The zombie theme has long been a favorite in American pop culture, especially during times of social or economic unrest. It saw its first major surge in the 1960's when American culture was moving inexorably toward a more diverse, complex state than it had embraced following the Second World War. Zombies became popular again in the 1980's in the midst of several economic crashes and various armed conflicts around the globe. It only makes sense that in today's era of war in the Middle East, high unemployment and growing energy concerns that zombies would once again be the monsters of choice in our socially-charged fiction narratives. In 2006 author Max Brooks followed up his hit The Zombie Survival Guide with another novel about the walking dead, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.

World War Z takes the compelling, personal tone of the best non-fiction war stories and applies it to a detailed vision of what life would be like if flesh-eating former humans cropped up in the modern world. Brooks puts himself in the place of a compassionate journalist who turns his government-funded after-war report, which was rejected for its emotional tone, into a thorough historical non-fiction novel of the Zombie War. His book spans the globe, giving people from various stations and locales the chance to recount their experiences during the decade-long struggle against the dead.

The book takes the format of a series of interviews Brooks conducted with various key individuals who took part in the war or the experiences of civilians during the conflict. Many of the stories are anchored in real social issues of our world today, while others are reflections on aspects of humanity in general. With the planet thrown into disarray and no place entirely untouched by the plague, many political problems become moot while others insanely persist. There are echoes of Apartheid in South Africa, religious unrest in Israel and economically-driven violence in the United States.

Most of the vignettes in World War Z are both chilling and engrossing for their matter of fact details and classic horror set pieces. The story of a girl who saw her parents and various other people self-destruct in the Canadian wilderness is particularly well-written and disturbing. Not all of the characters fare as well, though. Tomonaga Jiro, a blind Japanese man who spent much of the war surviving in a forest, veers a little too far into pulp. Whereas most of the book focuses on believable people, Jiro is depicted as a spiritual warrior straight out of an anime. This is a shame considering that his narrative begins as a sad, true-life story of how the survivors of the atomic bombs in World War II were treated in larger Japanese society.

World War Z already has a strong audio book adaptation on shelves and the inevitable film adaptation has been in the works for three years. The script has passed through a lot of hands and Max Brooks himself has sounded optimistic about the results. Currently, Plan B Entertainment owns the rights to the book and there's a good chance filming will start some time within the next year. It's an excellent, if a bit flawed, book that lends a lot of literary gravity to what is ultimately a very niche genre.