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.


 

Walter M. Miller Jr

Walter M. Miller was a Catholic writer who mainly wrote short stories, but he best known for his Hugo award winning novel A Canticle for Leibowitz.  He lived a reclusive life and only wrote one other novel, a sequel he had almost finished before his death called Saint Leibotwitz and the Wild Horse Women.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

This is widely considered to be one of the greatest post apocalyptic novels ever written.  Post apocalyptic novels deal with a near future world shortly after some great event (rise of zombies, asteroid, nuclear war, etc.) has wiped out modern civilization and most modern technology.  This is a collection of 3 connected stories, with the first beginning 600 years after a global nuclear war.  After the nuclear war there was a mass destruction of learning and technology by many of the survivors.  A US military engineer named Leibowitz founded a Catholic monastic order and the 3 stories are about monks in his order and the attempt to preserve technology and knowledge.

The first story deals with a monk, Brother Francis, who stumbles upon a fallout shelter that contains many relics from Leibowitz's life written down on ancient memo pads.  He rewrites one document as an illumination and attempts to bring it and original documents to the Pope to help canonize Leibowitz, but is beset by wandering bands of fallout mutants called Pope's Children.    The second act is set 600 years later, and centers around a new renaissance of learning with the scientist Thon Taddeo reconstruction of electrical generators based partly on the Leibowitz documents.  Meanwhile, the city states of Texarkana and Laredo are planning to attack the city of Denver to gain control of a large part of North America and this results in a church schism.  In the third act, set another 600 years in the future, nuclear power and space flight have both been rediscovered and the world is on the brink of another nuclear war between two great powers in Europe and the Americas.  New Rome has plans for escaping the earth to continue life and knowledge on colonized planets, which becomes necessary after nuclear war breaks out again.

The novel has many major thematic elements.  The most obvious one is the recurrence of history with parallels to what happened to Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire.  The necessity for civilization in the preservation of knowledge over time and the conflict between church and state are both repeatedly brought up. There is also a major discussion of the Catholic ethics of euthanasia between a priest and a government official in the third act.

On the whole this novel is appropriate for most older teens and it contains intelligent discussions of major religious and ethical themes..  There is a good bit of violence, but it is for thematic or religious points and isn't gratuitous.  There are a lot of books that deal with similar post apocalyptic settings (Warday, World War Z, The Road, The Postman, etc.), but those almost all focus on what it would be like to live and survive in that sort of setting.  This is much more focused on permanent themes and the nuclear apocalypse is more of an excuse to explore those themes.