I just found out that Max Brooks (author of World War Z) is Mel Brooks' son and I have no idea what to do with this information.
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Similar to my surprise when I reread world war z and discoverd that the cool ass zombie book I read when I was 15 actually sucked ass
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.
Also Russia being taken over by Rasputin, if I recall correctly. I still remember the last line from the Russia chapter, because it makes no sense. It's something about "and you know what the word tzar comes from". Which is like, okay so he's calling himself Caesar? How does that matter.
The racism is kinda funny in a way, because it's just every single stereotype you can make up. The Brits fight with longswords and love the queen, the Russians have Rasputin, the Canadians don't exist.
And there's some cool stuff like the french catacombs.
The Palestine chapter should get him executed.
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.
The book doesn't really ever answer the question of where all the foods coming from. It has people transporting goods and people rebuilding after, but like I don't recall any interviews with farmers.
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
Yeah there's a chapter of a guy being proud they can make root beer again because global trade is returning, but there's not a lot of detail about how peiple procured food during the war (apart from "the government flew supplies to camps, but like where did the government get supplies from?)
This book about a global zombie apocalypse is unrealistic!
Food comes from the grocery store, silly!
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
People are dunking on the book but I thought it had it's moments.
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.
Definitely, I dug that one.
I completely forgot about the sub!
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.
That DPRK chapter
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