Max Brooks’ World War Z is a follow-up to The Zombie Survival Guide which became a commercial success largely through word of mouth on the Internet. While The Zombie Survival Guide was a fictional manual covering the biology of zombies and suggested methods of killing them and surviving a zombie outbreak, World War Z tells the story of a worldwide zombie apocalypse scenario through the oral testimonies of over 40 survivors. It has since become popular enough that there are plans to make a film version of the book with a screenplay by J. Michael Straczynski.

World War Z places the initial zombie outbreak in Sichuan Province, China, where a boy diving for treasure amongst the submerged villages of the Three Gorges Reservoir comes to the surface with a mysterious bite mark on his foot and is kept locked in an abandoned house by frightened villages after attacking and biting a number of them. They notify the local hospital and the doctor who is sent is shocked to discover that the boy is as savage as an animal, biting and clawing at anyone who comes near him. His skin has become cold and gray, and though numerous wounds are found all over his body from his struggles to free himself, no blood comes out of them. A hypodermic needle inserted into where his veins should be comes up filled with a strange, viscous matter. He is even able to snap his own arm in an effort to free himself and seems affected by neither pain nor exhaustion. Not unexpectedly, all of the villagers bitten by the boy have become comatose with cold and gray skin as well.

The Chinese government is informed of the outbreak and instead of warning everyone instead arrests all involved and orchestrates a massive cover-up, going to the extent of provoking a confrontation in the Taiwan Strait to sow confusion and camouflage growing military activity within China. This allows the zombie virus to spread across the whole country and eventually throughout the world. Refugees flee China en masse, the rich on commercial flights to the United States and Europe before air travel is restricted, the poor overland southwards to Thailand and Myanmar or northwards to Kyrgyzstan and Russia. The most desperate make for the coasts, appropriating any and all means, from ocean liners to makeshift rafts floating on sacks of ping-pong balls, to escape from the ravening hordes of zombies.

The scale of the tragedy is mind blowing and global. No country is spared. In the United States alone, 200 million people end up being zombified. Horror stories from all around in the world are told in little vignettes: clumps of zombies walking the streets of Khayelitsha, near Cape Town; huge swarms of them overtaking the cars of fleeing refugees stalled in an endlessly traffic jam on the I-80 highway in America; soldiers in Hamburg, Germany being ordered to abandon defenseless civilians as governments all over the world ruthlessly prioritize their dwindling resources to secure the most defensible areas and abandon the rest to the zombies; the military in India blowing up key choke points like mountain passes and bridges from under the feet of hundreds of thousands of their people. There’s no faulting Brooks’ ambition or imagination in telling the story of the whole world’s war against the zombie. The book is full of convincing detail. The zombies for example need neither sustenance nor rest and shamble inexorably towards the nearest living beings, but low temperatures cause them to freeze solid, so that many refugees flee towards colder climates to escape them.

Of course, even once out of the clutches of the zombies, the survivors have other problems to contend with. Those who flee to snowy wastes face hunger and cold. Many who escape on boats drown as their overburdened vessels sink or else succumb to thirst. Desperate people turn on each other for every little scrap of food or fuel. As civilization collapses and must be rebuilt, Brooks describes the emotional turmoil of the survivors’ lives as they try to adjust to the new realities of a world full of zombies. Previously, well-paid white-collar executives become unskilled labour. Farmers, plumbers, mechanics and other skilled technicians become highly prized by society.

Unfortunately, what should have been a slam-dunk is spoiled both by Brooks’ tendency to indulge in his personal fetishes and mediocre writing. Too many pages are wasted in playing the blame game against soft targets: the U.S. government for keeping its head in the sand while the crisis balloons for fear of losing votes during an election year; pharmaceutical companies for selling a vaccine for the zombie virus that they know does not work; a military bureaucracy too mired in Cold War tactics to adapt to fighting the walking dead. When Brooks describes a new world in which the most populous country is Tibet, while China is a dead wasteland; where the new economic superpower is Cuba while Americans are huddling in tents and caves and where college students successfully fend off the zombie hordes with improvised hand-to-hand weapons while armed forces with tanks, artillery, air support and machine-guns are quickly overrun, it’s hard to resist rolling one’s eyes.

Even worse, out of the more than 40 different characters in the book, some of whom are given no more than a paragraph or two, not one of them is genuinely engaging. Many are cliché-ridden archetypes whose individual stories can be boiled down to a simple label: the greedy war profiteer, the lying politician, the shell-shocked war veteran, the self-sacrificing soldier, even a blind martial arts master who implausibly survives all by himself in a zombie-infested Japan that has been completely evacuated by government order. It takes a rare talent to convincingly give voice to such a varied cast, and Brooks is not one of them. His attempt to make a British historian, for example, sound British by having him use words like “cock-up”, “cracking” and “Zed” is woefully amateurish. There are action scenes aplenty but none are thrilling or suspenseful. Some of the horror scenes work passably, but however hard he tries to convey a sense of tragedy, his writing simply too clumsy to forge any emotional bonds between the characters and the reader.

At the beginning of a book, reference is made to an official report, filled with facts and figures covering the zombie war, and the purported writer mentions that World War Z is meant to give a human voice to that report. I can’t help but think that it would have been so much better if we had been given that fictional report instead. A roughly chronological and dispassionate account of the war, with population and zombie count figures during each phase, reports of major engagements complete with detailed notes on the logistics and personnel involved, and plenty of maps and charts showing what happened where and when, would have made for a far more valuable and interesting book. Brooks has plenty of cool ideas on what a real zombie war would be like, unfortunately, he writes too poorly to make a decent novel out of those ideas.