Let me start by saying that I'm not a "horror" genre fan by nature. I figure that between epidemic disease, war, and the collected work of Toni Tennille the world is replete with horror enough that seeking out horrible things to "entertain" myself is both redundant and insulting.
But I read a review of the film that said "don't go thinking you'll see the book on film; this isn't like the book at all..." and suggested that the book touched on much broader and deeper subjects than the living dead feasting on human brains.
And I can report that, yes, it does.
Not sure which part I've enjoyed more. The Palestinian recounting how his father dragged him to asylum in Israel where he found that the "Zionist plot" was, in fact, the true assessment of the rapacious dead rising from their graves? The former White House chief of staff sneering about misplaced idealism and political "realities" driving the failed response to the Zombie Apocalypse from his current job shoveling pig-shit at a manure farm? The old Red Chinese combat surgeon's tale of the very first "Victim Zero"?
Politics, espionage, corruption, democracy, dictatorship, free markets, hope and fear, delusion, skepticism, credulity...the book does a pretty damn decent job of describing all the ways people deal - or fail to deal- with the immensities of Fate and Nature that we try and pretend can't destroy us with a vast and utter indifference (not to mention the usual human miseries and buffooneries) at any moment.
Good stuff. If you're looking for a damn good summer read, you could do far worse than the "Oral History of the Zombie War".
Then go watch Shaun of the Dead.
Shaun: "Look, I don't care what the telly says, all right? We have to get out of here. If we don't they'll tear us to pieces, and that is really going to exacerbate things for all of us."
