Another excellent selection from my public library. This is a re-read for me. I listened to the audio, which I remember being spectacular when it first came out. Then I remembered the movie coming out and hearing disappointing reviews, so I skipped it. The book is written as an oral history about a dozen years after global victory in the great zombie war. All kinds of people are interviewed and they share their stories about the early days and their first encounters, the trajectory of the outbreak, various wilderness situations, management, government, victory, surrender. It’s a really fun piece of zombie fiction.

I picked it up again recently because I ended up watching the film recently. I know it’s a cliche that the book is always better than the movie, but here it’s true. The movie uses some of the book as background for just your bog-standard dude-works-hard-and-finds-the-key-to-save-the-day story. He’s a real hero. Boring. The book, on the other hand, is full of regular people sorting themselves, their families, and their communities out. It’s young adults telling you about their lost childhoods, people who made tough choices and maybe saved some of humanity trying to make sense of it all. It’s people running government agencies that never needed to exist before now. It’s billionaires being monsters. The book really is something; an interesting twist on the zombie apocalypse. The text is a little dated, but reading it post pandemic makes it eerily real in some ways. There’s panic, misinformation, deniers, true believers… it all feels a little familiar. This isn’t my first zombie fiction in an endemic Covid world, so I had some expectation of what would be the most upsetting about it. I thought, perhaps, it would be loads of people getting sick but, no, it turns out watching people disregard and endanger others is what did it for me. Because this is written after the main events being described, you don’t get the immediacy of having to watch a character die because someone else made a terrible choice.

So, if you like oral histories, zombies, and knowing that there’s some kind of happy ending, this is for you.