World War Z by Max Brooks

Wiki zombie attack!

I've been eyeing World War Z on the shelves for some time now, before I took the plunge earlier this month. My initial thoughts were: "How can zombies make for interesting and thought-provoking reading?"

Well, these thoughts were banished once I got into the novel, which is told from short interviews of various survivors of the worldwide zombie war - these were interviews from soldiers, generals, politicians, guns-for-hire, your average joe, doctors, the list goes on.

And that's what made the story so realistic (to the point I had quite a few funky dreams of zombies). By telling the story as an oral history of the zombie war, Brooks manages to take zombies, which are (mostly) fictional and incredulous, and make them chillingly believable. As the interviewees recount their fears, their actions; the mass panics and sacrifices; how they survived; and how naive and inept governments worsened the crisis - I felt that this was not only the author's commentary on issues that face the world today, I could also imagine that people and governments would react that way should such a crisis occur.

7 out of 10 zombielicious brains.