I'm one of the few horror buffs across the board who have yet to read the 2003 cult book "The Zombie Survival Guide." So back in 2006 when author Max Brooks released his highly publicized and promoted sequel entitled "World War Z," I jumped at the chance and actually shelled out the dough to read his latest tome rather than borrow it from a friend or from a library as I typically did in the past. As a rule I don't usually read zombie fiction because most of the time it's usually just material that attempts to drastically re-invent the zombie sub-genre by reducing them to nothing but monsters, or more so turning them in to gimmicky creatures easily forgotten. Sue me but I grew up on Romero's zombie films and admittedly I've been spoiled by his films. For about as far back as I could remember I have been absolutely horrified of zombies. From horror comedies to zombie masterpieces, no matter what form they were in, I shuddered at the mere thought of them. My imagination did more than fill in the holes with the zombie movies I've heard of before I actually copped to watching them. I spent many a late nights thinking about zombies creeping up from beside my bed or pulling me down in to my mattress, and I avoided them for a long time. They petrify me. So as my resistance to them grew stronger, I managed to embrace the fear, and after a while I began to seek out all forms of zombie media, even indulging in some zombie fiction of my own. So when I took to buying "World War Z" and sitting down to read it I had no idea what I was in for. Would it be another spin on Romero's zombie fashioning, or would Max Brooks just create his own monster and call them zombies?

One only knew. Max Brooks, son of comedy and filmmaking legend Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft has crafted an epic novel that is not only something of relevance to the horror genre, but of something that's relevant to society. "World War Z" is not just a chronicling of the world going against the walking dead, but the world going against one another. Though Brooks does take to fashioning the zombies to fit his own specifications (you have to be bitten to become a zombie), he really does stick to the tried and true method of George A. Romero whose idea of zombies differed from students of his storytelling mastery. Like Romero, I am one who thinks zombies hold as much symbolism as vampires or werewolves do. Zombies are in fact walking representations of death and the zombies that lumber and stagger and resemble what was once breathing and living hold a deep symbolism to our society and our way of life. Romero believes that zombies are really only instruments in tales about humanity dealing with the walls coming down around us, and Max Brooks holds true to this ideal. Brooks doesn't just paste together a book to make a quick buck off of, hoping no one will notice, Brooks has pieced together a nightmarishly vivid, off-putting, and sardonic vision of a world that has fallen to its knees and has yet to recover thanks to the zombie apocalypse.

While the clawing gnawing corpses were our downfall, Brooks makes it very clear to the reader that our own apathy and sense of comfort and luxury is what did and will ultimately do us in when the shit hits the fan. Not to mention our reliance on the media who eventually provided mass amounts of misinformation and false reports that caused hundreds to be killed. There's even the mention of a placebo invented to stave off the hysteria growing from the infection that acts as a volatile commentary on the pharmaceutical industry. Brooks also juxtaposes the infection to the AIDS epidemic quite often and even begins the entire story set in a hospital featuring one of the most nauseating instances involving a zombie attack I've ever read. Much in the way of Romero in "Dawn of the Dead," Brooks keeps much about his zombies ambiguous. We know them to be the walking dead with cravings for human flesh who die when their brains are severed, and we know that the infection began somewhere at sometime and spread all over the world like a fungus that we stood up to fight much too late. Brooks hints here and there as to the source of the infection.

He explains in one anecdote that someone while swimming along a rock cliff felt a small bite along their heels they couldn't explain. This is what inevitably became the infection that signaled an infected victim by the black staining of their blood. This becomes the death siren of anyone bitten or scratched by the walking dead. But this is really only small layers in what is something of a sprawling zombie masterpiece that is so brilliantly written Brooks even manages to invoke genuine sobs from a story about a man's emotional ties to a scout dog hopelessly hurt and abandoned in the wasteland with no hope of him ever being able to help him. There's even an anecdote of the military playing hard rock as a way of psyching themselves in to staring down the walking dead building piles upon piles of bodies. And then, as all "World War Z" readers have come to know, there is the Battle of Yonkers. Much like a seasoned war veteran, anyone who has read this book from cover to cover will groan and sigh in continuous disbelief at the utter mayhem that is inflicted with the dread and infamous Battle of Yonkers that manages to be Brooks most vivid and perhaps most iconic of anecdotes in the variety before our eyes.

But through the blood shed and utterly sickening gore before us there is the sickly and sometimes sharp political commentary exploring the spoofs of certain unnamed politicians who were once aids to the president now reduced to picking up horse crap, and even mentions a celebrity's over-exposed fortress that was inevitably raided by survivors anxious for safety explaining how one individual walked in on two political pundits having raucous sex, both of whom often pretended to hate one another (Ahem--Bill Maher, Ann Coulter!). In either case, "World War Z" is told through the eyes of a reporter and journalist who takes it upon himself to break out of the confines of his office to chronicle the end of the world at the hands and teeth of the undead by traveling all around the globe to talk to different people from all walks of life to learn how they confronted and survived the onslaught of the shambling monsters. Why?

There's the anecdote of the stir crazy crew living in the submarine during the great panic where they anxiously look for a safe chunk of land to perch one, and also my favorite anecdote, the tale of the mentally disabled young woman who relives the accounts of her mother's anxious attempts to save her and a group of small children trapped in a church in the middle of a zombie attack. All the while re-enacting the scenes with bodily gestures and mimicking the moans of the dead startling anyone within ear shot, Brooks account of this young girl who is woefully unaware of the severity of her mother's death, is probably the most dramatic and horrifying I've set eyes on. There is also of course the blind swordsman who used nature as his guide against the dead, and the young Asian computer geek who had to learn how to escape his building once the dead came slamming on his doorstep. I could go on for pages on the vast array of stories, and rich characters, and heartbreaking tales of people fallen under the nails of the dead, and the thick social and economic undertones, but Max Brooks clearly aims for immortal relevance not only in the social commentary sense, but also as an author and paves his own way as an artist in a family of Hollywood royalty.

Brooks' dialogue and prose is nothing short of brilliant standing as a composite of third person and first person narrative and stark descriptions of gruesome events that will stick in any reader's minds for days to come. With a myriad of flashbacks and accounts from survivors all of whom manage to affect the journalist who is not only an observer but someone who accomplishes re-living the entire World War Z through the eyes of almost a hundred people from Afghanistan to New York. While most of the novel is definitely a tale of the world falling to the hands of the undead, Brooks' story is in its truest essence a novel about thousands of people sitting at the end of the world trying to figure out how we all let it get this far and let civilization slip away. It's not just about monsters and gore, it's about the political undercurrent, societal woes, poverty, apathy, pro-choice and pro-life, the dangers of the media, the pharmaceutical industry and so much more that Brooks can fit in to one novel. What's horrifying about "World War Z" is not the walking dead, but the fact that the people in the globe residing among the monsters did little to nothing to stop or save their purported cherished civilization that they claim to have adored to much throughout the course of the narrative. "World War Z" is a masterpiece of modern literature, but did I really need to state the obvious to you?