Max Brooks

Max Brooks has written two of the best selling science fiction books of the last decade, both of which cover the overdone subject of a zombie uprising.  The son of the director Mel Brooks has also written 2 graphic novels along with other comic books, has appeared in a few films and animated features as an actor, and was a writer for Saturday Night Live.

The Zombie Survival Guide
His first book was not a novel, but a satirical guide to surviving a zombie uprising or apocalypse.  It has various sections on how zombies came to exist, what to do in various situations like finding yourself trapped on the second story of a house with zombies below, what supplies to prepare ahead of time, and gives examples of past zombie attacks and what we can learn from them.  Some of the advice is actually practical and the main selling point of the book is that it keeps a straight serious tone throughout despite the subject matter and he goes into good detail on subjects like why you shouldn't use fire against zombies (it won't stop them and they will stumbling along setting other potential fires.)  These are for the most part traditional zombies with the slow walk, slow incubation period for the infection, and very low intelligence that can only be destroyed by destroying the brain.  An entertaining quick read for the most part, but not a huge amount of commentary or depth and if you don't care for survivalist or zombie tropes, you might not like it.

World War Z
This followup novel is written as an oral history after the world wide zombie wars have ended.  It is much deeper than the zombie survival guide, but that book is referenced as a creation of the narrator and it was used in the war as a training manual.  Each section is an interview of a different survivor, each from a unique setting and time period of the war:  from the first outbreak, the spread of the zombie virus across the world, the zombie victory, the push back against the zombies, and the clean up after the victory. Each story stands on its own, with my personal favorites of the Japanese man who is so tied to his computer he doesn't realize the uprising has destroyed his neighborhood and must now survive, the defense of Israel from the giant onslaught, and the battle of Yonkers, which ends up taking out a lot of celebrities.

There is a good mix of action, social commentary, plot twists, humor, horror, memorable characters, and a   epic scale of drama.  I enjoyed this book so much I read it twice, which is very rare for me.

For the most part these books are appropriate for high school age, but there is a lot of zombie violence so be prepared for that.  There was a decent feature film based extremely loosely on this book, but it lacks the humor and insight of the novel, has fast zombies, and is told as a singular story about one character that has a very different plot from the book.  It really should have been an HBO style miniseries instead and hopefully it will be remade as that someday.  A very similar title is Warday, which was a fictional oral history of a nuclear war set in the 1980s.  That is meant as more of a cautionary tale and the social commentary hasn't aged well, but is a decent story and I wouldn't be surprised if Brooks was inspired in part by it.  There are plenty of other zombie series out there, but two other fairly recent ones I would suggest if you like this are Monster Island (a dark humor story about zombies taking over New York)  and the best selling and very dark graphic novel series The Walking Dead, which is about life after the zombies have won.