World War Z

 World War Z was actually one of the first books I read for this class- right after Cycle of the Werewolf. I wasn't sure what to expect of it. I had seen the movie a few years back but didn't remember much of it, and I was rather underwhelmed when I did watch the movie. Something about zombie media for the most part doesn't really do it for me- I like things to be completed, to be finished, or at least "finished" in some sense. 

Yet with the majority of the zombie media I've seen (mostly seen, since I was never really one for horror books until recently), honestly the only one that comes to mind that has a definitive "ending" was the horror romance for Warm Bodies. Honestly that really hit the happy medium for me- yeah, it was creepy cause it did show the eating of brains and zombie attacks and such... but it also had a fairly well thought out plot, even if it was a little cheesy. And by the end of it, there was a clear end to a story, with the zombies being rehabilitated into human society. This does generally happen within In the Flesh too, a tv series that didn't run for very long in 2013-2014, though it might have just been canceled before it got to the point of not finishing the story.

The thing that I mostly get annoyed with in regards to most zombie media is the fact that the story doesn't end. Take The Walking Dead (still ongoing even after 10 years), the show Glitch, the movie version of World War Z- all pieces of zombie media that either don't end or they have a vague "ending." World War Z frustrated me for this exact reason, because it focused on a singular family trying to survive this zombie apocalypse and the ending is the family reaching a safe zone... yet the threat of zombies is still very much high and the zombies are still, in fact, a very real thing. Where is the satisfaction in that? It's a vague hopeful ending of "We're going to be okay (but just ignore that the rest of the world is still in deep shit)."

Yet in complete contrast, I absolutely adored the book. Having it take place as an interview format, with the stories themselves indicating that these events have taken place in the past, and that the "Zombie War" is effectively over... it gave me hope and assurity that this story did have an ending. I wanted to know how, and I wanted to read everyone's accounts on how they personally survived it. One of my friends commented on how they actually disliked the book because it was an interview format and all took place in the past, which they felt took away from the suspense of the book, but I had no such qualms. The interview format was something I hadn't seen from zombie media before, and honestly I feel like that's immediately where a movie adaption would fall short and impossible- though I would love to see a documentary style zombie movie. With how vivid Brooks was able to make the interviews, especially jumping from so many different characters, there are a lot of cinematic qualities to it already.

I did have a few sections that stuck out to me the most. The first was the interview with Jesika Hendricks in Manitoba, Canada. She tells her story of going north with her family at the first sign of The Great Panic and discovering that the zombies freeze during the winter, buying some time for the others that also went north. Yet what really struck me about her section was how she, ever summer, volunteers to go north to find and mark the frozen zombies. Her interview ends with them finding a half-thawed zombie, and she "raises her weapon, a long iron crowbar, and casually smashes the creature's skull." Something about it kept with me- it's an effective demonstration of just how much life has changed, and what people do now, and how people have gotten used to it. It's just another day for her, in the aftermath of this war. 

The other sections that struck me were the interviews with Kondo Tatsumi and Tomonaga Ijiro in Kyoto, Japan. However, it was less about the content and more about the continuing, partner nature that is present within these two sections that show up right after one another. Tatsumi's narrative starts with him alone, then eventually meeting Ijiro and joining forces with him- then the next interview is Ijiro's time right before Tatsumi finds him. Even after the war, these two are still partners, having formed a martial arts for defending against zombies, and are seen with each other even in Ijiro's interview. It was the first, and I believe only, set of interviews that really interlocks with one another, showing the shared experience between the survivors and how things have changed.

All in all, there were a lot of parts of the novel that really stood out to me- there's a clear ending to this story, even if technically the zombies are still there. But it didn't make me feel like it was unfinished in the sense that I get from most other zombie media.