Deb­bie Ja­cob

There's some­thing very al­lur­ing about vam­pires, were­wolves and zom­bies, and so it's no sur­prise that World War Z: An Oral His­to­ry of the Zom­bie War by Max Brooks has be­come such a pop­u­lar book.

De­scribed as a post-apoc­a­lyp­tic hor­ror sto­ry by Max Brooks, World War Z, the se­quel to Brooks' 2003 nov­el The Zom­bie Sur­vival Guide, makes a per­fect Sun­day Arts Sec­tion (SAS) Book Club read to kick off the new year.

It is a sus­pense­ful, plot-dri­ven read that is amaz­ing­ly re­al­is­tic. I ac­tu­al­ly found my­self do­ing some re­search to see if the nov­el was based on re­al events.

World War Z be­gins with the nar­ra­tor, a doc­tor work­ing for the UN, who stum­bles on a strange dis­ease in a re­mote, name­less vil­lage in Chi­na. There, he finds a pa­tient, a boy tied with plas­tic pack­ing twine, hid­den away in an aban­doned house. Ini­tial­ly will­ing to dis­miss the vil­lagers' warn­ings, the doc­tor soon finds him­self afraid of the pa­tient. To make mat­ters worse, the dis­ease he stum­bles on is killing peo­ple at an alarm­ing rate all over the world.

Equal­ly fas­ci­nat­ed and hor­ri­fied at how many lives are be­ing claimed by this dis­ease that turns peo­ple in­to vi­cious, zom­bie-like crea­tures who ex­hib­it ex­tra­or­di­nary strength, the nar­ra­tor em­barks on a fact-find­ing mis­sion that leads him fur­ther and fur­ther in­to chaos.

World War Z is a col­lec­tion of the thoughts and in­ter­views the doc­tor pieces to­geth­er af­ter the dis­ease near­ly wipes out every­one in the world. The doc­tor de­scribes his col­lec­tion of in­ter­views with eye­wit­ness­es around the world as "mem­o­ries". From Chi­na to the Ama­zon rain for­est in Brazil, Pales­tine, Aus­tralia, the US, Cana­da, Japan, In­dia, Bar­ba­dos, Cu­ba and many oth­er coun­tries, the nar­ra­tor pieces to­geth­er the ter­ror of the dis­ease and the fear of those who try to flee from it.

World War Z is writ­ten in episod­ic in­ter­views to cap­ture first-hand ac­counts of the plague that near­ly de­stroyed mankind. Usu­al­ly this is a dif­fi­cult style to fol­low and ap­pre­ci­ate for read­ers who like a smooth, tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tive, but the struc­ture works well for this nov­el be­cause it gives the sto­ry the im­me­di­a­cy of a news­pa­per re­port and al­lows each sub­ject to share his sto­ry while read­ers have the lux­u­ry of dis­cov­er­ing in­for­ma­tion along with the nar­ra­tor.

Out­ward­ly, it might seem that World War Z strives to be noth­ing more than an ex­cit­ing read, but Brooks' nov­el rais­es in­ter­est­ing ques­tions about pan­demics and the dry sta­tis­tics that they are some­times re­duced to while ques­tion­ing the hu­man el­e­ment of dis­ease and how it is treat­ed. In many ways, Brooks' book cap­tures the ter­ror ini­tial­ly as­so­ci­at­ed with the Aids epi­dem­ic.

World War Z is sched­uled to be re­leased this year as a movie star­ring Brad Pitt. In the movie ver­sion, Brad Pitt is a UN work­er rush­ing around the world try­ing to pre­vent the Zom­bie War, which is the op­po­site of what hap­pens in the book.

Check out lo­cal book­stores for World War Z and kick off the new year with the SAS Book Club. Join us at SAS Book Club on Face­book and tell us what you think of the New York Times best­seller.