Zombies are cool.
This is easy for them: after all, the living dead have no warmth of life in them.
I just finished Max Brooks’s Zombie Survival Guide : Complete Protection from the Living Dead, and I recommend it to everyone, without any reservations whatsoever.
It is a comprehensive guide for surviving a zombie outbreak — a treatment of what arms to use, where to hole up or run to, and how to act if your whole world is swallowed up by a planet-wide zombie uprising. (Hint: it doesn’t recommend screaming. That attracts the undead.)
And it’s all written “in character”: that is, with full seriousness, never cracking a smile. Think Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report: that serious, but not quite as caricature-like — after all, merely being a right-wing commentator isn’t quite comedy, though close; but being a grimly realistic zombie survival expert needs no hysterical fear of bears or similar overdone tics.
Out of all the ways and means of comedy, I’m especially attracted by just that serious conceit of “rational action in an irrational world” — staying inside the confines of an insane world, and extracting amusement and excitement from actions along lines that in that mad world are sane, but to us just laughable. That’s Colbert, that’s the Zombie Survival Guide, and that’s my favorite example of humor-drama like that: Rumiko Takahashi’s manga Ranma 1/2.
Or, to put it another way, the comedy is hugely enhanced by the fact that neither zombie investigator Brooks, pundit Colbert or sex-changing martial artist Ranma Saotome ever laugh. (Not at the things we readers/viewers laugh at, anyway.)
Also, the Zombie Survival Guide just gets better the more you get into it — from weapons trivia to recommended actions for a zombie apocalypse (prepare a hideout, hide for two decades, don’t come back to shop when the toilet paper runs out), and, in the end, to an examination of recorded zombie attacks through human history.
And that record of attacks, from Ancient Egypt to Roanoke island, from Byelgoransk to Khotan, is a delight. To link this to even more things I like, it’s a chilly cavalcade of glimses much like Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth, except these are snippets of stories, speculation and legend from a hard-nosed investigator, not dreamy sonnet poems from a cosmic atheist. And — though I’m more a history buff than anyone with education in it — that history is eerily plausible and true to reality.
And, best of all, there’s no caricature, no implausible buffoonery. That would have killed this book dead. I suspect that a gullible or uneducated person (being both wouldn’t be necessary) could easily be fooled into thinking the book one of absolute, even if slightly neurotic, fact. (Well, except for the publisher’s category of “humor” in the back cover. Damn you, publisher!) At times the book is more scary than funny, or then pleasingly grim or perceptive — all a sign of the author going for a good book and not just cheap laughs. (No mention of noxious farts from decaying dead insides here.)
So, if an opinion from a random Internet nobody sways you: do buy the Zombie Survival Guide, and enjoy. It’s five out of five stars good, and the storytelling “sequel”, World War Z, is going to my buy-list right now.
(And no doubt some people won’t find the Survival Guide a good read — but hey, if one has a personality corresponding to that of someone with an elk-caliber salt lick up his wazoo, no read is going to be good. Personalities like that make up, I believe, about one-third of Amazon reviewers.)
(Masks of Eris is an authority for reviews of zombie-related releases since the author has seen several zombie movies, and written a fiction-post about the time when, much to the woe of Christians, the Z-Eschaton was immanentized.)
