Book 56: The Zombie Survival Guide

The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead by Max Brooks

I quite enjoyed Max Brooks's World War Z but this is a much more humorous look at zombies. Given the popularity of survival guides and the popularity of zombies at the moment, it makes complete sense to have a book that combines the two. Having read his follow up novel and seen a few zombie films, his advice was mostly obvious but it was still a fun read. There were a few parts were he contradicted himself but it wasn't anything huge (at one point he said zombies can't climb, at another he said not to do something because zombies can then climb up - maybe he just meant that eventually there'd be so many of them they could basically walk on top of each other to the top).

While it is of course fiction and humorous, the whole "zombies as a result of a highly contagious disease" definitely makes the idea seem not completely impossible. Of course, everyone who thinks about such things as the zombie apocalypse naturally assumes that they are going to be the ones who survive it when it is of course rather likely that that wouldn't be the case at all. Still, I think it's a fun genre on occasion, though I tend to be more partial to vampire stories (although it is kind of interesting that between those two genres the focus is completely different - some vampire movies make people identify with the humans fighting against vampires while others make them identify with the vampires; how many people actually want to be zombies though? Everybody wants to be on the side that's killing them).

My only real quibble with the book is that I felt like Brooks had a few too many historic zombie attacks at the end. A few were amusing but I don't think he really needed as many of them as he included.