Books by Max Brooks

“I’m going to say something stupid, because, yes, of course, it was a best-seller that was turned into a film starring Brad Pitt. So it’s hardly unknown. But when I started reading it I thought: why did nobody tell me how good this book is? Fundamentally, I think so many people think: ‘zombies are not for me.’ I’m one of them. But this book totally transcends that category. The realism is extraordinary; it’s a wild feat of imagination.” Read more...

The Best Near-Future Dystopias

Rosa Rankin-Gee, Novelist

Zombie stories are, essentially, a bloodstained sub-genre of the pandemic novel. They tend towards shock and gratuitous gore. But, like Severance, Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, is notable for its literary styling and thoughtful world-building. It’s “a novel that bridges the gap between pulp and high literature,” explained the literary scholar Greg Garrett, when he selected the best books on zombies: “It takes a subject matter which we would think of as mainstream geek culture, but it finds universal human themes, develops characters that you care about, and also manages to be culturally critical.” Like Station Eleven, this book takes many different perspectives, this time in the form of a series of statements made by witness from around the globe. “There is a lovely effect like those achieved by modernists like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf in which you have a chapter from one character’s point of view, and then another chapter from another character’s point of view. You are putting together thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird.”

From our article Books like Station Eleven