World War Z
Zombie stories and videogames go together like butter and bread. A few oddballs don’t care for it, but most of us agree that it’s a solid combination. I would even argue, with apologies Romero, that video games are even better suited for telling zombie survival stories than movies. The only thing more immersive than seeing the zombie hordes as they close in on you on screen is being forced to fight them for survival. Frankly, books are the last media (behind games, movies and graphic novels) that you would want to experience such a story from.
World War Z is a huge success precisely because it doesn’t try to cram the survival horror experience into text on a page. Rather, Max Brooks approaches the zombiepocalypse concept from a different angle altogether: realism. In fact, the full title is actually World War Z: An Oral History of The Zombie War, and as that would lead to expect, the whole book is written as a collection of witness accounts describing a historical event. This allows readers to appreciate the event from a lot of different angles and consider all sorts of practical matters that would result from a Living Dead situation such as the environmental concerns stemming from an army of corpses, the epidemiology of a zombie outbreak, and a glimpse at the political climate after it was all over.
I realize that these might sound like rather dry topics, but it’s fascinating stuff; the sort of which you aren’t likely to find in video games or books about video games. And rest assured, there is plenty of action embedded in the narrative to keep things exciting.
