over not being allowed to go to Burger King? Checkmate, leftists
Oh you have no idea, I wish I could find the clip of him on
literally crying (actual tears in his eyes, I swear) about how much he hates China because it's hilariousI didn't realize for the longest time that Duncan Jones, the director of Moon and the awful Warcraft movie, was David Bowie's son lol
I burned through a copy of WW Z a handful of years ago.
I liked the "war diary" presentation. Didn't really catch on at the stereotyping because I wasn't paying attention and enjoying the stupid story book when all the zombie entertainment was flooding the market.
I did get caught up in how silly the USA's military response was portrayed. Kettling thousands of zombies in a city and then dropping bombs/artillery on top of them would do a pretty good job of shattering skulls and liquefying brains. Shit, just having any tracked armored vehicle with mine rollers on the front could have done a great job dezombiefying a city's worth of zombies just by kettling the Z's and then slowly driving in a straight light down a street. Instead, bombs and artillery were described as having no effect (unless my memory is completely wrong), which... just isn't how explosions work.
There's entire sections of any modern military doctrine about digging holes/trenches for fighting positions and obstacles. Dig a series of narrow/shallow trenches with tanglefoot wire obstacles between trenches, lure a city full of zombies towards them and any zombie that falls down is pulped by the thousands of other zombies walking over them. Your bait team just walks or drives away.
Of all the ways to bash the US military, criticizing its ability in destroying a large population of squishy targets tightly packed together is absolutely not the most believable story device.
Now I want to see someone do the mine roller thing in a zombie flick
World War Z is still the best zombie fiction (for better or worse) because it actually ends. Every other zombie story fizzles out or becomes Man vs Man with the zombies fading into the background. I cannot stress enough how much zombie fiction pervaded culture in the 2000s, rivaling MARVEL in the 2010s, so somebody pulling a Blazing Saddles on the genre was desperately needed.
