Apologies for posting yet another Max Brooks book review but I realised I'd never actually reviewed this anywhere. Not on Amazon and certainly not on our ol' "ReadItDaddy" blog. So why is it so good?
Right there in the subtitle "An Oral History" is the key to the success of this book. It's not written like a traditional novel, and it's all the better for it. Instead, it's a collection of stories and anecdotes gathered by a journalist chronicling the outbreak of a worldwide pandemic that halts life as we know it (quite literally) dead in its tracks.
Of course, reading something like this under the current circumstances is like picking a scab. Weirdly jarring, but also weirdly satisfying - and it's testament to Brooks' skill as a writer to see the eerie parallels between his fictional Zombie plague outbreak and the current COVID-19 crisis.
On re-reading this, the bits that really got to me (and the bits that are almost like holding up a mirror to what's going on in the world at the moment) are the everyday human stories. One sequence where a person working on a Zombie mop-up squad is gingerly picking through the fallout from the Zombie war, the human cost and of course all the human trappings and material goods that idiots took with them as they fled the cities in search of refuge. Chapters where issues like the failure of state to protect its people, the selfishness and idiocy of people dealing with something they cannot possibly chart, predict or control, and the descriptions of heroes (even one extreme example of a sociopath's response to the Zombie Plague being adopted by a government as a last-gasp strategy to sacrifice the many in order to save the few really do clang like a massive bell with the stuff you'll read about the Coronavirus on various news channels and Twitter at the moment).
Like all good books that deserve reading many many times, there's always something new to read or discover in Brooks' books purely because he packs so much detail and research into his work, to the point where it's almost obsessional, almost documentarian. It grips you though and won't let go, and even over the last week or so when I've had disrupted sleep for one reason or another (usually work stress) I find myself reading huge chunks of this into the wee small hours, just soaking up the amazing writing of someone who damned well knows they're good at what they do.
If you're after a happy go lucky joy-filled novel to make your heart sing, you might want to look elsewhere but if you want to read a harrowing description of the fall of civilisation at the hands of a pandemic that has no easy solution (like you're not living that reality day to day) then here's your go-to.
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