Shawn
I’ll be honest — I came to this one a bit late, and my zombie phase has mostly run its course. So I had to work a little harder to get past the premise and into what the book is actually doing, which turns out to be quite a lot. Brooks is really writing about institutional failure, geopolitical hubris, and what gets stripped away from people when everything collapses — the zombies are almost incidental. The oral history format is genuinely clever; no single narrator means no clean truth, and you’re constantly doing the work of piecing things together yourself.
The standout sections are the ones that feel least like zombie fiction — the stolen Chinese nuclear submarine, the blind atomic bomb survivor alone in the mountains, the ISS crew deciding to stay in orbit. Those hit hard. The straight combat chapters are fine but less interesting to me now than they would’ve been a few years ago.
Three stars feels right — I’m glad I read it, I respect what it’s doing, but I’m probably not the audience for it anymore.
I’ll be honest — I came to this one a bit late, and my zombie phase has mostly run its course. So I had to work a little harder to get past the premise and into what the book is actually doing, which turns out to be quite a lot. Brooks is really writing about institutional failure, geopolitical hubris, and what gets stripped away from people when everything collapses — the zombies are almost incidental. The oral history format is genuinely clever; no single narrator means no clean truth, and you’re constantly doing the work of piecing things together yourself.
The standout sections are the ones that feel least like zombie fiction — the stolen Chinese nuclear submarine, the blind atomic bomb survivor alone in the mountains, the ISS crew deciding to stay in orbit. Those hit hard. The straight combat chapters are fine but less interesting to me now than they would’ve been a few years ago.
Three stars feels right — I’m glad I read it, I respect what it’s doing, but I’m probably not the audience for it anymore.