While reading, I assessed my home for defense as well as available weaponsOne of the best parts of reading many a horror book is closing it and saying "This is not real". It is often my favorite part of reading such books. Stephen King excels in terrifying me paragraph to paragraph. He suspends my disbelief with a deft touch and gives me stomach aches. Having said that, a demon possessed car is not a plausible concern in my world. So I can go to sleep, eventually, 99.99 % certain that my car will not be possessed in the morning. The same goes for other kinds of stories that often involve monsters. I thought zombies would be fun.
I wish I could say I had a good laugh while reading 'World War Z'. I wish I could say I did not go out and buy it's companion book 'The Zombie Survival Guide' a week or two after completing it. In fact, I wish I could say it did not linger. Who wants to dream of zombies? like I did… two nights in a row. 'An Oral History of the Zombie War', as it is also titled, feels real. The interviews, the individual survivors who are damaged or crazy or ashamed or relieved or all of the above were real. Unfortunately, the political reactions to a zombie pandemic were real in the worst sense. I am certain that in an alternate world the zombie apocalypse is real. WWZ channels that history into fiction in our own dimension.
My nightmares were on a personal level. A slow nameless terror in my garden (which I don't have in real life and now may never have thanks to this nightmare… easily defensible homes from now on) or running from zombies with my children down a tunnel... nightmare number two, made me realize how much I had internalized the stories. On a conscious level, my favorite parts of the book were the political and cultural decisions that affected people on a personal level. Max Brooks draws these connections with precision but is not heavy handed. My imagination made everything clear. In some cases, I wish my imagination had not made anything clear.
While reading, I assessed my home for defense as well as available weapons in different areas. I felt reassured by my dog and cat or as I like to think of them, "warning system". My life became for several days haunted by slow, moaning, merciless, soulless creatures who may or may not look like relatives…depending on the day dreams of the moment. By the way, it helps to put faces of loved ones on the zombies of your mind so that you are prepared to defend yourself. 'The Zombie Survival Guide' helped me fine tune many of my ruminations. I was disappointed to find that in these parts of Europe machetes are difficult to acquire. I have used machetes in South America so I feel confident in wielding one. I am not sure a hatchet would be as useful.
Go out and read these books… Contact me later so as to form survival committees in multiple continents… 'cause you never know.
Max Brooks
ISBN: 9780804137881
