Max Brooks’ World War Z is fiction for the Discovery Channel / NatGeo junkie, that special breed of people who regard Shark Week as a red-letter holiday. Masquerading as a collection of interviews from survivors of a global zombie apocalypse, the book succeeds in taking a ludicrous premise and making the reader take it seriously.
Brooks does a good job at setting up the beginning of the zombie infection. The disease first emerges in China before slowly spreading around the world, both through regular air travel and human trafficking. The public was initially lulled into a false sense of security by a combination of government propaganda and predatory businessmen. By the time the existence of the zombies becomes impossible to deny the human race is already in the middle of a losing battle that ends up killing hundreds of millions and turning them into flesh-eating machines.
