Zomb Comp Lit

So, I've read two zombie novels over the past six months.  I read Max Brooks' World War Z: An Oral History and Z.A. Recht's Plague of the Dead.  I have also obviously watched AMC's The Walking Dead.

Comparing Brooks and Recht's books is interesting.  Brooks is a talented writer (he's Mel's son) and he has a surprising capacity to evoke pathos and emotion from the "stories" the survivors "tell".  The oral history format is clever and allows the author to explore different viewpoints, different characters, different emotions and different situations.  All of this leads to a compulsively readable book.

Recht is a terrible, terrible writer.  You pretty much cannot escape a paragraph without coming across at least one cliche.  The dialogue is execrable, the characterizations thin and the story monotonous.

The interesting thing is, Recht creates a much more interesting and "credible" strain of zombie.  Brooks routinely decides to put his narrative ahead of "scientific" consistency.  For instance, in Brooks' novel, zombies can walk underwater.  Sure, that makes sense.  Zombies don't breathe, why not?  Well, first of all, YOU try walking underwater.  It's difficult.  Secondly, the pressure at great depths would crush flesh and bone, including the all important skull.  Brooks even acknowledges this, but then says, "No one can figure out why zombies can survive at great depths."  What a complete punt!

It works, though, for his narrative, because it means that no place is safe.  No island, not even a ship, is completely immune.  There's a chilling sequence where zombies start banging on a nuclear submarine walls as it lays on the ocean floor.  Good stuff, but c'mon.

Meanwhile, Recht wouldn't really know a compelling dramatic situation if it bite him on the neck and infected him.  He creates this stupid subplot involving the NSA that's implausible and unnecessary. But his "Morningstar Virus" kind of works.  And it behaves the way a virus would in terms if epidemiology.  He also seems to understand the military, or at least the acronyms and culture of the military.

So, you have a well-written piece with a somewhat unexplained and unrealistic strain of zombie and you have a piece of crap that reads like a precocious 15 year old wrote it but nails the "science".

Meanwhile, The Walking Dead is interesting.  No real attempts are made to explain it until the last episode, and those work OK.  They have set up some compelling dramatic relationships that could really pay off in the second season.  But it's been somewhat formulaic and rote in its plot.  I'm hoping as they move away from the graphic novels as a text, they will open up the plot somewhat.

I think in the end, this is why I loved 28 Days Later.  While technically not a zombie movie, it's plausible enough scientifically, it's compelling dramatically - the stuff between Brendan Gleason and his daughter is great - and it holds together metaphorically.

Wow, that's a lot of spilled pixels on zombies...