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We survived the zombie apocalypse, but how many of us are still haunted by that terrible time? We have (temporarily?) defeated the living dead, but at what cost? Told in the haunting and riveting voices of the men and women who witnessed the horror firsthand, World War Z is the only record of the plague years.

I first heard about Max Brooks’ (son of Mel Brooks) “World War Z” in the same way I’ve heard about a lot of the books I’ve read recently: on a podcast. This time it was Tom Merritt who mentioned the book, and I think it was back in episode #114 of “East Meets West.”

“World War Z” touts itself as “an oral history of the zombie war.” It takes place an unspecified amount of time in the future and is written as a series of first-person interviews by the author with the survivors of the war against the undead, which ended approximately 10 years ago. Think “Band of Brothers” with a George Romero twist.

This was a really entertaining read, and very imaginative. You’ve got your typical zombie lore (being bit means your infected, the only way to kill a zombie is to destroy the brain, etc.) mixed in with modern warfare and things I’ve never seen addressed before. For example: when winter comes to the northern areas of the world, the zombies freeze. They don’t die, however, just thaw out in spring and pick up where they left off. The same goes for out at sea … they’ll just float around forever until they wash up on a beach somewhere, or get caught in a fishing net. Really scary stuff: how do you know you’ve wiped every zombie off the planet, purged the infection? How do you wage war against an enemy that never gets discouraged? As a character in the book says: how do you “shock and awe” something that can’t be shocked or awed, mentally or biologically?

The book is sequential, for the most part, but jumps around between the different people being interviewed, in different countries and locations (there’s even a section of what the crew of the international space station was doing during the war). There are interviews with military personnel, government leaders, and regular people.

It’s really a riveting book. I’ve read that someone’s already purchased the movie rights so it could be an interesting film if it’s done right.